“The new Stephen Frears film, The Queen, is about a clash of wills between Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Right Honourable Tony Blair, M.P., Prime Minister in Her Majesty’s Government. Or, if you prefer, Alien vs. Predator.” — from Anthony Lane‘s review in last week’s The New Yorker.
And this from “Styles & Scenes” columnist Elizabeth Snead: Queen star Helen Mirren “really does look — and dress — just like Queen Elizabeth in the film. Although, in some scenes she also bore a unsettling resemblance to President George Washington.”

Richard Roeper is the latest addition to the Gold Derby Oscar panel, and aside from his expected Best Picture favorite being Flags of Our Fathers (which he may or may not have seen when he submitted his list), he’s got The Departed in his #2 slot — which is somewhat significant, I feel. On one level I feel like an idiot cheerleader yelling “Go, Departed!” but I’m sensing a real surge on behalf of this Martin Scorsese film.
A fellow journalist said, “Forget it…that 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating will drop after Wednesday night’s all-media in Manhattan.” Well, it’s down to 95% now, partly due to Jim Hoberman‘s half-admiring pan.
A tastily-phrased review by Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum is worth a run-through. Departed director Martin Scorsese has created “a movie built on the foundations of GoodFellas and Mean Streets but not chained to it,” she says, “a picture that feels as effortless as The Aviator and Gangs of New York felt effortful. And that unclenching brings out the best in his instincts, which in turn allows him to bring out the best in his actors: Complicated, compelling Leonardo DiCaprio, for one, reaches a new career high in this, his third Scorsese picture.”
Roeper, by the way, is joining Gold Derby panelists Claudia Puig (USA Today), Pete Hammond (HollywoodWiretap.com, Maxim), Gene Seymour (Newsday), Art Spiegelman (Reuters), Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune), Michael Sragow (Baltimore Sun), myself, L.A. Times Oscar Beat columnist Steve Pond, Peter Travers (Rolling Stone), and Gold Derby honcho Tom O’Neil. Hey, that’s only 11…it should be an even 12, no?

A well-connected journalist at last night’s premiere party for The Queen told me she has a bit of a problem with a certain film coming out later in the month. She called it “the worst piece of shit” she’s seen in a long while. That sounds mean, doesn’t it? But that’s how people talk at parties after a glass of wine. Taken aback but ever the optimist, I said, “Not even [well-liked actress] for Best Actress?” Nope, she replied. I ran this past a guy who’s seen it also and he said, “Well, it’s a pretty crowded field for best actress contenders so yeah, it’s conceivable [she] could get elbowed aside.” I would run the name of the film and the actress, but it seems fairer to catch it myself and run a reaction when it opens. Maybe I’m turning cowardly on top of that.

There’s a new coffee-table book called Edie: Factory Girl (VH1 Books) . It’s mainly filled with — surprise! — photos of Edie Sedgwick as well as some relatively recent ones of Sienna Miller portraying Sedgwick during filming of George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl (Weinstein Co., 12.29).

The photos were all taken by Nat Finkelstein, a notorious Warhol photographer — a character — who knew Edie better than fairly well; the text is by David Dalton, who began working as an assistant to Andy Warhol, Sedgwick’s media promoter and benefactor until he cast her aside, when he was still in his teens.
I don’t know who wrote the following promo copy, but it reads well: “She was riveting to look at, a sprite of the zeitgeist, the living distillation of the over-amped vision of New York in the mid ’60s. Like many exotic creatures that Andy Warhol shed his light on, she initially bloomed — became the symbol for all that was hip and stylish — and just as quickly began to disintegrate.
“Told with unsparing candor and with candid images that capture her at the peak of her Factory stardom, Edie Factory Girl is the short but enduring cultural story of Edie Sedgwick — releasing in time for the film.”

“Helen doesn’t say, `Please love me. Look, I’ll smile nicely, and you’ll love me,” Stephen Frears tells John Lahr for a cannily written profile of Queen star Helen Mirren in last week’s issue of The New Yorker. “She’s not inviting you in the way other actresses often are. She just says, `This is what it’s like,’ and that’s what you love about her. She confronts something, and she doesn’t sentimentalize it.” Elizabeth I costar Jeremy Irons adds, “She goes for life…that’s why she’s alluring to men. She is the complete antithesis of the vapid.”

How can Chris Nolan‘s The Prestige (Touchstone, 10.20) be “falling off of the list” of MCN’s Gurus of Gold if it hasn’t been seen all that much? A friend saw it yesterday for what he believed was the first time (or one of the first times), and feels it’s one of the more satisfying commercial rides he’s taken in a long while because Nolan is such an expert filmmaker, etc. There may be another screening this week, a Variety series screening and an all-media screening next week.

Reader John Coogan has passed along this Google Video file containing Werner Herzog‘s TV documentary Wings of Hope (2000), which is about Juliane Koepcke, a German woman who was the only survivor of a plane crash that occured in the Pervian jungle in 1972. She and Herzog are shown revisiting the site of the accident as she tells how she managed to survive. The doc is freshly topical due to last weekend’s mid-air collision above Brazil which resulted in the deaths of 155 people aboard a commercial jetliner.

In a conversation with Radar Online‘s Jebediah Reed, the legendary R. Lee Ermey — star of Texas Chainsaw Massscare: The Begining — says something surprising about Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut. “Stanley called me up all the time,” he says. “He’d call at three o’clock in the morning and say, “Oh, it’s 10 o’clock over here.” [Laughs] “Yeah, well, it’s three o-fucking-clock in the morning here, Stanley. Oh well.

“He called me about two weeks before he died, as a matter of fact. We had a long conversation about Eyes Wide Shut. He told me it was a piece of shit and that he was disgusted with it and that the critics were going to have him for lunch. He said Cruise and Kidman had their way with him — exactly the words he used.

What did he mean?, asks Reed. “[Kubrick] was kind of a shy little timid guy. He wasn’t real forceful. That’s why he didn’t appreciate working with big, high-powered actors. They would have their way with him, he would lose control, and his movie would turn to shit.”

Ermey is a colorful, impudent rightwing mouth-off type, but watch the Kubrick acolytes try and characterize him as a deranged nutter in response to this.

If N.Y. Post writer Reed Tucker quotes Departed star Leonardo DiCaprio yelling, in a manner of speaking, “Table on fire!”, does that mean there was one, particularly if a quote in a Time magazine transcript disputes this?

One one hand we have a bull session between Time‘s Josh Tyrangien and the Departed guys — Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson. But it contains a slight problem for Tucker, who included an apparent wrongo in an interview piece with Nicholson that ran on 10.1.
Tucker writes that “before one scene in which [Nicholson’s] Costello interrogates [DiCaprio’s] Costigan to figure out if he’s a rat, Nicholson reportedly told Scorsese, ‘I don’t think [DiCaprio] is scared enough of me. I have to be scarier.’ So scary he got. Jocelyn-Wildenstein-in-the-morning scary.
“‘I came in the next day,” DiCaprio recalls, ‘and Jack’s hair was all over the place. He was muttering to himself and the prop guy tipped me off that he had a fire extinguisher, a bottle of whiskey, some matches and a handgun somewhere. So I sat down at the table not knowing what to expect, and he set the table on fire after pouring whiskey all over the place and stuck a gun in my face.'”
That scene, Tucker writes, “turned out to be one of the most chilling in the movie.” Except there’s no whiskey table fire in the movie. At all. To anyone’s recollection.
Tyrangien’s q & a transcript tells a different story:
“Scorsese: So we shoot the scene, and all of a sudden you hear a thunk. And I’m thinking, I better say cut. And, thank God, I didn’t. Jack picks up a gun and points it at Leo, and he didn’t know at that point that there was a gun there. So what you see from Leo is real. I love that.
“Nicholson: But the prop man told him, goddammit!
“Dicaprio: He said, “All I know is Jack has a handgun, a bottle of whiskey and a fire extinguisher.’
“Time: Why a fire extinguisher?
“Nicholson: I was going to set the table on fire with bourbon out of my mouth, but I forgot they didn’t give me real bourbon.
“Dicaprio: [Laughing] It’s hard to light Diet Coke.”

The Reeler‘s Stu VanAirsdale on Warren Beatty‘s NY Film Festival press conference following Tuesday’s press screening of Reds. And N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott speaks to Beatty about the film and its legend in a 10.4 piece.

“I braced myself as Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby began,” writes Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman. “First of all, it’s filled with well-known faces like Demi Moore, Sharon Stone and Lindsay Lohan — actors who are often more frequently in supermarket tabloids than good movies.
“After these three, plus William H. Macy, Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater and Estevez himself all make the scene, Laurence Fishburne‘s entrance is nearly comical. You hear yourself saying, ‘Anyone else back there?’
“But I have to tell you, I loved Bobby. Once the shock of all these people settles in — quickly, too — the stories of various characters who were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the day Bobby Kennedy was killed in June 1968 become not only completely engrossing, but unexpectedly moving and poignant.”

Scriptland columnist Jay Fernandez has picked up on the rumble that was going around last May (in Cannes, for the most part) about Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Ariagga being at odds. The L.A. Times reporter has written that people in their respective cirlcles “are privately aghast that Inarritu, apparently miffed that Arriaga claimed much of the credit for the critical success of 21 Grams, banned the writer from attending Cannes, where Babel had its world premiere. Inarritu, in full auteur glory, went on to claim the best director prize. Multiple calls to Arriaga’s UTA agent went unreturned, Inarritu’s manager would merely confirm the ban and acknowledge the feud, and a message left for Inarritu sits idle.”