Gabriel Range‘s Death of a President, which screens tonight in Toronto, “does not take the assassination of [George] Bush as the premise for entertainment,” the 32 year-old director tells Toronto Star critic Peter Howell. “It’s the starting point for what I hope are some quite serious reflections on these extraordinary times we live in.” Here’s the piece, which apparently is the first significant interview that Range has given about the film.

In another N.Y. Times Sunday piece, James Ulmer tells the tale of David Geffen ‘s long-standing reluctance to have Dreamgirls made into a feature, and how director Bill Condon and producer Larry Mark managed to change his mind. Other stories are passed along in the piece, but this is the most interesting.

N.Y. Times staffer David Halbfinger profiles All The Kings’ Men director-writer Steve Zallian, apparently without his having seen the finished film. He writes that ATKM “is already being talked about as an Oscar contender,” but he qualifies this by mentioning that Robert Rossen‘s original 1949 version, starring Broderick Crawford, won the Best Picture Oscar “and no remake has ever matched that feat, Academy researchers say.”

Steve Zallian, Sean Penn

This seems to me like a typical N.Y. Times evasion. Halbfinger has surely dug around and been told what many, many people are saying about this film, which is that it’s problematic on various levels (sluggish, creaky, talky) and will almost certainly encounter limited enthusiasm from the public, but he chooses instead to mention a statistic that implies that Oscar glory may be elusive.
There were expectations that Zaillian’s film would open at the end of ’05, but “when test screenings revealed that audiences were confused about the basic relationships among the main characters, Columbia Pictures agreed to delay the opening, and Mr. Zaillian went back to work.” Eight months later Zallian “has emerged from almost a year of near-solitary confinement in an editing room to pronounce All the King’s Men a finished product. His producers are hoping it will prove his masterpiece.”
All the King’s Men stars Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Patricia Clarkson, Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Hopkins. It’ll open nationwide on 9.22 following some special screenings in New Orleans.
I tried to see it at 5:30 pm yesterday afternoon at the Varsity, but I lost heart when an announcement was made that there were almost no seats available (I was standing near the end of a long line) so I went to three parties in succession and came back for the 10:30 pm screening. Unfortunately, the champagne at the parties on top of the usual late-night fatigue factor messed with my concentration.
I definitely saw portions of ATKM — somewhere between half and three-fifths, I’d say. I know that the parts I was awake for (and I was very alert and attuned during my waking moments) felt enervated and boring. I know that the photography has a kind of drained sepia quality, and that a lot of the scenes are shrouded in dark- ness and flavored with lots and lots of southern-fried, neo-Faulknerian dialogue.
Clarkson has at least one great line: “The world is full of sluts on skates.”
I’ll have to take another shot at seeing ATKM when I get back Los Angeles, I guess. Or on DVD four or five months from now.

Heartening news about Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn being acquired by MGM, given all the financial and post-production mucky-muck this project has been coping with.

Festival fatigue and misdirected brain cells led to my conveying an “understanding” a day or two ago that Sony Classics was looking at giving The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck‘s masterful film about spying and intimacy in East Germany in the mid ’80s, a one-week qualifying run in New York and L.A. before opening it in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. Duhhhh….one doesn’t need to open a foreign-made film in the States to be considered for Best Foreign Film — it simply has to be submitted by the country of origin (which in this case is Germany) following a theatrical run there in ’06.
Sony Classics co-chief Michael Barker told me last night he wants Others to open free and clear of the dominance of the big Oscar-worthy December films. “I don’t want it to be anyone’s second choice,” he said. “This is a first-choice movie and I know the word-of-mouth will carry it through once it opens, which is why we’re thinking February. ”
As I wrote with some confidence two days ago, Others, is all but guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/archives/2006/09/triumph_of_othe_1.php

Eight months after debuting at Sundance ’06 and being pretty much praised to the heavens, Christopher Quinn and Tommy Walker‘s God Grew Tired Of Us has finally landed a distribution deal.
National Geographic Films, which “co-presented” March of the Penguins, is pooling forces with Newmarket Films on a plan to open it “early next year”, according to this story by Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte.
NGF “is providing funds to complete the film,” she reports. (What does that mean? Pay off the catering bill? It looked completed to me when I saw it eight months ago.) Nicole Kidman is narrating the doc. Brad Pitt exec produced; Catherine Keener and Dermot Mulroney co-produced.
“We’re a big media company with a lot of different moving parts,” NGF president Adam Leipzig told LaPorte.
Leipzig and his homies saw God at Sundance also (probably the same screening I attended). “We were blown away,” he tells LePorte. “We walked out of the theater and found the agents at CAA who were representing the movie, and said, ‘We have to be involved in this movie.’ It was one of those responses that was instantaneous and completely clear to us.”
And yet it took eight months to put a deal together. Lots of deal points to smooth out, right? Everybody’s gotta get their cut, lotsa lawyers involved. Anyway, fast work!
Will the film at least open sufficiently for it to compete for the Best Doc Oscar? It should.
God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of three young Sudanese guys — John, Daniel, and Panther — all of them refugees from their country’s ongoing, utterly devastating civil war, and members of a massive army known as the “lost boys of Sudan”. The film is about their escape to America to start new lives only to encounter profound longings for home and family, and no small measure of guilt.
The HE piece I wrote about the film last January is called “Lonely Deliverance” — you’ll have to scroll down some.

A very nicely rendered trailer for Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). There’s some kind of deal in place by which www.miltary.com is the only website currently showing it….cool.

The Venice Film Festival jury has given the Golden Lion to Jia Zhangke‘s Still Life — hah! — and not Stephen Frears ‘ The Queen or Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby . The latter two were named as the most likely Golden Lion winners in a recent Reuters story by Mike Collett-White and Silvia Aloisi…wrong! The Silver Lion for Best Director went to director Alain Resnais for Private Fears in Public Places , and a Silver Lion Revelation trophy went to Emanuele Crialese for Nuovomondo — Golden Door.

I read an earlybird “review” two or three months ago that said Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10) was a little too mild and unassertive for its own good. The writer was somewhat persuasive because ever since I’ve been referring to this film in my column jottings as “Ridley Lite.”
Well, back up on that. A Good Year, which had its first press screening this morning at 9 ayem, is a lightweight film, all right, and, okay, more than a little formulaic from the get-go…but it goes down so easily and smartly, and after the first 35 or 40 minutes or so the mood of it begins to sink in like expensive French skin cream, and the result is a kind of airy, nectary enchantment that is relatively rare in mainstream cinema these days.
And I swear on my kids that Russell Crowe, the fuming, flying-phone-man of legend, is 50% of the cause of all this sweet, mellow charm. The other 50% contributor is Scott, of course. And let’s give some credit, also, to the late Harry Nilsson, whose songs turn up on the soundtrack three times. (“Gotta Get Up”, one my favorites, is one of them.)
And let’s offer a toast, also, to the cinematography, the French sun, the vineyards, the aroma, the taste of it, the beautiful women…the whole succulent package. This, to me, is first-class escapism.
The Good Year press conference is about to begin (I’m typing this from the press room at teh Sutton Place hotel) so I’ll continue this piece later on this afternoon ….probably.

Peter O’Toole‘s performance as an aging, spirited, rogue-ishly randy actor in Roger Michell‘s Venus (Miramax, 12.15) hasn’t been overhyped — I saw the film late yesterday afternoon and it’s certainly one of his very best. But it has been, I think, under-described. It’s a performance of profound tenderness and vulnerabilty …artful frailty, if you will.

O’Toole is 74 and is playing a man in his early to mid ’80s, and bravely, it seemed to me. He makes you chuckle at times, and of course is charming to the last, but it’s not an audience-pleasing “performance” as much as a piece of naked exposure about what it is to be at death’s door and stll wanting to be alive in every way you can.
It’s a beautiful job, and it makes me all the more sad that O’Toole won’t be coming to Toronto after all. It was announced yesterday that he’s too sick to travel from Britain. Something about “intestinal problems, which he’s had before,” according an a story in Tom O’Neill‘s column.