Cinemascope’s Yair Raveh wrote today “that two Israeli films — both feature-length debuts for their directors — will be shown at The Telluride Film Festival before heading on to Toronto. The two are Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit (which I heard excellent things about at Cannes last May) and Etgar Keret and Shira Gefen‘s Jellyfish.

A still from Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit, an early ’08 Sony Classics release

“The latter won the Camera D’or at Cannes and will be released in the States by Zeitgeist in March 2008. The Band’s Visit won the Fipresci prize in Cannes and Best Feature in Munich, and was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for an early 2008 U.S. release.
“Both films, alongside Josef Cedar’s oustanding Beaufort (Silver Bear winner in Berlin for Best Director) are battling it out right now here in Israel for the chance to be Israel’s entry to the Foreign Language Oscar, in what is clearly the best year ever — artistically and commercially — for Israeli movies.”

I spoke yesterday with Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling about In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14), about which he said he was “emotionally moved” and “doing somersaults over it,” and that “it’s going to shake people to the core.” What got me were the comparisons Durling noted between Tommy Lee Jones‘ performance as Hank Deerfield, a grief-wracked ex-military cop with a subdued and taciturn manner, and John Wayne‘s as gruff and blustery Ethan Edwards in John Ford‘s The Searchers.

Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley of Elah, John Wayne in The Searchers

Neither performance has an emotional geyser moment. Deerfield and Edwards are both about “holding it in” at all costs, and yet both actors allow their characters’ feelings to seep out in just the right way. They’re both old-school tough guys, of course, and are both looking to find a disappeared family member. Jones’ character isn’t a racist like Edwards but he’s got something else eating at him — a notion that if he’d listened to his son a bit more a certain bad thing might not have happened. Wayne was this all-American iconic figure playing a complex man with a dark undercurrent, and Jones is playing a retired straight-arrow career solder who comes to question what in the name of hell has been going on in Iraq — not in a political way but in terms of the human cost.
Different guys, different performances…but clearly sharing all kinds of cross echoes. Both former military men dealing with the question of “how do soldiers who’ve just come out of a conflict fit into society, if at all?”

In early ’05 I read an interview with Cuba Gooding that assessed the Snow Dog-ging and Boat Trip-ping of his career since the heyday of Jerry Maguire and As Good As It Gets. The piece seemed to be saying that Gooding was turning a corner with somewhat more serious parts in films like Lee Daniels‘ Shadowboxer (which wasn’t very good). I asked Gooding a question about this presumed turn-in-the-road at a Santa Barbara Film Festival screening in January or early February ’05, and he seemed to be in a good head-space about what lay ahead.

I realize that Gooding has a respectable dramatic role in Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster (which is supposed to be quite good) and I realize that we all need to eat and pay bills, etc., but as I used to really admire and enjoy Gooding it’s hard not to feel depressed or dispirited at seeing him back on family-crap, idiot-wind turf with Daddy Day Camp.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that Clint Eastwood was so taken by James C. Strouse‘s Grace is Gone (Weinstein Co., 10.5), the much-admired Sundance film about a doleful dad’s inability to tell his two daughters about their soldier-mom’s death in Iraq, that he’s now composing an all-new musical score for it.

(l. to r.) Eastwood, Cusack, Strouse

This is intriguing news — Eastwood is a gifted melodist (I’m a big fan of his Million Dollar Baby score) but his decision to assist Grace in this respect hardly constitutes a 6.5 earthquake. If Strouse’s film is going to end up as an Oscar Derby finalist (and it may well accomplish this feat), it’ll be because of what the film is deep down (which all stems from Strouse’s dramatic restraint in delivering the goods), and not because Clint king-shit Eastwood liked it enough to bang out a musical theme.
Eastwood’s score won’t be laid down “until close to the movie’s Oscar-season debut at the New York Film Festival in September,” O’Neil reports. Meantime, he adds, screening audiences are still hearing the “old score” by “relative rookie” Max Richter. I don’t recall anything being particularly wrong or unaffecting with Richter’s score when I saw Grace at Sundance last January. Eastwood’s admiration for the film aside, this is obviously about Harvey Weinstein, no fool, figuring that Clint’s name will enhance the prestige element.
In my mid-Sundance review, written seven months ago, I called Grace is Gone “the best film I’ve seen so far at [the festival]. It’s a plain and pared down thing, emotionally subtle but very specific and often moving, familiar and understated with a Midwestern voice of its own — a family film about a very American, very here-and-now tragedy.

Grace gang at Sundance: Alessandro Nivola, Shelan O’Keefe, director James C. Strouse, producer-star John Cusack

“It definitely stands a chance of being remembered at year’s end, certainly for John Cusack’s deeply touching performance (a major step forward given his career-long inhabiting of hip sardonic wise guys) and possibly in the Best Picture, Direction and Screenplay categories at the ’08 Spirit Awards, and perhaps beyond that. 2007 has barely begun, but Grace has the kind of quiet poignance and gravitas that lingers.
“It is basically antiwar (and clearly anti-Bush), but at the same time non-judgmental in its portrait of a patriotic dad (Cusack) who’s barely coping with the news of his wife having just been killed, and particularly how to break the news to his two daughters (one of whom is played by Shelan O’Keefe).
“Grace is humanistic and character-driven, but, as Sundance programmer John Cooper has written, the fact that it ‘can be construed as pro-military guarantees its greatest impact.’ It’s a curious case — a movie made by anti-war blues that exudes heartfelt respect and compassion for the patriotic reds. I’m putting it a bit bluntly, but that’s the basic deal.

“There’s a shiftless-brother-of-Cusack character (Alessandro Nivola) who espouses antiwar views, but the film is apolitical in its focus on family grief and confusion. It’s obviously frowning at Cusack’s blind loyalty to the Bush cabal’s handling of the war but it doesn’t get into argumentative particulars or windy rhetoric.
“I can imagine this film playing in rural Republican/Bubba territory sometime later this year, and mainstream conservative guys and their wives and children coming out of the theatre and going, ‘Yeah…good film…solemn, truthful.'”
“The elegance of Grace is Gone is that it doesn’t ‘say’ anything, but there’s no mistaking what it’s saying.”

There was a lot of strong sentiment yesterday over the fall of New Line marketing president Russell Schwartz — some saying “ding-dong, Schwartz is dead”, others saying he was doomed given the quality of New line product. It led me to wonder, in any event, which production and distribution executives are generally considered by industry readers to be (or to have been) the best Hollywood has ever seen, and which have been the absolute worst and most despised? There’s plenty of feeling about this, I’m sure.

Remember, no producers or agents — we’re talking strictly studio execs. Marketers included. We’re not addressing who’s been the best politically as much as who’s been the most staunch and impassioned champion of the best material and the best filmmakers. Who, in other words, has “gotten it” more often than not in the John Calley or Steven J. Ross or Irving Thalberg sense of the term? And who has most distinguished him or herself in the opposite direction?
And not just who’s “gotten” it but who’s had the cojones to stand up the the Dark Siders and say “this is the right movie to make because it’s the right movie to make”? Especially the ones who’ve done this with the marketing guys saying “we can’t sell it!”
Greenlighting, advocating and selling the films that make the studio the most money is well and good and necessary, but this isn’t today’s issue. We’re trying to name the very best and the worst studio people in terms of who they are (or were), in terms of their visions and their souls. And they don’t have to be Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. It’s okay if they’re shouters like Harvey Weinstein as long as their shouting has led to making great films.
It goes without saying that a studio chief who greenlights a McG movie or a film like, say, Marie-Antoinette can be on the best-of-the-best list, theoretically, but McG dermerits weigh very heavily on the collective soul of humankind and must be considered accordingly. It also goes without saying, as far as I’m concerned, that execs like Bill Mechanic (who called the shots on 20th Century Fox fare from ’96 to ’00, and who was allegedly canned over Fight Club), one-time Universal chair- man Tom Pollock, former 20th Century Fox vice-chairman Tom Sherak, New Line production chief Mike DeLuca and Disney production exec Nina Jacobson have to be on it. If not, say why.
Does Mark Canton, the Sony Studios production chief in the early to mid ’90s, belong on the all-time bad guy list…or has he been given a bad rap? (He greenlit some good films that came out after he left the lot.) And what about Lorenzo di Bonaventura? Brad Grey? Tom Rothman?
I could go on and on (especially about certain publicists and marketers) but I’m too cowardly to be honest about this because it’ll only get me in dutch. This needs to be a reader thing, for the most part. Okay, I’ll jump in with a few more good guys as the wheels begin to turn, but remember the list has to include only the worst as well as the best. Starting, let’s say, witih the year 1992. The last 15 years. No mezzo-mezzos or in-betweeners. And you don’t have to be writing from direct personal experience. Second-hand info and opinons will suffice.

“It’s a hallmark of Judd Apatow‘s films thus far, whatever his direct role, that stock situations and characters are endowed with extra dimensions of humanity, weakness and insecurity, ” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy notes in his 8.7 Superbad review. The film “may be more overtly comic than 40 Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up, but its darkness and thoughtfulness are still notable for a genre so thoroughly dedicated to raucous surfaces and money moments.” Still, McCarthy adds, “Fixation on all manner of bodily functions and a plethora of outrageously out-there gags guarantee strong teen and date-night turnout…pic will never die as a high school and frathouse keg-party favorite.”

Given that Chris Tucker has made a total of three movies over the last nine years, and all of them for Brett Ratner — Rush Hour (’98), Rush Hour 2 (’01) and Rush Hour 3 (opening 8.10) — it’s not likely I’ll be seeing him in another film anytime soon. Actually, I know I won’t. I’ve decided as much, and for a very compelling, deep-down reason.

Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan in Rush Hour 3

Almost every line Tucker said during last night’s Rush Hour 3 screening made me wince. The way he delivered them, I mean. To me, Tucker’s high-pitched, kazoo- like Daffy Duck voice is chalk on a blackboard, especially with that jackhammer street-rap delivery that he can’t seem to let go of. And after a half hour or so of watching and listening I decided I will never again watch this guy jump around and go “c’mon, maayeeen!…litten to me!….bap-dee-dee-bap-bap…yayeh! yayeh!” It’s over, finito…purged.
Tucker has many fans and that’s cool. He’s got the wit, the smirk attitude and the showbiz swagger of a first-rate, live-wire comedian. More power to him, but I’m done with his mincing, squealy-ass voice for the rest of my natural life. Unless he turns up in a film for, you know, Bernardo Bertolucci or Paul Thomas Ander- son or Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck…a director who’ll sit him down and say, “Chris, you’re great and all but you have to give the hyper thing a rest and let your voice settle into a deeper, quieter place.” But how likely is that?

“A little movie called Once gave me enough inspiration to last the rest of the year.” — Steven Spielberg to USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican in a piece about Fox Searchlight’s new ad/promo push for the Irish-made film. Breznican also reveals that costars Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova have recorded a cover version of Bob Dylan‘s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” that’ll be included in the soundtrack of Todd Haynes‘ Dylan pic I’m Not There.

Hansard, Irglova on the beach in Santa Monica last May [photo by Larry Armstrong]

“Even though you can argue that Brett [Ratner] is easily distracted and has a short attention span and likes to go out and party and have a good time, Brett is in his own way a perfectionist. He wants his movies to be great.” — New Line production president Toby Emmerich speaking to L.A. Times reporter John Horn in an 8.7 article about the making of Rush Hour 3. Also: An assemblage of quotes from online pontificators about why Ratner is so hated by the blogging commuinity (“paid too much and laid too much,” etc.), edited by L.A. Times staffer Deborah Netburn.

Premiere.com’s Stephen Saito has thrown together a list of the 20 Hottest New Faces of Comedy. Disputation — Anna Faris brings a certain spunk and vivaciousness to her performances, but I’ve never so much as grinned at anything she’s done in an allegedly humorous vein. She really needs to pay the piper for starring in all those Scary Movie movies. (The IMDB says she’ll next be in Scary Movie 5.) In this sense she won’t be out of the woods and forgiven and performing on a level playing field until at least 2010. Otherwise the hottest guys on the list are Superbad‘s Jonah Hill, 23,and Michael Cera, 19, who Saito calls “the Laurel and Hardy for the Y generation.”

It’s sad and dispiriting to hear that Sydney Pollack has decided against directing the HBO movie Recount, a verite-styled drama about about the fiercely contested 2000 U.S. presidential election, because of illness. Pollack’s spokesperson Leslee Dart said “he’s got some medical issues” and “is not feeling well right now,” making it “unrealistic” for him to move into production within the next few weeks.

Sydney Pollack, Jay Roach, Danny Strong

The head-scratcher, of course, is the decision to replace Pollack with comedy director Jay Roach (the Austin Powers films, Meet The Parents/Fockers — he was also one of the Borat producers). Roach is a proficient pro and he’s obviously looking to strike a blow for his own artistic maturity by directing Recount, but c’mon…when I think of Jay Roach, I think of a funnier Brett Ratner without the poon.
I’ve read a rough draft of Recount that convinced me it could be really good. I just hope Roach doesn’t screw it up. I’m sure he has the exact same thought on his mind right now.
Written by Danny Strong, Recount will be “a character-driven film about all the squabbling, spinning, vote-disqualifying and Supreme Court deliberating that eventually handed George Bush the presidency despite Al Gore winning the popular vote in both Florida and across the nation,” as I wrote earlier. News reports are saying Recount will begin shooting “in the fall,” but I was told yesterday that Roach may need a little while to get up to speed so it may not shoot until later in the year.
The following quote appears on page 137 of Strong’s script, and I am revealing nothing as it is from a published dissenting opinion by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens regarding Bush vs. Gore: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

Believe it or not, Bill O’Reilly will be advancing a view that The Bourne Ultimatum is antigovernment propaganda during the second hour of The Radio Factor, starting at 1 pm today. As the Radio Factor website puts it, “Ultimatum has a political message that may surprise you… we’ll break it out for you and explain why it may make you mad.” Flash: Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal was supposed to be a guest, presumably arguing against the O’Reilly view, but his bosses stepped in at the last second and said “no, you can’t do that.”