“And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he’d be there. And then I woke up.” An older man’s description of a dream about his deceased father, spoken at the end of a very good film (one I’m not going to name) that has stayed with me for weeks and weeks, and which sinks in deeper every time I think of it.

“If Alfred Hitchcock‘s tombstone bore the word ‘suspense,’ what would we engrave on Michelangelo Antonioni‘s? ‘Alienation,’ probably, yet that is a word forever applied to the films, not spoken within them. You may disagree with his vision of the sexes fighting to make connections that endure, as opposed to mere spasms of desire (‘avventura’ means not just an adventure but a fling), but there is no denying the sharp, concrete form in which that vision was set.

“And so the paradoxes accrue: sex solves nothing for Antonioni, yet somehow his films, blending tactility with froideur, remain a tease and a turn-on, and, for someone insistent on human solitude, he was awfully skilled at handling group situations — look at the beach party in The Girlfriends, or the search party climbing rocks in L’Avventura. He was an urbanist, yet few can match his eye for landscape or his nose for weather.” — from Anthony Lane‘s essay, “Lone Sailors,” in the 8.27 New Yorker.

Of the forthcoming 8.24 openers, Philip G. Atwell‘s War (Lionsgate), the Jet Li-Jason Statham martial-arts thriller, and Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman‘s The Nanny Diaries (Weinstein Co.) are tracking the best. War has better awareness and definite interest, and will probably be the #1 newbie. And the 9.7 duke-out between 3:10 to Yuma and Shoot ‘Em Up is still neck and neck, with the latter enjoying a very slight edge.

The new bells-and-whistles website for Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14) went up today, along with a new one-sheet. The copy line says, “Sometimes finding the truth is easier than facing it.”

The 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley came and went last Thursday without much stir on this end. And for good reason — the metaphor of his film career is more than a little painful to contemplate. For a guy who began making movies with the dream of emulating the pathos of James Dean, Presley’s celluloid history is probably the saddest in motion picture history.

He made 27 stinkers in a row after Don Siegel‘s Flaming Star, his last reasonably decent programmer. I was going to say something about the three or four that are half-palatable — Robert D. Webb‘s Love Me Tender, Richard Thorpe’s Jailhouse Rock, Michael Curtiz‘s King Creole and Flaming Star. But even these are mixed- bag affairs.

27 depressingly slick and shallow films in a row is just staggering — a metaphor for the most appalling commercial sell-out in history.

In Matt Zoller Seitz‘s N.Y. Times review of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (which I still haven’t seen), he reports that “New Line has commissioned ]director Seth] Gordon to remake this story with actors.” And Gordon has told MTV.com that he’d like to see Johnny Depp play the doc’s real- life bad guy Billy Mitchell.

This brings to mind an observation by Variety‘s Ronnie Scheib that “Hollywood may find it difficult to cast two big-name stars willing to play it as broadly as the real-life hero and villain of this tale. Nor would many self-respecting scriptwriters dare to match the sheer improbability of these actual happenings.”

The doc, in any event, has tallied exceptional Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings — 97% and 85%, respectively. On top of those stirring per-screen averages last weekend.

Two days ago AICN’s Drew McWeeny/Moriarty posted a reader pan of Jonathan Hensleigh‘s Welcome to the Jungle, a Blair Witch-y kids-vs-cannibals shocker that I saw and favorably reviewed last November. As kids-in-peril movies go, it struck me as an unusually spooky, unnerving, cut-above thing — an experience that “creeped me out in a way I’m not likely to forget.”

I therefore don’t get why it’s going straight to video — Movies Unlimited and Amazon are posting an 11.13.07 release.

I was particularly aroused by “the raw non-staginess of it, the realistic atmosphere, the non-actorish acting, the hand-held photography, and the seemingly authentic [Fiji/New Guinea] locales. You can taste the moisture and the earthy-leafy jungleness all through it, but especially in the second half. Which jacks up the fear factor once the uh-oh stuff happens.”

Last Friday Times Online critic Cosmo Landesman hit on a political aspect in The Bourne Ultimatum (having opened in England that day) that I don’t remember any U.S. critic saying quite as concisely — Matt Damon‘s Jason Bourne is the ultimate left-thinking super-baddie, “the John Rambo of the liberal intelligentsia.”

Ultimatum “is a great and liberating [occasion] for liberal-kind,” Landesman observes. “For them, spy heroes have always been suspect: Bond was too much of a sexist, [Arnold] Schwarzenegger (True Lies) too right-wing and Vin Diesel (xXx) too dumb. But Bourne allows liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage blockbuster: they can see him kick ass, break necks, smash faces and shoot fellow human beings, and not complain about civil liberties because the victims work for the CIA.

“Bourne is the perfect liberal hero — he doesn’t have a fantastic secret-agent body, a tuxedo or a taste for martinis and one-night stands. He is fluent in five languages, drives brilliantly in any city and, as we see here, even reads The Guardian. More important, he blames the system for his sins and is consumed with liberal guilt for what he has done. Perfect.”

The French-subtitled trailer for Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream (Weinstein Co., 11.30) was YouTube posted on 8.18. The British-based drama costars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as two brothers in a financial bind who both fall for a femme fatale (Haley Atwell), who steers them into a criminal scheme. If Tom Wilkinson doesn’t play their dad then he’s playing their uncle. Pic “has been said to be in a darker vein, similar to Match Point,” according to one published report. The curtain goes up at the Venice and Toronto film festivals next month.

HE to Resurrecting the Champ director Rod Lurie regarding his interview with Coming Soon’s Edward Douglas in which he discusses his remake of Straw Dogs: It’s a relatively minor thing, but Susan George never once “smiles” during the rape scene in Straw Dogs. She responds to the rapist in a way that indicates she’s somewhat complicit, yes, but smiling isn’t part of the repertoire.

Fact #1: On-the-lot-screenings of Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21) have been few and far between. I’ve been hankering to see it for a long while, hoping to experience that allegedly painterly, Terrence Malick-y element and, if possible, share whatever love I might honestly feel, but WB publicists have their strategy.

Fact #2: The poor movie isn’t listed on the Warner Bros. website along with the other “Coming Soon”-ers (The Brave One, Michael Clayton, Fred Claus, etc.).

Fact #3: The film’s bare-bones website (trailer, synopsis, stills) hasn’t been enhanced or added to in months.

Fact #4: Jesse James is going to Toronto and producer-star Brad Pitt will be there for a day or so to promote it.

Fact #5: The Coming Soon.net Jesse James page says it’s going to have a “limited” release.

“Taking a satirical bite out of a tightly swaddled subculture, The Nanny Diaries (MGM/Weinstein, 8,24) is to high-class childcare what The Devil Wears Prada was to high fashion. Absent Meryl Streep‘s indelible villainess, however, this new comedy rarely rises above standard sitcom fare, a bitter and ironic disappointment given the involvement of American Splendor writer-directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman. Downbeat word of mouth will cause Diaries to fade from view. DVD future looks brighter.” — from Lael Lowenstein‘s 8.17 Variety review.