Werner, Werner, Werner Herzog all the way at the Film Forum, starting on May 18th.

Last Monday afternoon I did a brief phoner with the great Jeff Daniels while standing outside a neighborhood luncheonette on Madison and 81st. The idea was to pay tribute to his fine supporting performance in The Lookout, Scott Frank‘s midwestern bank-job drama. Daniels plays a guy named Lewis — a lazy, bearded, low-rent, shoulder- shrugging, guitar-playing, middle-aged smartass — with a dry, succinct wit that settles in and hits the spot. He’s far and away the best thing in the film.

After last Tuesday’s performance of Blackbird at the Manhattan Theatre Club — Tuesday, 3.27.07, 9:20 pm

I’m not a huge fan of The Lookout (it has a few good things), but I really liked Daniels and I was trying to do Frank a small favor. But I waited until today to run this piece, and that makes me two days late and a dollar short. The Lookout opened and died this weekend with only $1,929,000 in the till and $2000 a print. Face it — DVDs of The Lookout will be sitting in the Walmart bargain bin four or five months from now. It’s a cold, cruel, fuck-you world out there.

Plus the interview, frankly, didn’t go all that well. Daniels was in a cranky, almost bitter mood and preoccupied by the emotional load of playing a very difficult lead role in David Harrower‘s Blackbird, a play that was in previews at the Manhattan Theatre Club. His character, Ray, is a guy in his mid ’50s who’s done time for having had a brief affair with a 12 year-old girl named Una when he was 40. The play is about the girl, now 27 (and played by Allison Pill), visiting Ray and wanting to regurgitate and hash things over in more ways than one.

Playing the role, Daniels said, is harrowing, draining, bruising. I mentioned an actor friend who used to unwind from a difficult role by getting a shiatsu massage after each performance. Not in that realm, said Daniels. Getting into Ray makes him feel like he needs the services of a therapist.

Daniels in The Lookout

Is there some way we could meet before or after the play, I asked, so I could take a quick photo? I can’t see doing that, Daniels said. Talk to the Lookout publicist. What if I stood outside with the autograph hounds after a Blackbird performance and snapped a shot when you come out…how would that be? Still don’t see it, he replied. I might not come out right away, it depends what door I leave by, there might be notes, I don’t like to do that stuff anyway.

Scott had spoken favorably to Daniels about me, which was why we were talking there and then. “I mean, I can’t even believe I’m talking to you,” he said at one point, meaning that he was whipped and disturbed and phoners like this were above and beyond the call. I wasn’t offended, but I can’t say I was charmed.

I tried some standard flattery (like mentioning how much I liked him as Chris Reeve‘s boyfriend in the 1981 B’way production of The Fifth of July), but that didn’t help much. Daniels just said “thank you” a couple of times, and the conversation seemed to stop each time he said that, and I started to feel like a kiss-ass. It was basically a dud conversation all around.

So I called the publicist for Blackbird and asked for a couple of press comps. She obliged, and I saw Daniels do the hard thing last Tuesday night. Blackbird is a 95 minute one-acter, and pretty much a straight sprint. It holds you with a hard grip. And Daniels is damn impressive. Not touching, exactly, since he’s playing a kind of monster, but it’s a steady “wow, wow, wow” thing to watch him go to town. He should end up with some great reviews when the play opens on April 10.

Four people walked out, but that’s to be expected, I guess, with a play about a pedophile and his victim. Except it’s not that cut and dried.

Directed by Joe Mantello, Blackbird is about two people who are totally destroyed by the fact that they were genuinely in love (or something close to that), and who briefly and clumsily acted on it and have been paying for this criminal sin for 15 years and counting. It’s also about dealing with guilt and trying to move on. It could also be about a serial molester who’s never moved on at all.

This is Lolita territory, of course, which means that it’s not just about an older guy having his way with a lamb in the woods (although it was certainly that in part). Ray’s crime was loathsome, of course, but it’s clear from listening to the 27 year-old Una that she had some pretty strong feelings at the time of the seduction that were nearly the equal of Ray’s, and that putting this kind of relationship in a box and keeping it there isn’t easy or simple.

The American-moviegoer problem with Aishwarya Rai, the super-beautiful, violet-eyed Indian actress, is obviously of a xenophobic and shameful nature, but a problem nonetheless. I’m sorry to sound like a guy wiping windshields at a Baton Rouge car wash, but she has a three-syllable first name that’s hard to hang onto and is somewhat difficult to pronounce.

Even after reading this Martyn Palmer article in the 3.30 London Times and practicing the pronunciation of her first name over and over, I still can’t remember it. Quick — turn your head away from the computer screen and try and say her name. See? Plus it contorts your mouth every which way to say “aysh” (pronounced like J. Carrol Naish?) and then “war” and then “ya.” I’ve got enough aggravation.

Plus she apparently said in an Asian website q & a that her favorite all-time film is Casablanca. As I’ve recently explained, it’s not flattering for a 2007 person of any accomplishment to put Casablanca at the top of his/her list. It strongly suggests that the person has a bland, schmaltzy, not-very-inquisitive movie mentality, which suggests that he/she has a bland and schmaltzy mentality in other respects.

Plus there’s a woman named “Sashay” who responded to Palmer’s article by saying that (a) the piece “conveniently left out the part about how Aishwarya married a tree during her engagement,” etc., (b) that “the few Indian movies I’ve seen her play, she is either being knocked over the head or having her hair pulled by some man, like somehow it’s romantic,” and that (c) “she’s an average pretty girl that has above-average luck.”

This may be an April Fool’s joke, but Dark Horizons‘ Garth Franklin has reported (via Reuters) that Al Pacino is “being sought” to join Robert DeNiro in the Departed sequel, based on a script by the brilliant, bulky and bearded William Monaghan.

The film (I know this part isn’t bullshit) has no choice but to focus on Mark Wahlberg‘s “Dignam” character because — spoiler for people who live in caves! — he’s the biggest name who wasn’t killed in the original.

The story revolves around big-time political corruption as the abrasive, motor-mouthed Wahlberg goes undercover to take down an oily U.S. Senator (DeNiro). The producers (Graham King, etc.) want Pacino to play Wahlberg’s new boss (i.e., succeeding the dead Martin Sheen), “a force veteran who may not be as clean as he appears.”

Alec Baldwin (“You’re one of those healthy types, right? Go fuck yourself”) is also expected to reprise his Departed role. (Why wouldn’t this be true?)

The Warner Bros. project is said to be moving forward with such haste that “it could very well be Scorsese’s next,” Franklin passes along. April Fool!….not?

No matter what happens between De Niro and Pacino in this film (i.e., sharing the same scene, confrontationally speaking), I can’t see it topping their legendary Kate Mantellini mano e mano in Michael Mann‘s Heat.

The weekend’s #1 film and the absolute toast of America is Blades of Glory, which will end up with $33,433,000 by tonight. Meet The Robinsons is second with $25,7000,000…very respectable. And Zack Snyder‘s 300 came in third with $11,235,000.

TMNT is #4 with $9,001,000, down 63% (popular!) from last weekend. Wild Hogs Roasting On A Spit came in fifth at $8,320,000. Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg ‘s not-especially-great Shooter is sixth with $7,927,000, and the indisputably bad Premonition came in seventh with $5,121,000.

The Last Mimzy, down 60%, came in eighth with $3,967,000, just a notch ahead of The Hills Have Eyes 2, also down 60%, with $3,895,000. Mike Binder‘s Reign Over Me, down 51%, came in tenth with $3,668,000. (Americans!) And Scott Frank‘s The Lookout bombed — $1,929,000, about $2000 a print.

There’s reason to half-believe that Once (Fox Searchlight, 5.18), a curiously intoxicating date movie, might catch on. A suggested copy line — “If you can’t get laid after seeing Once with someone you’re after, you can’t get laid” — is one reason. Whatever the odds of this happening (a decent box-office haul, that is), it seems that director John Carney is planning on some kind of spirited reception.

Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova in Once

A friend who spoke with him in L.A. after a recent press screening says he intends to shoot a sequel about the continuing romantic travails of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova‘s characters. Call it a kind of nod to Richard Linklater‘s decision to shoot Before Sunset as a completion of Before Sunrise.

Notable Hollywood smoothie adorned in regal 17th Century duds and put to canvas by successful Moscow painter Nikas Safranov, profiled by L.A. Times staffer Jeffrey Fleishman. Safranov, a bit of a smoothie himself. is peddling the 2007 version of children-with- great-big-eyes paintings….no?

“Another problem with killing Tony Soprano [at the end of the about-to-start final season] is how likable he is, despite his pathologically long list of misdeeds and murder. We like him, that’s why we watch the show, and doing him in more than the writers and the audience can bear. Indeed, they want to believe he can change.

“‘Arthur Miller used to say, you don’t go to the theater unless you see your- self onstage,’ says Glen O. Gabbard, a psychiatrist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who wrote The Psychology of the Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America’s Favorite Gangster Family. ‘The audience thinks that maybe, just maybe, this bad man can be transformed into a good man. That’s what [Dr. Jennifer] Melfi thinks, that’s what the audience thinks.’

“And yet, something more powerful than the demands of storytelling may dictate Tony’s final fate — Hollywood. Although Chase is ending the series because he’s mined the show for all he can on television, rumors persist about a possible Sopranos feature film. A Sopranos movie without Tony? As the Bada Bing! boys might say, not gonna happen.” — from Martin Miller‘s 4.1.07 L.A. Times piece.

Will Ferrell as an astronaut, a bullfighter, a ballerina and a referee. Four new-movie ideas proposed by Arizona Daily Star smartass Phil Villarreal that would broaden Ferrell’s following and build upon his tremendous talent.

“After Hollow Man, I felt that I should change gears, because I felt that it wasn’t a personal movie anymore. I felt like I could not express myself in a personal way and said that I have to back off from the fantasy and the science fiction or the studios or whatever. I have to do something that’s for me; I want to do something which I believe in again.” — Black Book director Paul Verhoeven speaking to Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas.

Paul Verhoeven during HE interview at Beverly Wilshire hotel two weeks ago, snapped by yours truly

A letter about comedians going serious (Sandler, Murphy, Rock, Ferrell) by L.A. Times reader named Nicholas Silver was published in today’s edition. I don’t agree with everything he says (particularly a remark about Adam Sandler seeming shallow in Reign Over Me), but he says it fairly well:

“You want to know what we really learn when comics like Adam Sandler and Chris Rock make so-called serious movies? We learn how very shallow they are and, by extension, how very debased we are as Americans for paying so much attention to them.

“Listen, anybody in a moment of quietude can seem to be thinking. Take Eddie Murphy: apparently he was great in Dreamgirls, but talent and charm have never been an issue with him. The question is, where’s his head at? I’ll tell you where: Norbit.

“Will Ferrell is funny and sweet, but he’s stuck in television. Every idea he gets is based on perceptions gleaned from watching TV. Nearly all American comedians post-Saturday Night Live have been siophomoric, developmentally stunted and crude. The bar has definitely been lowered.

“At least when watching a picure by Woody Allen, America’s greatest living comedian, you know you’re watching a man who’s constantly running interference between bona fide seriousness and an irrepressible gift for cracking wise.”

I’ve recently read Peter Buchman‘s scripts of The Argentine and Guerilla (both dated 10.4.06), the two-part Che Guevara saga that Steven Soderbergh will begin filming sometime in May with Benicio del Toro in the title role, and they’re awfully damn good — a pair of lean, gritty, you-are-there battle sagas, one about success and the other about failure. Together they comprise a strong and properly ambiguous whole.

Benicio del Toro as Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Obviously political and terse and rugged, the two scripts are about how living outside the law and fighting a violent revolution feels and smells and chafes on a verite, chapter-by-chapter basis. They’re about sweat and guns and hunger and toughing it out…friendships, betrayals, exhaustion, shoot-outs and trudging through the jungle with a bad case of asthma. What it was, how it happened…the straight dope and no overt “drama.”

If Soderbergh does right by what’s on the page, The Argentine and Guerilla (which Focus Features will open within weeks of each other in 2008) will have, at the very least, a Traffic-like impact. The films will almost certainly be Oscar contenders, and you have to figure that del Toro, playing a complex, conflicted hero who ends up dead (i.e. executed in a rural schoolhouse by a drunken Bolivian soldier), will be up for Best Actor. The Guevara role is too well written (nothing but choice, down- to-it dialogue from start to finish) and del Toro is too talented an actor — it can’t not happen.

In fact, I can easily imagine critics comparing Soderbergh’s two-part saga to Coppola’s The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II — not necessarily in terms of quality or emotional-impact issues but because they convey two distinct and disparate sides of Guevara’s saga, the up and the down, in the same way that Coppola’s films are about the youthful ascent and increasingly malignant, middle- aged descent of Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone.

The Argentine is about Fidel Castro and Guevara’s forces leading their ragtag anti-Batista army from their arrival on Cuban shores in 1956 until their victory in late ’58. Guerilla is about Guevara’s failed attempt to spark a revolution in Bolivia in 1967. The former is about struggle, strength and triumph, and Guerilla is its opposite number — the same fight minus the wind in the sails.

Reading them took me back to a 3.19.07 “Page Six” item that preemptively attacked the Soderbergh venture, which I read as a case of knee-jerk hostility due to the fact that the N.Y. Post, which publishes the column, is a right-wing paper that sometimes lets its agenda seep into the writing.

The item vented concerns shared by right-wing anti-Castro Cubans (i.e., the Andy Garcia brigade) that the two films will portray the famed revolutionary in glowing heroic terms without focusing on his brutal, darkly dogmatic side that manifested when Guevara was put in charge of Havana’s La Cabana fortress and oversaw the trial and execution of 600 political prisoners.

Steven Soderbergh; Benicio del Toro-as-Che charicature; Che Guevara

“To witness such butchery is a trauma that will accompany me to my grave,” Jose Vilasuso, a lawyer who worked under Guevara, is quoted as saying. “The walls of that medieval castle received the echoes of the rhythmic footstep of the squad, the clicking of the rifles, the sorry howling of the dying, the macabre silence.”

In this respect the Cuban righties are not that wrong. The Argentine contains no La Cabana depictions — nothing about what happened in the wake of Castro and Guevara”s triumph, and no reflections at all about the kind of country Cuba became under Castro since then. Guerilla alludes to Guevara’s frustration with being a top-level Cuban comandante, but no specifics are offered. (Oddly, the script doesn’t have any scenes of Guevara visiting New York City in December 1964, which Soderbergh filmed last year.)

And Guevara is clearly portrayed in a flattering light. As far as these screenplays represent what the films will ultimately be (the rule-of-thumb being that scripts are only blueprints), Buchman’s Guevara is an imperfect but admirable fellow — com- plex and dogged, tenacious but plagued by asthma, brave and strong but capable of error, rigid and dogmatic and, in Guerilla, oblivious to the basic shape of things, and yet basically decent and humane and certainly courageous to the last.

And yet the scripts don’t feel like a buff-and-polish job. (Not to me anyway.) Guevara is shown as a right guy, but they don’t attempt to portray a revolution or the Cuban culture or anything sweeping about the wisdom or ultimate goodness of Latin American socialism. They’re about an intelligent, willful, resourceful hombre and his allies slugging it out in a pair of tough battles. No heartfelt speeches, no playing to the galleries — just the rough-and-tumble.

Soderbergh will shoot the films in tandem, using mostly Spanish dialogue. Javier Bardem (as Castro?), Franka Potente, Benjamin Bratt and Benjamin Benite- zare were reported by Variety last October to be “in talks to play key roles.”

The producer is Laura Bickford, who began working on the project with Del Toro and Soderbergh five or six (seven?) years ago, in the wake of their joint Traffic collaboration. The lead financier is the Paris-based Wild Bunch, which “also hung in through twists and turns that included Terrence Malick committing to direct and then dropping out to make The New World.”