“I’ve seen Casino Royale, and I don’t want to get into the trip of breaking the embargo to slap down another critic, but let me say this: that French guy is completely wrong about the movie. See it for yourself and tell me I’m wrong.” — Big-gun critic based in a very cool northern city.

And the Jesse James plot thickens: yesterday I linked to a Kevin Williamson interview in the Calgary Sun with Tony Scott, who’s the executive producer of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Scott said to Williamson that the film, directed by Andrew Dominik with Brad Pitt playing the famed Missouri outlaw, would be out in February ’07.
Now I’m hearing forget February. In fact, forget any specific date. Limbo!
Before posting I called a Warner Bros. p.r. rep yesterday for a precise date — she didn’t get back until this afternoon, and she told me Scott is “absolutely wrong…I don’t know where he got that…the film is not coming out in Feburary…nobody’s seen it and we don’t have a date.” She couldn’t even suggest a season; nor could Scott (I called his office and was blown off) or producer Jules Daly (ditto).
Scott told Williamson that “we have to be careful how we market [Jesse James] because it’s like a Terrence Malick film. But it’s really good and Brad’s terrific in it — he just gets better with age.” Throw in WB’s release-date quandary and the implication is that Jesse James is perhaps a little too Terrence Malicky — too pastoral and picturesque, too much meditative muttering…something?
This was a movie that was going to come out last September — now the studio won’t even say what season it’ll open in. That’s a problem. The only time to open an offbeat western that’s making everyone a little nervous (a film, say, in the vein of All The Pretty Horses?) is (a) in either February-March or early April, (b) the dumping ground of August or (c) October-November (i.e., if it’s any good). If it’s the latter, The Assassination of Jesse James will become, in a sense, the All The Kings Men of the fall ’07 season.

There are very few adults in the big bad business world who don’t swear by the Don Corleone maxim, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Whatever your game is or what side of the fence you’re on, dealing with people who understand how things really work is usually a very smooth experience. Unfortunately, there are those who don’t get Don Corleone and instead are into a kind of iron-cannon, thick-walled, defend-the-English-castle mentality. They basically strategize the way Frank Thring‘s King Aella did in Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings, and they regard well-meaning interpreters of the Hollywood film business the way that King Aella saw Kirk Douglas‘s Einar and Ernest Borgnine‘s Ragnar. You’re watching The Godfather, Part II and you’re thinking Michael Corleone may lose his soul, but at least he gets it. You’re watching The Vikings and you can’t wait to see King Aella thrown into the wolf pit.

The Hollywood Reporter has published a Hollywood Hot-Shots of Tomorrow list. Get in with the “tomorrow guys” or you’ll start to experience shaky relationship footing in five years, and five years later you’ll be dead. Congrats to Paramount’s Pam Abdy, New Line’s Cale Boyter, Silver Pictures’ Susan Downey, Pheonix Pictures Brad Fischer, DreamWorks’ John Fox, Universal’s Kristin Lowe, Fox Searchlight’s Zola Mashariki , Columbia’s Adam Milano, Lionsgate’s John Sacchi, Warner Premiere’s Geoff Shaevitz and IFC Films’ Ryan Werner.

Paramount Pictures’ chairman Brad Grey has persuaded Martin Scorsese to sign a four-year, first-look deal with the studio, under which the Departed director (the most likely winner of the Best Director Oscar next February, as things currently stand) “will direct and produce entertainment across all platforms including feature films, made-for-DVD, digital content and television for Paramount Pictures and Paramount Vantage,” according to the release.

Martin Scorsese (l.); Brad Grey (r.)

Is this the beginning of something new and dynamic for Marty? Or is this a gold-watch honorarium being given to an older guy who’s probably never going to ring-a-ding-ding it with as much dead-on clarity as he did with The Departed? I hate to say it, but lightning doesn’t strike that often in a creative person’s life and at Scorsese’s age — let’s face it — the odds are that it’ll be all downhill from here on. But maybe not.
As long as Marty doesn’t use the Paramount deal to make any more Kundun‘s, things’ll be okay. My own view is that Scorsese should stay out of Asia altogether. Remakes, fine. Historical terra firma, nein.

I’ve twice read Patrick Goldstein‘s 11.6 column about Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, those Bush-shilling film lovers who run the Liberty Film Festival (Friday to Sunday at the Pacific Design Center), and I’m wondering yet again where all the good fascist entertainments are hiding these days?

Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire was the last Hollywood-produced, high-quality, conservative-minded, get-those-godless-third-world-scumbags movie, and that was a couple of years ago. I’m saying there’s room in my liberal head for good right-wing films if they’re well-made enough. (What a thing to say on Election Day!). Problem is, they’re all but nonexistent.
What was the first mainsteam example of a “fascist” entertainment? Dirty Harry? (Pauline Kael famously thought so.)
I wonder what the Liberty guys thought of that excellent hand-held video movie about a couple of young guys going to Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden as a revenge move for 9/11…you know the one I mean. (I just did a search and can’t find it.) I wonder what Aputo and Murty thought of Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Night- mares, or whether they even had the character to sit down and watch it? Or if they had the curiosity to read Paul Haggis‘s Against All Enemies script? What did they think of The Fog of War, I wonder?
The LFF’s site indicates they’re showing films that Cheney and Wolfowitz would be very happy to see. Pierre Rehov’s Suicide Killers and From the River to the Sea, which “both deal with the origins of Islamic terrorism in the repression of Islamic societies.” They’ll also be showing Border War, about those terrible conniving Mexicans slipping through the border in order to perform bottom-rung jobs that nobody else wants. Plus some “exciting” short films like The Road to Ramadi and A Journey to Iraq, plus, narrative features like The 9/11 Commission Report “that deals with Clinton’s failure to get bin Laden.”
The Bush adminstration has been choking for over three years on the lies and denials that have fortified the Iraq debacle, and the Liberty guys are supporting a doc that nails Clinton for not doing enough to get bin Laden back in the late ’90s? This is revolting.
I don’t know the details (haven’t made the call to Mark Ebner), but I’m also wondering why aren’t they showing Patrick Dollard‘s pro-troops documentary that he’s been shooting in Iraq, or at least a portion from it? Dollard has been filming for quite a while now. That I would pay to see.

Another George Lucas-is-a-bit-of-a-dead- head-and-a-creative-ass-dragger story, this one from screenwriter Frank Darabont.

“I worked for over a year on [the Indiana Jones 4 movie],” Darabont has told CHUD‘s Devin Faraci. “I worked very closely with Steven Spielberg. He was ecstatic with the result and was ready to shoot it two years ago. He was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Raiders of the Lost Ark. That’s really high praise and gave me a real sense of accomplishment, especially when you love the material you’re working on as much as I love the Indiana Jones films.”
But along came Lucas and the project was zotzed…back to square one.
“Lucas read it and said, ‘Yeah, I don’t think so, I don’t like it.’ And then he resets it to zero when Spielberg is ready to shoot it that coming year, [which] is a real kick to the nuts. You can only waste so much time and so many years of your life on experiences like that, you can only get so emotionally invested and have the rug pulled out from under you before you say enough of that.”

I was intending to vote first thing this morning. All right, no later than 1 pm. Some of the people I know are saying, “Hmmm… I’m actually going to vote for a Republican today.” (Schwarznegger, they mean.) I know one thing for sure — Jerry Brown for Attorney General! If you’re a Californian and want to vote the lock-step liberal line…naah, you can figure it out yourself. People say they’re liberal or conservative or libertarian, but they mainly belong to the Green Party. As in the color of currency.

“Some close to Sacha Baron Cohen point to Borat‘s amazing $31,607 per-playdate average as a sign the film had enough appeal for a wider release. But some distrib execs point to the still-low awareness — in the latest tracking, which reflects polling from over the weekend, just 57% of people were aware of the film, while 90% had heard of Santa Clause 3 — and argue that Borat will benefit by waiting a week for word of mouth to build before going out wider.” — from Gabriel Snyder and Ian Mohr‘s 11.6. Variety story. How is it possible that 43% of the public is still unaware of this film? What, are they living under rocks? Imagine the kind of brain you need to have, the non-interest levels in the outside world…amazing.

I’ve tried and it’s impossible — there’s no feeling just one way about John Ford. His movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life, and after seeing Peter Bogdanovich‘s Directed by John Ford — an expanded, unexpectedly touching documentary about the legendary helmer that will show twice on Turner Classic Movies Tuesday evening (and also at a special AFI Film Festival screening at the Linwood Dunn) — the muddle is still there.

But Bogdanovich’s film gives you a feeling — one that seems clear and genuine — that you’ve gotten to know the old coot better than ever before, that you’ve really and truly seen past the bluster and the scowl and the cigar, beyond the scrappy Irish machismo and into some intimate realm. After many years of saying “Ford sure made some great films but what a snappy old prick he was,” I’ve finally come to like the guy. And I feel I owe Bogdanovich a debt for that.

I tried to say this during my Monday afternoon phone chat with Bogdanovich. We spoke for 25 or 30 minutes. And I never quite said what I felt the film had taught me about Ford, which is that he was a shameless softie who used a snarly exterior manner to keep people from getting inside and discovering who he really was. But of course, his films made that pretty clear on their own.

Directed by John Ford is really and truly one of Bogdanovich’s best films. It’s right up there with The Last Picture Show, They All Laughed, Targets, Saint Jack and Paper Moon.

It reminds us once again that the director of The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Horse Soldiers, Drums Along the Mohawk and The Man Who Shot Libery Valance was a superb visual composer and one of Hollywood’s most economical story-tellers bar none. His films were always layered and understated with sub-currents that never flowed in one simple direction. His films always seemed fairly obvious and sometimes sentimental …at first. Then you’d watch them again and reconsider, and they always seemed to be about a lot more.

Bogdanovich actually made Ford in 1971, but he was never very happy with that earlier version. The current version still has the Orson Welles narration and a trio of warm, hilarious, fascinating interviews with John Wayne, Henry Fonda and James Stewart. These three alone make the doc worth seeing. The interviews were shot in 35 mm and very carefully lit and framed. The fact that Wayne, Fonda and Stewart have all moved on to the next realm makes it all the more affecting.

The additions include new interviews with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill and Steven Spielberg.

The other big extra is an audio tape of a 1973 heart-to-heart between Ford, then lying on his deathbed, and his lifelong love interest Katharine Hepburn (they fell for each other during the making of Mary, Queen of Scots). At one point you can hear Ford tell her that he loves her. It’s the kind of thing a guy like Ford would only say knowing that the clock is ticking and he’d better spit it out while he can still breathe.

I love Spielberg’s recollection about meeting Ford and being brusquely told how he’ll never be a decent director until he learns to frame landscapes without the horizon being dead center. I take pictures every day and I don’t think I’ll ever forget that lesson. I know I won’t.

I’m still bothered by the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of Ford’s films. The Irish clannishness, the tributes to boozy male camaraderie, the relentless balladeering over the opening credits of 90% of his films, the old-school chauvinism, the racism, the thinly sketched women, the “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” (as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film), and so on.

But I now feel that I’ve finally come to know and very much like Ford the man. Maybe some day the stuff that still irritates me about his films will cease; maybe not. But I know my attitude about the guy has definitely been altered by Bogdanovich’s film. I presume I’m not the only one, or at least that I won’t be after it airs tomorrow night.