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.”

Mainstream reporters whose stories are printed in newspapers which are then hand-delivered to newsstands and newspaper vending machines by guys in trucks…these reporters and their editors really love pointing out that Steve Zallian‘s All The King’s Men was a huge debacle. The difference this time is that L.A. Times writer Scott Martelle got to talk to Zallian, the poor guy, and take his photo even. Look at the expression he’s wearing. It’s glum but in a kind of enigmatic, late-afternoon, verging-on-Mona Lisa way.

And what’s with this morning’s posting of this Time “blog” piece by Washington Times reporter and Brainwash editor Eric Pfeiffer about the selling of Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center to conservatives? Why now, I mean, two months after the movie came out? Because Stone has been promoting it in Europe?

The Queen star Helen Mirren, who’s looks at this stage like an even more likely shoo-in for Best Actress than Prada‘s Meryl Streep and Volver‘s Penelope Cruz, sat for a round-table chat this morning at the Four Seasons hotel; so did the film’s director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan. Frears and Morgan deliver a somewhat livelier session (Frears’ voice is the sharper and deeper of the two), but Mirren ran a close second.

Queen star Helen Mirren, not as she appeared during roundtable interviews this morning (9.3) at the Four Seasons but at a Miramax-funded photo session a week or two back.

La Opinion‘s Josep Parera called me a few days for a piece about the Oscar season, and what’s cool about this isn’t what I said (the usual praisings of Innaritu and Almodovar) as much as the mildly exotic thrill of being quoted in Spanish:
“Para el periodista Jeffrey Wells, responsable de la pagina en la red hollywood-elsewhere.com, y uno de los expertos en analizar la carrera de los Oscar, ‘Babel es la obra cumbre de Inarritu. El es el director mas brillante de la actualidad. Esta al mismo nivel que cineastas como Fellini y Antonioni. No es solo un director, es alguien que est√É∆í√Ǭ° por encima del resto, en el panteon de los grandes.”
“Y por lo que respecta a Volver, Wells afirma que se trata ‘de la mejor pelicula para mujeres y de mujeres de la historia.'”

Happiness and lethargy are merely flip sides of the same coin. People who go “whoopee” when things are going well and “woe is me” when things are going badly are slaves in a jungle of illusion. There is only the cosmic hum and continuity of it all.
That is why people who spray champagne on their friends and scream “we’re number one!” when their football or soccer or baseball or basketball teams wins are cosmic midgets. And why this front-page story that appeared in the Times this afternoon will only excite or encourage children.
It reads, “After days of flirting with its all-time peak, the Dow Jones industrial average finally set a new record this afternoon. The Dow gained 56.99 points, or 0.5 percent, to close at 11,727.34. The index√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s previous closing high of 11,722.98 was set on Jan. 14, 2000.
“The latest record came as oil prices fell about 3 percent and dropped below $60 a barrel for the first time since March. Energy prices have been falling in the last month because fears of hurricanes, troubles in the Middle East and tight supplies have eased markedly since the end of summer.
“Earlier today, the Dow topped another record reached on Jan. 14, 2000, as it traded at an all-time intraday high of 11,758.87. The stock market rally that led to the 2000 peak had been fueled by growth in technology and a belief that the internet would transform businesses. The rally over the last few months, however, has had more modest roots: signs that the economy is moderating and inflation is tame.”

“I will tell you right now — Cate Blanchett will win the Oscar,” Good German star George Clooney has told the Associated Press about his costar. “She’s the best actor working today. Not actress — she’s an actor. Intimidating, in a way, to work with an actor that good.”

“Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed clocks in at two and a half hours, yet it’s two and a half hours of jabber and jolt, and [with] enough color for ten crime pictures. It works smashingly. There’s no mercy — not even for the audience. William Monahan‘s dialogue is Mamet-speak played at Alvin and the Chipmunks speed with a broad Boston accent.
“While characters spit yahmuthahfuckedme expletives into one another’s faces (along with peculiar citations of Shakespeare, Freud, and James Joyce), Scorsese and his fab house editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, drive the action brusquely. They can hardly sit still in the present; they leap around in time, splintering a moment into its antecedent and aftermath. They chuck in random splattery head shootings and bashings — like demitasses of espresso in the middle of a long road trip.” — from David Edelstein ‘s review, the best-written about this film yet, in New York magazine.
The wheel is turning, turning. All the top critics are creaming all over this thing. Maybe this Boston crime movie about nothing especially rich or dimensional except for its own brilliant moves is a Best Picture finalist waiting to happen — it’s got a 100% rating so far on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% rating on Metacritic.

As every knows, Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.07) will be two high-style wank-off movies in one — Robert Rodriguez‘s Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof. Two guys who are capable of much, much more slumming by making a couple of B movies in quotes. Point is, this thing became more interesting since the stories started getting around last summer about Rodriguez disassembling and losing his focus during the shooting of Death Planet because he was so emotionally shattered over getting divorced from his wife and producer, Elizabeth Avellan.
This freakout — a couple of guys I’ve spoken to have used the antiquated term “nervous breakdown”, which is a leftover from the ’50s and ’60s — didn’t detonate the movie, but it came close. “It was touch and go, but they got through it,” a guy tells me. And I gather some exta costs were incurred, whcih always happens when a film isn’t made in a perfectly ordered and coordinated way.
Rodriguez is “a traditional Hispanic Catholic male,” a friend says, “who depended on Elizabeth to nurture, support and protect him..and when that marriage fell apart [after some 16 years of togetherness], he lost it.”
The intrigue for me is, does an artist need to have to have a smooth, happy, secure, well-ordered personal life to do good work? Maybe this is necessary for some people, but I don’t know that this is vital for everyone. This sounds a bit cold, but I’m thinking that Planet Terror will probably be a more layered thing to watch now, given what’s happened. In the same sense that Douglas Trumbull‘s Brain- storm (’83) became unavoidably more intriguing with everyone knowing that costar Natalie Wood had drowned not long after it was made.

I did some reporting in ’99 about other Neos who might have starred in The Matrix (Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith), and I never heard squat about Kevin Costner being offered the part so take this Guardian story (or this aspect of it) with a grain. Richard Burton would have been sublime as Brutus in Joseph L. Manckiewicz‘s 1953 production of Julius Caesar (which is out on DVD on 11.7) Julia Roberts blew it big-time by turning down Gwynneth Paltrow‘s role in Shakespeare in Love. Warren Beatty would have been perfect as Hubbell Gardiner (the role that Robert Redford finally took) in The Way We Were. Ben Affleck back-dooring Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain?….in ’97, maybe, but too old for the part in 2005. There’s something extremely weird about the idea of Jimmy Cagney in green tights as Robin Hood. And whoever wanted to see Chevy Chase whacking off in the shower in American Beauty, in Kevin Spacey‘s Lester part, needs to be found and punished.