The L.A. Times‘ Deborah Netburn with a recent sum-up of Gibson blogger riffs.

This Gibson-meltdown story from the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell reads like something that should have run Monday instead of today….sorry, but news cycles are running almost hourly these days. That said, there’s a decent pull-quote from yours truly: “As Woody Allen might put it, Mel is toast with those of the Hebrew persuasion.” But maybe there’s a chance with Mel having asked to meet and sit down with Jewish leaders, etc. Doubtful but maybe.

There’s a kind of nascent rumble on Talledega Nights (Columbia, 8.4), which has its all-media showing in Westwood this evening: Will Ferrell‘s dumb race-car driver schtick is whatever it is (funny, very funny, amusing, vaguely exasperating), but the supporting stand-out seems to be Sascha Baron Cohen, whose comedic Borat (subtitled “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”) played in Cannes last May and is opening on 11.3 via 20th Century Fox.

“On many levels, Talladega Nights is reminiscent of Anchorman,” says Screen Daily‘s Tim Grierson. “Both films were directed by Adam McKay, both were written by McKay and Ferrell, and both feature Ferrell playing a pompous big shot cut down to size who ultimately finds redemption. If those comparisons aren’t enough, each project lovingly satirises its milieu while relying on over-the-top characterizations and hit-and-miss improvised humor for its laughs.”
And yet there are “many good comic moments early on,” he says, which is good because they “help to compensate for a sluggish second half.”
And it’s Baron Cohen, playing an effete French snob, “who gives the film acceleration,” Grierson writes. “As a testament to Baron Cohen’s importance to Talladega Nights, the film’s second-half dip can be partly blamed on his disappearance from the plot as Ricky withdraws from the limelight to regain his confidence before the big third-act race.”

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson and RiskyBiz blogger once again runs a Mel Gibson statement ahead of everyone else. Gibson has stopped shot of agreeing to be lashed by rabbis in penance for his anti-Semitic remarks last weekend, as I half-seriously suggested he do yesterday, but he is saying, humbly, that he wants to sit down with Jewish community leaders and get his head straight.
“I’m not just asking for forgiveness,” his new statement reads. “I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.” Earlier in the statement he says, “Please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith.”
“I have begun an ongoing program of recovery and what I am now realizing is that I cannot do it alone. I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display, and I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery. Again, I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable. But I pray that that door is not forever closed.
“This is not about a film. Nor is it about artistic license. This is about real life and recognizing the consequences hurtful words can have. It’s about existing in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.” In Malibu, he surely means, as well as in northern Israel, southern Lebanon, Iraq and other places of agony in the Middle East.

“World Trade Center yields lovely and touching moments but proves a slow-going, arduous movie experience, if more uplifting than Universal’s earlier test of that historic day’s box office potential, United 93 ,” says Variety‘s Brian Lowryin his 7.31 review .
“Stone’s film bears some thematic resemblance to Alive , Frank Marshall‘s 1993 chronicle of a plane crash in the Andes. Both offer a tribute to human endurance under unimaginable conditions, but watching young guys huddle together trying not to freeze to death or two cops pinned under tons of debris isn’t exactly a cinematic thrill ride. Long stretches are shot in tight close-up on John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage ) and more personable Will Jimeno (Michael Pena) lying immersed in gray muck, seeking to stay alive.
“While both actors deliver strong performances, they are confined by the narrative figuratively as well as literally, spurring a degree of impatience for the climax. Yet the film ultimately present[s] an inspiring vision of can-do American spirit amid adversity, exemplified by [Connecticut rescuer Dave] Karnes and the rescue workers (played by, among others, Stephen Dorff and Frank Whaley) risking life and limb to assist complete strangers.”

In his revivings of the Rambo and Rocky franchises, Sylvester Stallone is taking a last desperate leap at marginal fame, semi-relevance and a revenue surge. It’s a tough place to be in but we all have to keep knocking.

I wish Stallone had kept trying to play Copland-type character roles, but I guess he wasn’t offered much in this vein after Copland came out, probably because people felt he wasn’t that terrific in it.

I got to know Stallone slightly as a result of working for a couple of hotshot publicists (Bobby Zarem, Dick Delson) who represented Sly during the big-dick Rambo II era in ’85 and ’86.

I then interviewed him in May 1992 during the Cliffhanger shoot in Cortina, Italy, for a piece that eventually ran in the New York Times. So I can say with a certain authority that when he’s in the right mood, Stallone is a likable, very funny and witty guy. He has a perverse sense of humor. But this never really came out in his films.

Every now and then Stallone wasn’t in the mood to be likable and witty, and then it was tippy–toe time. Sometimes his eyes would resemble a dead shark’s.

I was leaving his Pacific Palisades home once and making light chatter as a kind of exit strategy while Delson and Zarem were doing something in the other room. I noticed a familiar painting on the wall near the front door and said to him, “Francis Bacon…excellent taste!”

A friendly reply might have been “yeah, good old Francis” or “you’re a fan too, huh?” But he was in one of his moods or something. Stallone looked at me like he was Louis Lepke and I was a guy behind on my payments, and said, “You got it.”

He meant “yeah, it’s Bacon” and not “yeah, I have excellent taste”, but it was still kind of a flatline thing to say.

Superman Returns was in 2005 theatres last weekend, or about 225 more theatres than The Devil Wears Prada was playing in, or about 1778. And yet Prada made more money, earning $4,774,000 with a $2600 average. Superman Returns made $3,570,000 with a $1700 average.

9/11 Comfort Blanket

Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) is a well made, emotionally satisfying rescue movie. It happens to be about a couple of Port Authority cops (played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) who got buried in the rubble of 9/11, but it could be about any two family men who nearly buy it while doing a tough job on a bad day.
It’s pretty much as screenwiter Andrea Berloff described it three or four months ago — a boy-down-the-well movie only darker and with blood and bruises and crushed bones, and times two. Not the most striking or labrynthian or emotionally complex film you’ve ever seen, but a good one.

Nicolas Cage as John McLoughlin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center

It’s spookier and less talky and certainly more traumatic than Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, but it’s basically the same thing. Brave guys get caught in it, seem fucked, are fucked, families think they’re fucked, a nervy guy with smarts and ingenuity is determined to save them, he finds a way, brave guys aren’t fucked after all and they’re home free and out. Otherwise there are loads of differences between Stone’s and Howard’s film, and one that stands out in particular: Apollo 13 has a more interesting story and a much stronger second act.
World Trade Center is about two guys trapped in a dark hole full of rocks and dirt and twisted metal, and the audience definitely shares their plight in the middle section. A feeling of being enveloped by despair and then hopelessness, a sensation of oxygen depletion, of being trapped with life slipping away. If this weren’t a grim-up-and-pay-attention 9/11 movie and was just an original script, agency readers would be writing the same thing all over town: “Great beginning, good ending…and a second act that literally lies there.”
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Stone has directed World Trade Center like a champ and made it into something sharper and more shaded than what it probably was on the page. It could have been television — the bones are straight out of a made-for-TV movie manual — but it’s not. Nor is it the Second Coming. But because of the 9/11 baggage factor it’s being called a knockout and a cathartic wowser by both Time and Newsweek this week. And it’s not. Or at least, it didn’t feel that way to me.
By my standards World Trade Center is a solid 7.8. Not quite an 8, but absolutely nothing for anyone on the team not to be proud of, or at least very content with. I have no significant beefs with this film. I’d be surprised if anyone does. It’s not the kind of movie that will tick anyone off. It’s too decent and restrained and respectful and sharply rendered. But in a ground-rule-double sort of way.

Oliver Stone on Playa del Rey set of World Trade Center

It’s very well acted up and down (Nicolas Cage, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Stephen Dorff are the best of a uniformly pro-level cast). The sense of 9/11 realism is bracing all the way through, and the visual effects are top-notch, by which I mean nearly invisible. (There’s an overhead shot of the smoldering World Trade Center site on Tuesday, 9.12, that’s one of the best non-fake-looking CG shots I’ve ever seen.) I really have to hand it again to Stone for doing an excellent job of “getting out of the way” and just directing it like a no-nonsense pro — as if the spirit of Anthony Mann swirled up from the grave and took over.
I think it’s fine that the patriotic right-wing community has been shown World Trade Center in advance screenings and that they’re digging it and all. I can see why. It has no politics, no Hollywood leftie attitude — it’s just a straight drama about a lot of good people pulling together to save a couple of guys from the jaws of death. A movie about caring, family, duty, perseverance.
Everybody knows Cage plays Port Authority cop John McLoughlin and Pena plays Will Jimeno, right? Two real-life guys who had to go through dozens of operations to recover from their 9/11 injuries, and who’ve been helping to promote the film that last several weeks.
The Newsweek story, written by critic David Ansen, says that World Trade Center “celebrates the ties that bind us, the bonds that keep us going, the goodness that stands as a rebuke to the horror of that day. Perhaps, in the future, the times will call for more challenging, or polemical, or subversive visions. Right now, it feels like the 9/11 movie we need.”
Not very challenging or polemical, and yet Newsweek has World Trade Center on the cover. It sounds like the editors might have been the ones doing cartwheels in the lobby rather than Ansen. Boil the snow out and all he’s saying is that WTC is classy emotional therapy.

Michael Shannon as Dave Karnes

I have one very small quibble with World Trade Center and two mid-sized ones. A tinkling of piano keys at the wrong moment near the beginning, and two small but significant omissions in the portrayal of Dave Karnes, the ex-Marine who drove in from Connecticut on the afternoon of 9/11 and made it through the police barriers and onto the WTC site by dinner hour.
It was Karnes (portrayed by Michael Shannon) who discovered McLoughlin and Jimeno and brought the rescue teams to their aid. Everybody had quit looking that night for fear of other buildings collapsing. If Karnes hadn’t put on his Marine uniform and gotten himself a Marine haircut at a Stamford barbershop and driven down to Manhattan and all, it’s quite possible McLoughlin and Jimeno might not have survived. Shannon portrays him as a bit of a religious weirdo, a bit of a nut. But a good kind of nut in a situation like 9/11 — a guy who laser-beams right into what needs to be done, and then does it.
Curiously, Stone decided to omit a character detail that I find really interesting. Karnes drove into Manhattan in a recently purchased Porsche 911 convertible, and at times, according to a 9.02 Slate story by Rebeca Liss, at speeds of 120 mph.
That’s a fascinating trait for a 9/11 savior — tear-assing down the Connecticut Turn- plike and the Henry Hudson Parkway in a muscle car with the top down, and stop- ping at a McDonald’s along the way.
Why didn’t Stone show this? My theory is that he wanted Karnes to appear selfless and monk-like — a slightly bent military saint. And I think he knew this impression wouldn’t fly with audiences if he had Karnes driving a Porsche 911 because a lot of people think that guys who drive Porsches are dickheads. But I had read about Karnes and his Porsche two or three years ago and was waiting for that shot. I felt that Stone sold Karnes and his audience short by trying to simplify him into a ex-Marine who resembled Karnes in a lot of ways but not entirely.

There’s another thing that happened between Karnes and the men he saved that Stone chose not to dramatize. It would have been touching. Liss describes it thusly:
“Karnes left the site that night when Jimeno was rescued and went with him to the hospital. While doctors treated the injured cop, Karnes grabbed a few hours sleep on an empty bed in the hospital psychiatric ward. While he slept, the hospital cleaned and pressed his uniform.”
The little thing I didn’t like is a bit at the very beginning when Cage is dressing and getting ready to drive to work from his home in New Jersey. The movie has been running for maybe four or five minutes as he walks down a hallway and opens a door and looks into the bedrooms of his sleeping children. And Stone ruins the moment by putting a “sensitive” little piano riff on the soundtrack. Sensitive as in “awww, he loves his children” and “boy, the quiet little moments in life are what make it all worth it, you know?”
Without the tinkling piano it would have been a nice honest little moment — with the tinkling piano it’s Hollywood bullshit. It’s okay to use tinkling piano riffs to emphasize emotion but only after the film has been running for 15 or 20 minutes, by which time you’ve built up your characters and plot elements a little bit.
There’s a perfect little piano tinkle when Gloria Stuart’s “old Rose” first looks at Jack Dawson’s old drawing of her naked younger self in Titanic, but because we’ve gotten to know a bit about her character and who she is, and because we don’t exactly know what the piano tinkle means…but we can tell it means something. And so it gets us on some level.

Michael Pena as Jim Jimeno

I seem to have lost my World Trade Center thread here….
At least I haven’t oversold the thing. If you go and feel this afterwards, blame Ansen and Time‘s Richard Schickel.
Addendum: I happened to meet Mcloughlin’s real-life son on the Paramount lot after seeing World Trade Center a couple of weeks ago. He was with a couple of friends in a small white car. We shook hands and talked about the film a bit. I asked if his dad has been in touch with Karnes since 9.11 and I think he said “once.” I asked why Cage portrayed his dad as walking in an awkward stumpy fashion at the end of the film, and he said it’s because the bones in his dad’s feet were totally crushed and aren’t flexible and that he basically “walks around like Frankenstein.”

Mel Gibson has checked into a rehab facility for his alcohol problem, as reported by the Star‘s Lee Hannon and confirmed by his publicist Alan Neirob. However, a neighbor quoted in the story thinks Gibson has gone into the wrong rehab facility. If you want to read about this, here you go.

A South Park Mel Gibson segment via UTube, obviously made with The Passion of the Christ in mind. Moderately funny (okay, more than moderately), but Matt and Trey need to make a new “sugar tits and bad Jews” version.

That rumor about Heath Ledger being cast as the Joker in the next Batman movie has turned out to be true. A Warner Bros. publicist told me ten minutes ago the next Batman flick for Warner Bros. will be called The Dark Knight, and that Chris Nolan will again direct, and that Ledger will indeed play the infamous cackling twisted baddie who has it in for Batman, etc. Big payday for Heath, obviously — doing it for his kid, and because he always seems to enjoy going weird and quirky. An official release will be sent out tomorrow. The publicist told me to call her for more details but she didn’t include her extension or her cell and…forget it. I’ll post the rest tomorrow.

Here’s a fairly good review of Apocalypse Now: The Complete Triple Dip, the DVD containing both the original theatrical and the Redux versions of Francis Coppola‘s 1979 classic. I’m kidding about the DVD’s subtitle — it’s actually called The Complete Dossier.

The most exciting extra for a lot of people will be a full 17-minute reading of T.S. Eliot‘s “The Hollow Men” by Marlon Brando. There are also 13 deleted scenes, including one called “Monkey Sampan” One, deemed “a notoriously hard-to-find relic from the film√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s original construction” plus 12 additional sequences are not available in either the original or Redux versions
Apocalypse Now was shot in 70mm and was initially shown in the correct widescreen 70mm aspect ratio of 2.21 to 1. This new DVD has Apocalypse trimmed down to 2.35 to 1, which sounds like they’ve chopped off the tops and bottoms slightly. I saw it in 70mm at the Ziegeld 27 years ago and I know they showed it at 2.21 to 1 during that engagement and they wouldn’t have done this if it hadn’t been cool with Francis and the powers-that-be, so anyone who says a 2.35 to 1 presentation is somehow better or more complete is wrong. I’m always disagreeing with people who think it’s better to show a film with the tops and bottoms chopped off. Give it air, I always say. Give the actors a little headroom.
To be a really complete Apocalypse dossier, of course, George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr‘s Heart of Darkness — a brilliant documentary about the tortured making of the film — should have been included, and of course it hasn’t been