The Oregonian‘s film critic Shawn Levy has written a piece about how October is a great old time for film festivals in his neck of the woods. He chooses to mention three — the Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (Oct. 6-15), the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Oct. 6-8) and the Local Sightings Film Festival (Oct. 6-11) — but he can’t afford any space for the poor little Bend Film Festival (Oct. 12-16) — an indie-attitude shebang happening in Bend, Oregon, a nice little town a bit south of Redmond.

Late Monday afternoon/Yom Kippur update: Levy has written to explain he was only covering first-week-in-October festivals in his piece and will cover Bend big-time next weekend. I’m going to be part of the Bend Film Festival as a juror starting a week from Thursday. (I’ve been trying to watch the submitted films on DVD over the last two weeks…don’t ask.) MCN contributor Ray Pride will also be juror-ing there. I wouldn’t even be going if Levy, a Bend Film Festival fan along with Gus Van Sant and John Waters, hadn’t recommended my services to the organizers in the first place.

William J. Mann, the respected author of “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn” (Holt & Co.), describes Katharine Hepburn‘s “lifelong affection for women,” as Janet Maslin puts it in her N.Y. Times book review, as “the elephant in the room.”
I for one could never really imagine Hepburn making love with a man…not Spencer Tracy, not Charlie Allnut, not Rossano Brazzi. Whatever and whomever she let into her life and heart, hetero mambo never seemed part of the deep-down picture. And you can always sense these things, to some extent. Not everyone was readable, but many were. You could always detect on some level the inclinations of Montgomery Clift, James Dean, et. al. And there was never any missing the fact that Frank Sinatra was straight.
Maslin writes that “from [Hepburn’s] early friend Laura Harding, who described herself as ‘Miss Hepburn’s husband,’ to Phyllis Wilbourn, a companion of 40 years about whom Hepburn said, ‘Phyllis and I are one,’ women figure prominently in Mr. Mann’s thinking. [But] his goal here is less to detect lesbian relationships than to reiterate how greatly Hepburn’s public and private identities diverged.”

I’m well aware that providing a link to this shot of an Italian magazine cover is in bad taste, but I’d never happened across this photo before last weekend. It’s from a link sitting on the Diana Princess of Wales Wikipedia page, and with The Queen having just opened in New York and opening this weekend in Los Angeles, I’m guessing others might want to have a quick peek.

I was going to write “separated at birth” or some other smart crack, but it really boils down to a certain ad agency affinity for ominous pre-thunderstorm clouds as portents of heavy-osity — a minor zeitgeist current that briefly affected a couple of graphic designers a few months ago.

Tom Tykwer‘s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Dreamamount, 12.27), which isn’t expected to blow anyone’s socks off on these shores, has now brought in $47.3 million in Europe, with $28.4 million in Germany alone. It opens Wednesday in France. Here’s a U.K. teaser-trailer and the German teaser/final trailer.

On The Huffington Post, Liberal democratic activist and blogger Bob Geiger wrote yesterday that “while some would say we need additional evidence that the Iraq war is prosecuted by a bunch of Republican liars as much as we need more proof that disgraced GOP Congressman Mark Foley is a pervert, it’s still important that everyone catch [last night’s] 60 Minutes to see “State of Denial” author Bob Woodward [explain] in agonizing detail how George W. Bush and the Republican party have lied to the American people on the level of violence in Iraq and, in particular, the intensity of attacks against U.S. troops.
“Woodward details that, no matter what nonsense Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld spew daily about how great things are going in Iraq, it has indeed gone to hell in a hand basket and will get worse, not better, in 2007.
“The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,'” Woodward told 60 Minutes interviewer Mike Wallace last night . “Now there’s public, and then there’s private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know.”
“The insurgents know what they are doing. They know the level of violence and how effective they are. Who doesn’t know? The American public,” said Woodward.
Aaaah, but does the public really want to know? And what would they do if they did, doped into submission and docile as zoo animals as most of them are? There has long been a determination among millions of red-state Americans to interpret all pessimistic-realistic reporting about Iraq as the ravings of lefty Bush haters, and so the hard truths get tuned out.
And let’s not forget the mainstream American news media and its longstanding reluctance to hit hard enough and uncover enough about the Iraq situation. Why does it seem that documentary filmmakers like Deborah Scranton (The War Tapes), Michael Tucker and Petra Eppelin (The Prisoner, , Gunner Palace), Patricia Foulkrod (The Ground Truth) and Michael Moore (Farenheit 9/11) seem to tell it more plainly and persuasively than news media types in their daily/weekly reportings?
There’s an answer to this question — a fundamental answer, I believe — and it’s right there in Robert Kane Pappas‘ documentary called Orwell Rolls In His Grave.

“U.K. directors have such great faces. All those fags and Guinesses.” — Jamie Stuart commenting on the walrus-bulldog features of The Queen director Stephen Frears in his latest video mini-doc from the 44th New York Film Festival. (Some, I’m presuming, have never seen a British kitchen-sink movie or been to England, and therefore don’t know that “fags” is a slang term for cigarettes.)

“Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit. People might be sick to hear that because they love film, just like they loved magnetic tape. And I love film. I love it! It’s so beautiful! But I would die if I had to work like [I have with film] again. The sky’s the limit with digital.” — Inland Empire director David Lynch to N.Y. Times witer Dennis Lim.

I’m getting a little tired of these kiss-ass articles that journalists always write when Jack Nicholson has a film about to come out. They all say the same damn thing, which is that Jack is an exceptionallly talented wild man and a kind of Hollywood force-of-nature. Not to say Nicholson isn’t one of the very greatest — his imitation-of-a-rat bit in The Departed automatically ranks alongside his hold-the-chicken-salad– between-your-knees diner scene in Five Easy Pieces — but I’ve had it with these suck-up pieces. I’ve been reading them for 25 years.

Austrian Airlines, procedural skittishness and hamsters on a plane. A single hamster, actually. The key graph: “Austrian Airlines said the jet would remain grounded until the hamster was found ‘because it can’t take off that way for safety reasons.'”

I wangled a last-minute entry into a big hoo-hah for Warren Beatty‘s Reds (’81) at the Directors Guild of America theatre last night. It was a four-part affair — a buffet reception at 6 pm, screening at 7 pm, coffee, fruit and brownies in the lobby during intermission, and then a q & a with Beatty and interviewer Bennett Miller (the esteemed Capote director) sometime around 10:40 pm.

Capote director Bennett Miller and Reds director-producer-star Warren Beatty during Saturday night’s q & a following a screening of Reds at the DGA on Saturday, 9.30.06.

This and Wednesday’s special screening at the New York Film Festival is part of a promotion for the Paramount Home Video double-disc DVD that “streets” on 10.17. The longish, Oscar-winning epic will also open theatrically for a week in New York and Washington, D.C. on 10.6, and in L.A. (at the Arclight) on 10.13.
I hadn’t seen Reds in over 20 years (I haven’t watched the versions on VHS and laser disc due to gross over-scanning), and I was stirred and turned on all over again — it’s a very smart, wonderfully adult historical epic that delivers at a consistently intimate-intellectual level. I was also startled at how incredibly young everyone (Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Edward Herrman) looked back then.
At the same time I was wondering if today’s under-30 viewers will care very much about a film as rich and densely political as this one. The dual servings of a troubled-relationship movie (i.e., the ups and downs between Beatty’s free-thinking John Reed and Keaton’s Louise Bryant) and a very nicely layered portrait of old-school lefty idealism may seem a bit…I don’t know, musty.
And I wondered, also, if the early ’90s collapse of Russian communism, which Reed cared about and worked for with such feeling in the late teens and early 1920s, has enhanced the film by making it seem more like a tribute to lost-cause Quixotic dreams, or diminished it because it Bolshevism (which the film portrays as being a brutal and failed system almost from the get-go) came to naught at the end?

I’d forgotten what a deeply annoying piece of work Keaton’s Bryant is — insecure, snappy, under-talented, ready to argue at the drop of a hat. She has an affair with Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill and that’s…well, emotional indiscretions will happen every so often, but she walks out and all-but-terminates their relationship when Reed acknowledges he’s had a dalliance or two on the side and what-of-it?
Miller and Beatty had only met once before, but they seemed relaxed with each other. I liked Beatty’s observation that directing a movie was a bit like vomiting. “When things build up inside you eventually start to feel like vomiting,” he said. “You don’t want to vomit, but when you finally do you feel much better.” And I enjoyed a later moment when Beatty said to Miller, “You’ve acted, right?” and Miller, “What the fuck are you talking about? I haven’t acted since high school.” And also when Miller said, “You began filming the ‘Witnesses’ in the ’70s,” and Beatty replied, “The 1870s.”
Beatty mentioned during the q & a that his 12 year-old son Ben said earlier in the evening that he thought Reds was too long.
I spoke to Beatty this morning and asked him how Reed might have evolved in his thinking if he hadn’t died at such a young age, and what would he have said about the ultimate fate of Russian communism?
“I feel he wouldn’t have moved to the right [if he’d lived],” said Beatty. “And uhm…it’s very interesting. How some people moved from the far left to the far right, like Max Eastman. And you know, what happened to people during the Stalinist purges moved a lot of people to the right…and then there were a lot of people who didn’t. I believe Reed would have…well, of course, I don’t know…but I believe he would have remained true to that which he thought was workable. I also think he saw the upcoming problems with Communist dictatorship.”
Beatty said that he’d “he’d never taken DVDs seriously until now. I thought it was retrograde. I thought the picture is what it is and why excessively look back? I don’t feel that anymore because I think the nature of distribution has had a deleterious effect on certain content.

“This film, which cost $32 million to make…this film, Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia wouldn’t and couldn’t be made in today’s environment — they wouldn’t be financed. Can you imagine anyone today putting $150 million or $200 million dollars into a story of a very strange Englishman who goes to Arabia, behaves peculiarly and dies on a motorcyle…and played by an unknown?
“DVD releases and the obviously long shelf life that comes with the DVD market are the replacement for the long theatrical life that films used to have in theatres, plus it saves the audience from having to experience the mall experience, which is largely a hormonal matter these days. The home screens are getting bigger” — Beatty has a high-def system in his home — “and the multiplexes are…well, the large theatres at the Arclight are more of an exception than the rule.”
Reds will be at the Arclight on October 13th, as well as at the City Cinemas Village East in Manhattan and the E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C., on October 6th.
“I’ve never before studied the [DVD] situation, ” said Beatty, “but with theatrical you sometimes have your film opening against four or five movies on the same dates. There are 117 other DVD titles coming out on October 17th.” Before he said that I had guessed there were probably 20 other recongizable titles coming out that day.
I don’t think anyone gives a damn about the other 100.
Reds is unusual in that it will be issued in three formats on 10.17 — on regular DVD and on both Blu Ray and HD-DVD high-def.