Derek Elley is one of Variety‘s finest critics — a guy who knows his stuff all around the race track and the rodeo — but he’s also a British citizen who’s probably susceptible to feelings of national pride, and so you can’t fully trust his rave review of Joe Wright‘s Atonement, which was shown at the opening-night attraction at the Venice Film Festival just a few hours ago.

Knightley, McAvoy in Joe
Wrights’ Atonement (Focus Features, 12.25)

I feel, in other words, that the British film industry has been a nearly moribund thing for so long that you have to process any seasoned British critic reviewing Atonement — a thoroughly British film that was shot with British actors, crew and money on English soil — with at least a half grain of salt. Elley may be speaking God’s truth 80% or 90% of the time in his review, but a little voice is telling me “watch it…hold your horses…deep down he may be cheerleading for the home team.”

That said, Elley is doing cartwheels and somersaults over this Focus Features release which will also play next week in Toronto before debuting in December.

“Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life,” he begins, “but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms as Atonement, a smart, dazzlingly upholstered version by young British helmer Joe Wright of Ian McEwan‘s celebrated 2001 novel.

“Period yarn, largely set in 1930s and 1940s England, about an adolescent outburst of spite that destroys two lives and crumples a third, preserves much of the novel’s metaphysical depth and all of its emotional power. And as in Wright’s Pride & Prejudice, Keira Knightley delivers a star turn — echoed by co-thesp James McAvoy — that’s every bit as magnetic as the divas of those classic mellers which pic consciously references.

“Released in Europe next month and as a U.S. specialty item via Focus in December, this should reap good returns on the back of positive reviews and figure heavily in upcoming kudo derbies. It proved a popular opener of this year’s Venice fest.

“Though clearly by the same director, film is almost the polar opposite of Wright’s debut. Where Pride took a relatively free hand in reworking Austen’s classic in more youthful terms, Atonement is immensely faithful to McEwan’s novel, with whole scenes and dialogue seemingly lifted straight from the page in Christopher Hampton‘s brisk adaptation.

“And where Pride took a deliberately unstarchy, more realistic approach to Austen’s universe, Atonement consciously evokes the acting conventions and romantic cliches of ’30s and ’40s melodramas — from the cut-glass British accents, through Dario Marinelli‘s romantic, kinetic score, to the whole starchy period look.

“It’s a gamble that could easily have tilted over into farce. But as in Pride and Prejudice, Wright’s approach is redeemed by his cast and crew, with leads like Knightley, McAvoy and young Irish thesp Saoirse Ronan driving the movie on the performance side and technicians like d.p. Seamus McGarvey and designers Sarah Greenwood and Jacqueline Durran providing a richly decorated frame for their heightened playing.”

I’m not saying Elley has necessarily lost hs bearings ro that Atonement isn’t a god, well-made film (I won’t catch it until it shows in Toronto sometime around September 8th or 9th), but we need to hear what a few non-vested smart-ass American critics hae to say. Until a few of these come along we’re in a holding pattern.

In the wake of yesterday’s (8.28) Variety story about Owen Wilson dropping out of Ben Stiller‘s now-rolling Tropic Thunder, MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz is exploring to what extent Wilson’s reported attempted suicide will affect his other projects. Josh asked me for some comments this morning and wound up using a couple of them, but here’s the unexpurgated chat as it unfolded 90 minutes ago.

Wilson agonistes

MTV question: Does this incident jeopardize Wilson’s standing as a leading man?

HE answer: Owen is far too complex and interesting and whimsical to be a leading man. He’s a flaky poet dreamer, a briliiant space-case…a witty intellectual adolescent whom women might find charming for a night or two, but he’s the very antithesis of a Clark Gable oak tree. He’s the kind of guy women can spot in a second as undependable because his basic nature is to go wherever his whims or dreams or ambitions may lead him at a given moment. His true inner whatever has always been hidden, and he doesn’t wear his passion on his sleeve.

He’s Dignan, he’s Dupree in front of that classroom full of kids, he’s that Wedding Crashers guy, he’s that plucky oddball friend of Jackie Chan‘s. But he’s never carried a film on his own shoulders. Look at what happened with Behind Enemy Lines, Minus Man, The Big Bounce. Owen is partner material, but the partner stuff that has happened so far is golden. He and Vince Vaughn could be the Hope-Crosby of our time if they wanted to — I would go to see Vaughn-Wilson movies for the rest of my life. And the routines he’s done with Ben Stiller in various films and on the Oscar show have been classic.

Career-wise, Owen will be fine if — I say “if” — he gets right back up on the horse. Face up, be honest, talk about it on TV with Jon Stewart or whomever, get back in the program, accept that he’s had problems, etc. The only thing that might hurt him, on the other hand, is the notion that he’s Andy Dick. If that concept takes hold, Owen will have a problem.

MTV question: Will audiences easily be able to forget something as serious as a suicide attempt when seeing him in a comedy?

HE answer: Tragedy and comedy are the twin faces of a very thin dime, and if Owen absorbs this episode in the right way, his sense of humor — which was always dry and sardonic and even fatalistic at times — will be even better. All Owen did, really, was fall into a slightly deeper pit that the sort of pit that almost everyone — including Josh Horowitz — falls into. Not everyone’s into illicit substances (see the Us magazine story about the factors that may have led to Owen’s suicide attempt) but everybody’s been at the edge of the cliff once or twice or thrice.

MTV question: What do you make of the prospects for The Darjeeling Limited now?

HE answer: This probably doesn’t help Darjeeling Limited, but I don’t think it will hurt either. Everyone is now thinking of Owen as a fucked-up guy with issues to solve, and his Darjeeling character is a fucked-up guy with issues to solve. I mean, c’mon, he wears a big head bandage throughout most of the film. I don’t see the problem.

To hear it from a just-out Us magazine story, the jackal in the recent-druggy-downfall-of-Owen Wilson saga is none other than British attitude-humorist Steve Coogan, the 24 Hour Party People and Around the World in Eighty Daysstar and costar of Night at the Museum. The story says that Wilson’s troubles are due in part to “Owen hanging out [with] the wrong people again,” and that “at least two sources blame Coogan,” who’s described as “the party boy rehab veteran.”

“I went through it with Steve,” Courtney Love has told Us about her relationship with Coogan, which ended in 2006. “I was just out of rehab, and he was right there with the drugs. I tried to warn Owen. I tried to warn his friends. I hope from the bottom of my heart that Owen stays the hell away from that guy.” Us quotes “another source” as saying that Owen’s ex Kate Hudson “forbid [Wilson] from letting Coogan into his house. She knew he was bad.”

75% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang hates, hates, hates Balls of Fury. Let’s all get together and sledgehammer this one to death before it gets rolling. The Metacritic rating is 42% positive, but that ‘s because of three critics who give it a thumbs-up — the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s Andy Spletzer, the N.Y. Daily News‘ Elizabeth Weitzman and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Shari Linden. (They’re entitled — there’s no one “right” way to regard a film — but henceforth they’re going to be watched for further irregularities.)

It would be cruel to hope for Dan Fogler‘s film career to be stopped in its tracks, but I’ve had an animal dislike for this guy from the get-go. Like Peter Jackson (whom Fogler resembles), he has no sense of restraint or Zen calm. He’s a roly-poly ape. N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott says he looks like “the love child of Jack Black and the pornographic-film star Ron Jeremy.”

DVD Journal, the anonymously-written DVD-connoisseur website that launched in August 1997, has closed up shop. I read the nameless editor’s statement (posted yesterday) about what’s going on, only he doesn’t really say anything. There’s an acknowledgement that the DVD market share is going down and that this may have something to do with ad revenues or the moon’s orbit or whatever, but he definitely has trouble with the concept of just spitting it out. Real men put their cards on the table. If anyone really knows why these guys are dimming the lights, please advise.

The Brave One director Neil Jordan captures Jodie Foster in such a way as to “accentuate her petite stature, her lithe frame, her thin arms constantly bared from the shoulders. When [Foster’s character] walks the streets at night or strides purposefully onto a subway platform, she seems to be descending, wraith-like, into the abyss; yet her ferocity can also give way, without warning, to vulnerability and panic, especially when events begin to spiral out of her control.

“Even at her most ruthless, Foster never cedes her grip on the viewer’s concern — but then, neither did Charles Bronson in Death Wish. Jordan neither subverts the pleasures of seeing lone-ranger justice onscreen, as David Cronenberg did in A History of Violence, nor panders overtly to the audience’s baser instincts; instead, The Brave One attempts to tap into post-9/11 anxieties and comment on the very American idea of righteous payback.” — from an 8.27 Variety review by Justin Chang.

So there’s this 8.26 New Zealand Herald piece about Peter Jackson‘s Crossing the Line, a 15-minute World War I movie that was shot last April in just a few days. Fine — soldiers in a trench, guys yelling orders, fixed bayonets, biplanes, machine guns….”yaaahhhh!”

But the article doesn’t make clear what it is exactly that makes Jim Jannard‘s “Red One” — used by Jackson for his short — all that unique. Red One’s big selling point is that it has an advanced sensor chip, called a Mysterium and selling for about $25,000 each, which is said to produce quality that is “better than film.” Says who? Better in what way? How does it compare to the Viper and the Genesis, and in what specific ways?

I sat down for lunch yesterday with Shoot ‘Em Up director-writer Michael Davis, and the restaurant — the Boulevard Lounge at the Beverly Wilshire hotel — was so clattery and wallah-wallah that my Olympus digital recorder was overwhelmed. (I’m constitutionally incapable of buying one of those clip-mikes that discriminates against ambient noise.) But at least I got a free lunch out of it, and a chance to talk again with Davis — a genuinely nice guy, and a Steven Spielberg look-alike if I ever saw one — about the whole up-and-down.

Shoot Em Up director-writer Michael Davis at Boulevard — Monday, 8.27.07, 2:15 pm

Listen to clip #1, clip #2 and clip #3 if you want, but they’re a chore. I can’t think of anything all that new to say about Davis or the film. I wrote two years ago about his background and how get came to direct Shoot “Em Up, and I’ve raved about the film — “a brilliant, ultra-violent Buster Keaton comedy.” Maybe a new thought is preparing to push through or maybe that’s all she wrote.

Davis’s suitcase-load of action DVDs

Davis’s most impassioned statement was to bring a suitcase full of action-movie DVDs in order to prove his devotion to the genre and to disprove my opinion, expressed in this 8.11 review, that “there isn’t a single drop of sincerity in Shoot ‘Em Up” and that Davis’s “basic attitude is one of laughing derision for the whole Woo-aping circus.” Okay, all right — he’s a genuine action-movie fan but I didn’t feel this when I watched Shoot “Em Up, which is one reason why I enjoyed the film as much as I did. I still say “never trust the artist — trust the tale.”

Variety columnist and reporter Anne Thompson broke a bone in her foot last weekend and subsequently won’t make the trek to either the Telluride or Toronto film festivals.

“The exhibition situation has changed far more dramatically than the audience or the films themselves,” ThinkFilm’s Mark Urman has told Village Voice reporter Anthony Kaufman. “Manhattan is scandalously under-screened, and the rate at which theaters playing specialty films are renovated and created is far behind the rate they’ve been dying. I’ve had films thrown out of theaters making $8,000 to $9,000 in a weekend…and that’s heartbreaking.” As Kaufman reports, $8 to $9 grand “is a sizable gross, in line with Hairspray‘s stellar opening-weekend per-theater average. “

Presumably someone out there has a recent draft of Mikko Alanne‘s script of Pinkville, which director Oliver Stone will make into a film sometime early next year for United Artists. It seems like an astute move for Stone to not only revisit his own Vietnam combat experience as well as the turf of Platoon, his greatest screen triumph, but to also reflect on the Iraq War experience by looking back at another time when U.S. troops were frequently seen as the bad guys when it came to dealings with civilians.

I realize that Pinkville will not be focusing on William Calley, the Army Lieutenant who became a poster boy for G.I. atrocity-committers during the Vietnam War after news of the My Lai massacre — the slaughter by U.S. troops of 500 villagers, many of them women, children and elderly in March of 1968 — broke through. But I wonder to what degree, if any, it will include him in the scenario.

Calley, 64, is apparently retired and now lives in Atlanta, after a lifetime of working at a jewlery store in Columbus, Georgia. He will of course have to go through the whole magilla all over again once the film comes out.

Michael Fleming‘s Variety story says the focus will mainly be on a good-guy whistle-blower — General William Peers (Bruce Willis), who spearheaded the investigation of the 1968 My Lai massacre. Peers took heat from trying to get at the truth when most of the military establishment wanted it to just go away fast, especially after President Richard Nixon, looking to kowtow to the blue-collar, construction-worker, pro-Vietnam War voters, announced that he would personally review the Calley court-martial situation before any sentence was passed.

There’s a scene in Platoon, of course, in which some of the angrier and more belligerent troops (two fo them played by Tom Berenger and Kevin Dillon), furious over the death of comrades, terrorize and come close to killing several villagers before everything is stopped by Willem Dafoe‘s Sgt. Elias.

Channing Tatum “will play Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who, upon realizing what was happening below, put a stop to the killing by placing his craft between gunmen and the few villagers who were left, and telling his two shipmates to fire on the soldiers if they shot any more people,” Fleming reports. “They airlifted the survivors and reported the carnage to superiors.”

Presumably Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the My Lai story in late 1969, will be a character also.

At his court-martial, Calley “testified that he was ordered by Captain Ernest Medina to kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Still, there was only enough photographic and recorded evidence to convict Calley, alone, of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in 1974, following many appeals. After being issued a dishonorable discharge, Calley entered the insurance business.”

The little kid to the left of Calley on the Esquire cover, the one with the expression that sort of says “the idea behind this photograph is kinda sick”? I wonder where he is today. I’d like to know if he deliberately conveyed that expression for the Esquire photographer, or whether it just happened.

Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel has reported that four Owen Wilson movies — one now being filmed, one due to shoot in January, and two others pending release — have obviously been affected by last Sunday’s suicide attempt by the 38 year-old actor, and particularly by news reports about same.

Wilson was expected to show up in Hawaii to start work on DreamWorks’ Tropic Thunder, which costars Ben Stiller, Bill Hader and Jack Black, and then shoot a comedy in January with Jennifer Aniston called Marley & Me. Studio spokespersons didn’t say anything about anything when Siegel asked if Wilson would still be acting in these films.

The Wilson tragedy may or may not affect the marketing on Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited, which Fox Searchlight is opening on 9.28, but Siegel believes that Paramount’s marketing of Drillbit Taylor, a comedy that opens next March with Wilsonin the title role, has “an even bigger problem” because of the Judd Apatow-produced film’s young-male demographic. What…young guys are especially susceptible to being upset and turned off about Hollywood suicide attempts? Wouldn’t it be more of a case of audiences in general not being as inclined to laugh and kick back with Taylor because of this sad event?

Extra reported yesterday and today that it was Luke Wilson, Owen’s successful actor bother, who found him and called for an ambulance last Sunday. (Extra reporters “obtained the Calls for Service report from the Santa Monica Police Department, which lists the reason for the 911 call from Owen Wilson’s house as an ‘attempted suicide.'”)

I’ve never heard or read that Luke lives with Owen in his Santa Monica home, but if they do in fact live separately (as I’m given to understand) it seems awfully fortuitous that Luke just happened to come over just as Owen was succumbing to the effects of a slashed wrist and a pill overdose. It would certainly have been odd if Luke had been at the home before or during Owen’s suicide attempt. (Would you try to off yourself while your brother is in the house making scrambled eggs or watching the tube or catching zees in the guest room?) Any way you slice it, Luke being there for whatever reason was a pretty lucky break for his brother.