46 years ago, or roughly 35 years before Harvey Weinstein began rewriting the Oscar campaign book, Burt Lancaster voiced some angry allegations to the Saturday Evening Post about certain unsavory practices involving Oscar award balloting and politicking. (Thanks to Michael Bergeron for sending this along.)

Three months after winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Elmer Gantry (i.e., when it was safe to do so), Burt Lancaster let loose.

A trailer for Evan Almighty (Universal, 6.22.07), the most grossly expensive CGI comedy of all time with the least funny, most tiresome premise in the world. The mere threat of this film seems to have undone all the good vibes that Little Miss Sunshine extended to poor Steve Carell, who’s clearly playing to the cheap seats in this apparent Tom Shadyac monstrosity. God’s (i.e., Morgan Freeman‘s) decision to cover the earth in flood waters is clearly an expression of displeasure with how man has ruined it (which he most certainly has). But how is that, you know, “funny”?

Pat Broeske has written a N.Y. Times piece about a couple of planned duelling biopics about the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis… fascinating. The movie world certainly needs another biopic (or two) about a troubled genius musician who had drug problems and wasn’t the most likable or admirable guy in the world. I mean, that’s a story that absolutely needs to be told.

The Davis film most likely to get shot is called Miles and Me (shitty title!); the other one is being assembled by the Davis estate and may star Don Cheadle.
Curiously, Broeske doesn’t mention that the Davis mystique was re-energized a couple of years ago by a scene in Michael Mann‘s Collateral in which Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx visit a Los Angeles jazz club owner (Barry Shabaka Henley) who recalls a vivid encounter he had with Miles in the mid ’60s.
Davis was known to some as “the Prince of Darkness, [partly becasue] he ranted so much about race and prejudice that some acquaintances believed he was the one with racial prejudice. (Even though he never balked at working with white musicians, and he was romantically involved with several white women.) He often performed with his back to his audience, and berated fans who dared approach him.
“Famously fond of cool cars and hot women, Davis had an erratic personal life that included heroin addiction, cocaine addiction, pimping and spousal abuse,” Broeske writes.
“‘I actually left running for my life — more than once,√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù his former wife Frances Davis recalled in a telephone interview. A onetime Broadway dancer, she said her own career faltered after she left the hit musical West Side Story because Davis told her, ‘A woman should be with her man.’ She now says any screen depiction must be truthful about both his artistry and his rage. ‘There√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s got to be full treatment of his genius, as well as his shortcomings,’ she said.”
Forget that quality coming through from the Davis estate version — familymembers always protect their own.

Much admired screenwriter Eric Roth is making the rounds to raise awareness about his work on Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22), which, as he promised in a phone chat a few days ago, has a lot more in the way of adult texture than most of the films out now. Here’s a N.Y. Times interview piece by Kris Tapley, out today.

Here’s a 39-minute portion of yesterday’s conversation with Children of Men director-cowriter Alfonso Cuaron. A lot of it won’t add up for those who haven’t seen the film, but Cuaron’s obvious intelligence and his very precise choice of words deliver a kind of contact high if you listen for a few minutes. That and his laughter, which has a wonderful eruption and spontaneity.

Cuaron really knows his stuff, and he obviously respects to the nth degree and swears by the great Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, his director of photography who refused to use any sort of artificial lighting or green screens in the making of Children of Men. This is a film that uses CG visuals allthrough it, but with one or two exceptions it’s very hard to identify them.

Cuaron’s long experience making Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban provided a master course in state-of-the-art visual effects, and strengthened his hand in discussing what was possible or not possible in the making of Children of Men. But I’m delighted that he and “Chivo” were dead-set against using anything that looked in the least bit like a visual effect. (One surprise for me is that a bit in which Clive Owen and Julianne Moore play a mouth-to-mouth game of “catch” with ping-pong balls is digitally composed.) And I love that Cuaron values (along with “Chivo” and their collaborator and unofficial co-writer Clive Owen ) the on-camera benefits of minor filming accidents.

And I loved that when I mentioned the apparent influence of Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket in Men‘s final battle sequence, Cuaron said that the bigger visual references in the making of this film were Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (because of the futuristic-but-battered London settings) and F.W. Murnau‘s Sunrise.

We talked about how some older viewers have expressed dismay or outright dislike, even, for the sense of futility that, in their opinion, the film imparts. It’s obvious to me that anyone who comes away with this view isn’t paying attention. “This film has gotten very strong reactions — younger people find the film hopeful, older people find the film very depressive,” Cuaron admits.

“I’ve heard people say this is just another chase movie. It’s like people are so jaded about the telling of pictures. As opposed to have to engage with the specific cinematic elements and different approaches. I have a very bleak view of the present, but a very hopeful view of the future. For me the film is about hope in the end, but you cannnot dictate a sense of hope in a viewer because that is very personal and internal. [In our film] we basically allow audiences to fill in the blanks and make their own conclusions.”

I mentioned that the head of a distribution company who saw Children of Men at the Venice Film Festival recently complained that it departed significantly from the P.D. James novel. “We used the premise…only the premise of female infertility,” Cuaron responded. “But we received a statement from [original author] P.D. James, saying she fully admires and is pleased with the film and is very proud to be associated with it. For which I’m very thankful.

“I was not interested in constructing a back-story [about what caused female infertility],” Cuaron says. “Because if I did that, a lot of the movie would then have to be about that. For me, female infertility was basically a metaphor for the fading sense of hope. And the Human Project…if I have to explain who they are and the whole background of that, that also would have consumed a significant portion. The Human Project is a metaphor for human understanding. For me that was sufficient.”

“It’s kiddie season at the movies, and children are everywhere you look: brandishing machine guns in Blood Diamond, fighting for their lives in the desert in Babel, suffering from mortal wounds in Pan’s Labyrinth, being blown to bits in Deja Vu, sleeping in public toilets in The Pursuit of Happyness and getting massacred in The Nativity Story,” John Horn and Chris Lee’s 11.19 L.A. Times piece begins.
“Hollywood historically has steered away from depicting children in peril, typically limiting any life-or-death struggles to cartoonishly violent genre films such as The Shining, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But as this new batch of movies underscores, the old rules of childhood engagement are rapidly evolving. Instead of consigning children to the periphery of horrific realities, these films are dragging kids — preteens to toddlers — right into the middle of the mayhem.”

There’s no question that Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth (Picturehouse, 12.29) is his best work to date — a finely woven, emotionally haunting fairy tale of the first order. It’s one of del Toro’s semi-realistic films in the tradtion of Chronos and The Devil’s Backbone, but a very dark one also. I meant to write a longish piece after seeing it in Cannes last May but I didn’t. Now I’m figuring the right time will be a week or two before it opens in late December.
The reason why I delayed on writing a Pan’s review last May finally hit me yester- day during an interview with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron. It’s because the ending of del Toro’s film embraces a notion that death is a doorway to a kind of deliverance — to a wondrous realm in which the deceased is reunited with loved ones and finds ultimate peace. I used to be certain of the cosmic continuity of life (i.e., the constancy of the spirit, death being merely a transition point, etc.) but now I’m not so sure. And that’s why I had trouble with the finale. And why, I suspect, audiences will have trouble with it also.
It doesn’t undermine the exquisite balance and beauty of the whole — Pan’s Laby- rinth is thought to be one of the year’s best for some very good reasons — but it leaves you with a troubling “hmmm” as you’re leaving the theatre. In all honesty, if I were del Toro I would have ended it another way. I recognize that the ending is a subjective one (it’s happening in the head of Ivana Baquero‘s adolescent lead character), but it still bothers me.
Here, in any event, is a tour of del Toro’s idea-and-sketch book that appeared in Friday’s (11.17) Guardian.
Guillermo and I did a late-night interview toward the end of the Cannes Film Festi- val (on 5.25.06) at the Martinez Hotel, at which time he let me shoot his note-and- sketch journal, from which he wrote the screenplay and used to draw the first images from the film. Here are the shots again — image #1, image #2 and image #3.

TomKat’s wedding — a gala affair that happened yesterday inside Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano, Italy — reportedly cost a whopping $2.5 million. It seems a wee bit harsh for a N.Y. Post story to report that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes “pledged to live a wacky life of Scientology“..but the fact is that the ceremony was carried out by a Scientology minister, and that the secretive David Miscavige, the top dog in the Scientology church heirarchy, was Cruise’s best man. I love this shot of early evening fireworks in the wake of a huge afternoon rainstorm….nice.

And this graph from the Post story totally cracked me up: “The bride had an escort of security guards dressed in medieval uniforms — all of whom had been given strict orders to have ‘a shave, haircut and sunlamp session‘ — and a roll of drums played as she entered the former stable where they exchanged vows.” I wonder if the instructions included specifics about minimum sunlamp exposure time, and if the guards were asked to submit to a full-body sunlamp exposure or if it was just a face-and-neck thing.
If I were running the Cruise-Holmes nuptials I would have further insisted that the guards have enemas beforehand. For years Miss Manners has recommended enema treatments — — a measure ensuring that one’s appearance will exude the ultimate natural healthy glow — for all guests, family members, caterers, guards. In fact, I would have arranged for a team of enema specialists to be flown over so their services could be provided gratis to the guests.

The gap closed yesterday between Casino Royale and Happy Feet. The two are going to end up so neck-and-neck this evening — one studio’s estimate has Bond finishing the weekend with $41,122,000 and the Birds grabbing $41,254,000 — that their respective distributors, Sony/Columbia and Warner Bros., will probably be inflating the figures so as to position their film as the winner.
Right now, the Birds appear to be ahead of the Bond by $132,000…a nose-hair…but let’s see if the Bond spinners try to b.s. their way into a victory of some kind. Today’s (Sunday’s) figures will have to be very closely tallied down to the last dollar. Is it conceivable that the Birds will falter slightly and the Bond will pick up slightly also? Yeah, it could happen…but it’s not likely. This is definitely a squeaker, though. It’s Kennedy-Nixon in 1960.
The temptation for Sony and Warner Bros. to try and juggle each other on the reporting to the trades will be close to irresistable. Question is, how do you anticipate what the other guy is going to claim? It’s going to boil down to a question of who’s ballsier and who wants to lie more.
As expected, Happy Feet benefitted yesterday from a big family-trade surge, going from a Friday tally of $12,153,000 to a Saturday figure of $17,118,000. But Casino Royale also upticked — its Friday earnings of $14,904,000 increased by $800,000 the following day when it took in $15,779,000. Saturday business for sequels rarely increase — obviously a sign of unusual strength for the new 007.

A heartbreaking N.Y. Times story by Alex Mindlin about the closing of Movie Palace, a locally-owned Upper West Side Manhattan video store (105th and Broadway) that’s been run in a very neighborhood-friendly way by the same impassioned semi-ecentric, Gary Dennis, since 1984. The building has been sold and the new money-grubbing owner, a guy named Ralph Braha, more than doubled Dennis’ rent. And we all know the name of that tune.

“Like the movie theaters that preceded them, video stores are fast becoming relics, and their signs may soon join those unlighted movie marquees (with a vestigial letter or two) that dot various neighborhoods and remind passers-by of what once was,” Mindlin writes.
“But the decline of the video store is more than a story of small merchants undone by technological change. Like movie theaters, and unlike delis or drugstores, video shops in a city as film-saturated and film-savvy as New York emerged as centers of neighborhood life. Their selections mirror the people they serve, and their proprietors, like Mr. Dennis, can be beloved figures with a deep knowledge not only of local inhabitants’ film tastes, but also of other aspects of their lives.
“Salvatore Ierardo, the liquidation director for Video One Liquidators, a Florida company that sells off video stores’ inventories on site, sees the deaths of these shops firsthand. The stores are like “the guy that used to deliver ice,” he said, adding, “He worked hard and everything, but the refrigerator was working while he was sleeping.”
“Compared with some other video stores, Movie Place has not fared badly. For years, it resisted the forces that have been sweeping away many of the city’s other mom-and-pop video shops. Nationally, the number of privately owned video rental shops, as opposed to huge chains, fell to roughly 13,000 in 2005 from about 22,000 in 1996, according to Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, which tracks the entertainment industry.”
In short, almost half of the individually-owned video stores have gone bust in the last 10 years. The killers are the big video-store chains, Netflix, video-on-demand. Bit by bit, lease by lease, the neighborly human element in the DVD-renting experience is being squeezed and starved.

“Best Picture of the Year” means different things to different folks. For some (most, I suspect) it means being the most fundamentally “entertaining” — the one that will most likely reach the largest middlebrow audience. (Which is why a lot of people are suddenly behind Dreamgirls.) For others, it’s the film that’s the most soul-soothing or life-capturing (Volver, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, The Lives of Others ). Or that seems the most complete and fully realized according to its own particular rules (The Departed, The Queen, Pan’s Labyrinth, United 93).

But for me, the highest synthesis of Best Picture satisfaction means delivering on one or two of the above plus one other — it has to be visually historic. It has to knock your socks off by way of sheer visual energy or innovation. So much so that what you’re seeing becomes absolutely “real” and everything else drops away. The popcorn is put under the seat, notions of bathroom breaks are out of the question, and you almost stop blinking for fear of missing something.
Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men (Universal, 12.25) is that film, and is my choice so far for Best Picture of the Year.
This is a futuristic, dystopian end-of-the-world actioner and grim as hell, but what mainly comes through is how remarkably convincing it all looks and feels. Set in 2027 England, It’s one of the most exactingly detailed, full-on visions of a totally-fucked future — a world in which women have stopped having babies — that I’ve seen in any medium ever. Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland‘s production design is so precisely composed that it easily trumps whatever down-head feelings the film may temporarily impart.
And yet Children of Men doesn’t push the moody atmospheric gloom-vibe of films like Dark City, The Handmaid’s Tale, 12 Monkeys or Blade Runner. Based on a 1993 novel by P.D. James, an elderly British woman who mainly writes murder mysteries, it’s a movie with underlying heart and hope — a vision of an Apocalyptic ruin that also delivers warmth and frailty and compassion, and a vision of life that actually includes a future.

Understand this above all: Children of Men is the most excitingly photographed thing I’ve seen all year. It’s easily in the realm of Full Metal Jacket, Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan, only more so. It’s basically one long take after another, but the standouts are three bravura sequences that each last four or five minutes (longer?) without a cut, and involve truly astonishing feats of sustained choreography and miraculous camera movement. This alone should trump any misgivings you may have about any other aspect (although there’s not much to beef about).
In short — it’s the photography, stupid. The dp is Emmanuel Lubezki and the camera operator was George Richmond. I don’t know who precisely did what but the hand-held lensing is the stuff of instant legend. If Stanley Kubrick were alive today he would absolutely drop to his knees.
Any film buff who doesn’t rush out and see this film at least twice (and drag along as many friends as possible both times) is a traitor to the cause. That’s all there is to it — see it or live in shame. There’s no third option.
Children of Men may not satisfy every sector of the audience (I talked to a white- haired guy after the big Thursday-night premiere who thought it was the worst thing he’s seen in years), or even a majority of the big-gun critics. Variety‘s Derek Elley, astonishingly, gave it a mezzo-mezzo review after catching it at the Venice Film Festival. And I’ve heard the usual beefs about Clive Owen not exuding enough warmth. And there is concern among Universal execs that Men may not make a whole lot of coin.

Children of Men director-co-writer Alfonso Cuaron (r.); the great Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki , the film’s dp, to the left

But ten, twenty or fifty years from now, long after the pure-fizz movies (the ones that sometimes make people giddy and chuckly when they’re first seen) have been forgotten, people who care about the eye-popping art and vitality of cinema at its finest will be watching Children of Men.
I guess that white-haired guy was brought down by Cuaron’s vision of a crumbling world — worldwide infertility, bands of terrorists, mass chaos, people in cages, roving criminals on every corner. Britain, however, is the last island of relative stability in this world of November 2027. All the other countries have collapsed into total ruin.
What rings so true about this polluted Orwellian atmosphere is that it’s not radically different from the England of today — it’s just a bit grimier and madder with more cops and bigger video-screen ads, and a lot more animals on the streets, and much dirtier exhaust coming out of everyone’s tail pipes. Soldiers and cops are roving all over the place, warnings are constantly broadcast and posted. Broken windows, rampant graffiti, kids throwing rocks and garbage at passing trains….all the signs.
The key plot point is that there have been no births in the world since 2009. It’s over — everyone has given up.

Cuaron, Ashitey, Owen during the Venice Film Festival

Owen’s arc is to go from being a bitter disllusioned milquetoast — a bureaucrat named Theo Faron who can only shuffle along and think of his own misery — to a fighting humanist-activist doing everything he can to protect an illegal refugee named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), who, we soon learn, is miraculously pregnant. If it lives, the baby inside her will be the first child on the planet in 18 years. And it falls to Theo to smuggle Kee to a group called the Human Project, a group of scientists trying to find a cure for global infertility.
Michael Caine plays the only joyful character, a former political cartoonist-turned- pothead named Jasper who’s also Theo’s best friend. He’s in only two scenes but nonetheless lifts the film’s spirit significantly. Peter Mullan adds another energy jolt toward the end as a half-crazed cop friend of Caine’s.
The action starts with Theo being kidnapped by an immigrant-rights terrorist group run by Julian (Julianne Moore), a former lover of Theo’s who gave birth to their child only to see it die. She wants Theo to get hold of transit papers for Kee, which he does. But then things start to go crazy, and soon the film is pretty much one chase or high-peril situation after another.
That’s another reason people may pigeonhole this film as being less than it is — they’ll say it’s just another futuristic action flick.
I don’t think it matters at all if Cuaron and Timothy J. Sexton, who share script credit, have dealt with the various issues with sufficient or insufficient detail. It didn’t bother me that the infertility thing is never really explained — what mattered to me is that I absolutely believed it had taken hold.

The photography is legendary not just for the excitement factor, but because it’s fascinating to try and figure out how this and that sequence was shot. My favorite is an attack on a car in the countryside — it’s a single take that reportedly required a special mini-crane that allowed the camera to shoot both inside and outside the car. The big battle sequence at the finale is mind-blowing. It’s basically the final battle sequence in Full Metal Jacket on steroids.
I had thought of Cuaron mainly as a soulful-whimsical dramatist after Y Tu Mama Tambien. His Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (’04) was better than the others, but I did what I could to ignore it. His short in Paris J’etaime (“Parc Mon- ceau”) was pretty good. Children of Men, however, is a huge leap forward. Now he’s one of the big-boy visionaries in the class of Kubrick, Orson Welles, Spiel- berg, Gregg Toland, Chris Nolan, Ridley Scott, et. al.

The Birds are beating Bond, by not by much. Happy Feet is expected to end up with about $42,595,000 (3804 theatres, $11,199 a print). Martin Campbell‘s Casino Royale will be close behind with a projected tally of $40,470,000 (3434 theatres, $11795 a print) — the Daniel Craig experiment has succeeded and they’re out of the woods.
The third-place Borat will be off about 47% with an expected Sunday-night tally of $15,052,000. Santa Clause 2 will be off 48%. As expected, Stranger Than Fiction is dying — off about 47% with an expected $7,082,000 by Sunday night. Flushed Away — $6,751,000, off 50%. The dumb-asses don’t want to see anything too arty so Babel‘s not babbling very well — in 1251 theatres it”s off 46% for a projected weekend taly of $2,977,000.
The Departed will be off 50% with a tally of $2,561,000 and a seventh-place finish. Fast Food Nation is dead — $417,000 in 321 theatres and $1300 a print…a wipeout. For Your Consideration will take in $379,000 in 22 theatres ($16,477 a print). Bobby opened in only 2 theatres and will take in about $36,450 — it’s tracking pretty well and should do decently when it opens wide next weekend.