After he suffered a bout of insomnia last Saturdaywhile staying at London’s Ritz Hotel, Al Pacino reportedly “came down to the lobby at 2 am and instead of doing a jennifer Lopez or whatever and complaining and making all kinds of demands about having his room changed, he said he wanted to get to know the people who worked at such a great place” — or so it says in this Mirror story. Pacino, I’ve been told, is in London working on a Looking for Richard-like documentary called Salomaybe, about Oscar Wilde and his play “Salome”. Because of this project his emotonal pores are more open than usual. He’s in one of his gregarious-Al, get-down-with-the-folks, receptive-to-the-beauty-and-poetry-of-life modes. Nobody in the world is a sweetheart 24-7.

“Given all the publicity surrounding Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen may now be too well known, some say, to fool enough people into taking Bruno — his forthcoming Universal project, which he’ll star in and write and probably produce — as seriously as is required to make the film work,” according to a piece by L.A. Times writer Lorenza Munoz about Universal execs possibly feeling “buyer’s remorse” about agreeing to fund and distribute Cohen’s next comedy, about a gay guy named Bruno.

Come to think of it, Munoz’s sources may have a point. Obviously a lot more people are going to recognize Cohen when he tries to shoot docu-style footage in gay bars or wherever. The world is on to him. “He’s going to have a real tough time making Bruno and so is Universal,” predicted Edward D. Fagan, a New York attorney who’s representing two Romanians who are suing Cohen, 20th Century Fox and several others connected with Boratfor alleged civil rights violations. ‘The cat’s out of the bag,’ he said.”

I could do a mass e-mailing of the New York film publicist community, but I might as well use this space to announce that Hollywood Elsewhere will be trolling the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn starting this Friday and throughout the rest of the month. Looking very much forward to (i.e., close to panting for) that very specific New York action and energy, along with the blessed wearing of scarves and overcoats.

I’ve agreed to a 12.1 review embargo on The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.15) but this Riskybiz item submitted by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Sheigh Crabtree about director Steven Soderbergh getting a “Bronx cheer” following a DGA New York screening two nights ago (i.e., Saturday) leaves an impression that this 1940s-era black-and-white drama is some kind of marginal embarassment and/or unintended hoot. (Crabtree reports that one guy in the audience went “puhleeze” and that a geezer asked Soderbergh during the q & a if he’d intended “to do a spoof or a parody of The Third Man?”) And it’s not.
I’ve seen German twice in Los Angeles, both times with seasoned industry types, and nobody’s gone into a dismissive neg-head chortle about it. Not in my pres- ence, at least. The reactions have been…well, okay, admittedly muted here and there but always respectful. No one I spoke to was deriding it or grumbling on their way out to the parking lot.
Set in the post-World War II rubble of Berlin, The Good German is a very period- esque, Third Man-ish experience, but it’s not spoofy in the slightest. It’s not Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and it’s not Young Frankenstein and anything like that. Except for the final scene it’s relatively earnest (as far as a film like this can be) and straight and about itself. It’s partly a tribute piece — a recreation of a military whodunit drama as it might have actually looked and moved if, say, Michael Curtiz had directed it in 1946 — and partly a Phillip Marlowe detetective story in uniform.
That’s all I’m saying for now. I just felt that a defense was necessary.

Producer Saul Zaentz has been quoted by a German fantasy-film website called Ebenwald that Peter Jackson will direct The Hobbit for the Saul Zaentz Company. (I tried finding a mention of Saul Zaentz on the Ebenwald site, but nothing turned up.) Zaentz appparently acquired the rights to one or more works by Rings writer J.R.R. Tolkien in the mid ’70s. The Hobbit “will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson,” Zaentz has apparently said. “Next year The Hobbit rights will fall back to my company. I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that he will make the best deal with us. And he is fed up with the studios: to get his profit share on the Rings trilogy he had to sue New Line. With us, in contrast, he knows that he will be paid fairly and artistically supported without reservation.”

A couple of months ago I mentioned the snob syndrome among the elite big-city film writers. I said “there’s something vaguely arid and ingrown about this culture…a certain tendency to sidestep films with what an elitist would describe as plebian emotionalism.” And now here’s Time‘s Richard Corliss elaborating on this aversion as a prelude to a thumbs-up review of Darren Aronfosky‘s The Fountain.
“Movies critics can’t agree on much, but there’s one assumption most of them hold deeply without ever discussing it. It’s that a film that says life is crap is automa- tically deeper, better, richer, truer than one that says life can be beautiful.
“That’s a 180 from the prevailing notion in classic Hollywood, where optimism was the cardinal belief, at least on-screen. (It was in the front office that the knives came out.) Most movies, whatever their genre, were romances; they aimed for tears and ended with a kiss. But to serious critics then, and to the mass audience now, sentiment is suspect. Feeling is mushy, girly — for fools. To be soft- hearted is to be soft-headed.
“So critics will see a horror film with extreme violence, or (less frequently) an erotic film with extreme sex, and accept these as genre conventions, whether or not they’re grossed out or aroused. But a movie that tries to make them feel is some- how pandering to their basest or noblest emotions and, as they see it, deserves a spanking from any smart reviewer. These days, nothing is as easy to deride as dead-serious romance.”

“Animation came in for a number of reasons. There were certain moments that weren’t on film, especially the trial. We needed a way to show what was happening in the courtroom. We could have done it in renactments, or though talking heads, or we could have had courtroom drawings panned and scanned.

“But I thought animation would have served as commentary on the trial; Jerry Rubin called it a `cartoon show,’ and when I read that quote, the bells went off.” — Director Brett Morgen talking to John Anderson in the N.Y. Times about his long-in-preparation, partially animated documentary Chicago 10, which will open the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

Kevin Smith vs. Orlando Sentinel film critic Roger Moore — good rantin’, good readin’.

A well-reported piece by the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Ruthe Stein about odd bookings of specialty films. Basically about the “impact of a 7.8 earthquake” caused by the recent opening of the Century Centre plex, the overpowering of the indie-oriented Landmark chain, various trickle-down effects, etc.
“Devoted Bay Area moviegoers may feel like Alice Through the Looking Glass when they scan theater listings to locate the latest must-see specialty film [since] nothing seems to be playing where logic would dictate it should anymore,” Stein writes.
“Another shakeup is certain to occur when Sundance Cinemas completes renovations expected next spring on the Kabuki, formerly owned by AMC, and pursues the same independent fare the competition is vying for.”

No one seems willing to spit out the truth about Superman II — the Richard Donner Cut (Warner Home Video, 11.28), which is that it’s a so-so, patience- straining thing to sit through…at best.

The ’81 theatrical version was shaped by the fact that Donner, who had directed the original Superman and a good portion of part II, was fired by producer Ilya Salkind and replaced by Richard Lester. So it’s theoretically agreeable that the film Donner wanted to make has been slapped into some kind of form. Original visions should always be respected, and the effort that went into this new DVD deserves a salute.

The problem is that Superman II was never that great a film to begin with, and now it feels like a lesser thing in nearly every respect. And the technical fact is that the Donner version feels only a step or two up from a YouTube re-edit.

Revised 5-day holiday estimates based on Saturday numbers: Happy Feet will end up with $52,167,000, second-place Casino Royale with with $44,099,000 and Deja Vu (not doing quite as poorly as estimated a couple of days ago) with $29 million .

“He’s a murderer and an artist, he’s like a child and also like an old man, and he’s like an animal, but there’s something ethereal about him,” says Ben Whishaw in describing Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the character he portrays in Tom Tykwer‘s Perfume (Paramount, 12.27), in a chat with N.Y. Times writer Coelli Carr. “Because he hardly ever says anything, you start to read his behavior and look at those tiny things — posture, gait or the expression in the eyes — that are usually secondary to words.”
It is one thing to find fascination with Grenouille in the original Patrick Susskind novel, drawn in (as I was) by the well-sculpted prose and the fascinating evocations of aromatic transporation. It is another thing entirely to want to pay to see a movie about same and swim around in the head of a nearly non-verbal murdering creep for two hours. In talking with people who had seen the film, Whishaw found that “some had enormous sympathy for Grenouille, while others were repelled. ‘I like the fact that the film allows for those two very different responses,’ he said.”