In the third graph of this profile of Rufus Sewell by N.Y. Times writer Sarah Lyall, the 38 year-old actor is described by Neil Burger, the director-writer of The Illusionist, as “more of a leading man” than a character actor who could villains or oddballs. Only in softball profiles like this do you find such delusion. Sewell isn’t a leading man type in the slightest. He never has been. He’s vaguely villainous, obsessive, creepy, churned-up- inside, glaring. There’s a reason — hello? — he’s played almost nothing but villains these last few years. Sewell is an intense and accomplished actor, yes, and I’d love to see him in “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, the Tom Stoppard play that’s currently performing in London, but…

If you haven’t read my early-bird piece about Mike Binder‘s Reign O’er Me, please do so now. It’ll prepare you more fully for the disappointing but not altogether surprising news that Reign won’t be opening on 12.1 after all. Columbia is going for a March or April ’07 opening, and here’s why:

(1) Columbia has a heavy fall/Xmas slate anyway (four films) and they didn’t want to add another film to that list in the first place, although jazzed reactions to early screenings of Reign told them they have something that works in a big way, and not just with journos like myself;
(2) There’s no question that Adam Sandler‘s performance (he plays a Manhattan dentist caught in an emotional shut-down mode over his wife and daughters having been killed on 9.11) would have stirred talk about this or that acting honor, but Columbia already has two funny guys giving dramatic performances in a pair of high-profile Oscar bait movies — Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction and Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness — so do the math;
(3) This weekend’s low-key response to World Trade Center suggests that resistance to 9/11-themed movies is persisting wthin certain demos, and it may be the better part of wisdom to ease up on any more films in this vein and try again in the spring (even though Reign O’er Me uses the World Trade Center backdrop very sparingly);
(4) Reign‘s test screening numbers have been very good, but Columbia has picked up indications that some critics might not be inclined to give a drama with Sandler (who’s despised in elite critical circles) a fair shake; and…
(5) Columbia would release it on 12.1 anyway if Sandler, a very big Sony gorilla, had stood up, planted his feet and said he really wanted it released this year — but he didn’t quite do that. But he did say no print interviews when it does come out, which will make selling the film a bit of an uphill effort;
(6) Columbia feels it can give Reign O’er Me a more enthusiastic, great-guns launch in March/April than early December. It’s a less crazy time and there’s not as much stuff pulling everyone’s attention every which way.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date. It’ll still show at the Venice Film festival, though, and will be released internationally in the fall, starting with the U.K. on 9.22.
The delay is about “giving things more time to accumulate and gather momentum [in the States],” a Universal rep says. “Critical and popular acclaim, word-of-mouth, understanding, exposure, etc. Alfonso has rendered this film with real virtuosity and passion, and we just [decided to wait] to give it some more time for a meaningful campaign.”
A lot of people I know were hoping to see Children of Men soon. Hearing that it has Kubrick-like chops with long sustained shots had me revved. “You should remain revved,” the Uni guy says. “It’s an incredible, startling film.”

This 8.11 posting from Britain’s Film Ick says Terry Gilliam told a London crowd last Thursday night that a deal for him to direct Paul Giamatti in The Owl in Daylight, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick‘s final unfinished work, is “going ahead.” (My mind is melting & the plaster walls are cracking — I know I wrote a four or five-graph story about the Giamatti-Dick project three or four days ago, and now I can’t find it on the site.) If Gilliam directs Owl it will definitely have a mood and a sense of visual drive and togetherness, but it’s also be off to the races in a non-linear, weird-for-weird’s-sake, impressionistic sense, if you follow my drift. For a lot of people, that’ll be a fine and cherishable thing, but I’ve nearly had it with Gilliam. His movies are always about his brushstrokes first, acting second, story third and intelligibility fourth.

Another noteworthy Film Ick/Terry Gilliam item: Tideland, the Gilliam film that people were calling “unwatchable” at last year’s Toronto Film Festival & which inspired seven or eight critics to walk out of during a screening I happened to attend, “is now playing with a filmed introduction in which Gilliam helps the audience get into ‘the right mindset’. Gently amusing though possibly rather redundant, the film is a single shot of Gilliam addressing the camera, and offers nothing as elaborate, funny or pointed as ‘The Dress Pattern’ — Gilliam’s introduction to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which you can see on the Criterion [DVD].”

When all is said and done Talladega Nights (Columbia) is expected to be the #1 film on Sunday night with $22,871,000. It was down 52% from last weekend(indicated by that B CinemaScore), but the cume will be roughly at $90,800,000so it’s going good . Step Up was #1 Friday but will come in second with $21,241,000, or so the experts are saying. World Trade Center will end up with about $25,700,000. Barnyard will be #4 with $9,509,000, Pulse (#5) with $8,818,000…nobody cares about the lesser numbers. Miami Vice, whipped, will come in ninth with $4,427,000…a real shame. Little Miss Sunshine added 90 theatres and looking at a $2.5 million weekend haul, for an average of $16,7000.

The surprise-heat movie of the weekend is Disney’s Step Up, a teen dance-romancer that got a failing grade on Metacritic (50%) and a much worse number on Rotten Tomatoes (19%). But it was the #1 movie yesterday, doing $8,499,000 and beating out the #2 Talladega Nights and #3 World Trade Center . The final weekend tally for Will Ferrell’s NASCAR flick is expected to nudge it into first place, although Step Up is expected to finish with a higher-than-projected $21,240,000.

Step Up‘s Channing Tatum

The Step Up surprise was mainly about ace-in-the-hole Channing Tatum, the 26 year-old hunky male lead from Alabama who’s very hot now with teenage girls. (His previous punch-throughs happened in Coach Carter and She’s The Man — he had an uncredited bit part in War of the Worlds.) My son Jett, 18, said “the girls in the audience were gasping” whenever Tatum was on-screen during a She’s The Man show he went to last March in Boston.
I can smell piece-of-shit teen flicks like this a mile off, which is why I didn’t catch the press screening. But magnetism that works is always worth checking out, which is why I’ll probably pay $11 bucks plus parking , popcorn and a coke to sit through this thing (well, part of it) sometime later today or tonight. $20 bucks to watch Channing Tatum! Maybe I’ll learn something.
My favorite review blurb is from Chicago Reader‘s J.R. Jones, who wrote that “this teen chick flick is so perfectly calculated I wouldn’t be surprised if every i in the screenplay were dotted with a little heart. Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.”
If you go by MCN’s predictions chart, everybody was way, way off on this one. Coming Soon foresaw Step Up earning $11.1 million this weekend, Box-Office Guru said $8 million, Hollywood Reporter $13, Poland predicted $9, EW $11 and Box Office Mojo said $10.5. Thursday’s tracking indicated a late surge and a figure between $12 and $15 million, but that was still a short call. Nobody saw this one coming. Those tracking-survey guys had better figure some way to get to younger types on their cell phones and not just depend on land-line surveys.

“My girlfriend went crazy during this movie and was actually the one who wanted me to send in a review because she wants everybody to see it. I would rate this 10 out of 10 and is probably the best movie I’ve seen in a couple of years. We couldn’t believe how much we got into this movie and the music. Everybody was tapping their feet and laughing and cheering.

“At the end of the movie the whole crowd was applauding for a long time and they had this part when the credits were on where they had clips from all the different actors, and everybody clapped like crazy for each actor and then screamed nonstop when Jennifer Hudson came on.” — A guy named “Nightmare” who caught Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls at a theatre in San Diego’s Gaslamp district a couple of days ago and wrote a review for AICN. I’m into the idea of this film as much as the next guy, but “Nightmare” sounds like an easy lay.

Disney’s Touchstone division will definitely distribute Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto on 12.8, according to Disney spokesperson Heidi Trotta. Her statement came in response to Roger Freidman‘s Fox 411 report that Disney was trying to shop it around because of concerns that the controversy over Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks would diminish the box-office. I don’t believe Disney didn’t at least explore the possibility of dumping it, or delaying the release date. Any responsible company would have.

So it was Frank Whaley‘s paramedic character in World Trade Center — a real-life guy named Chuck Sereika — who was the first to crawl “into a burning black hole in the unstable pile of debris that was once the World Trade Center, and was the first man to reach trapped Port Authority officer Will Jimeno” — the guy played by Michael Pena. But in Oliver Stone’s film, the guy who goes in first is NYPD officer Scott Strauss (played by Stephen Dorff).

Frank Whaley as Chuck Sereika, the real rescue guy in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center

So reports Rebecca Liss in a Salon piece that went up two days ago. (Old news! The nostalgia file!) “Perhaps it seemed more dramatic or believable to the filmmakers for the NYPD to make this daring rescue basically on their own,” she writes. “Whatever the filmmakers’ reasons, they missed one of the more remarkable aspects of this rescue story.
“Sereika, a man with no training in collapsed-building rescue and extrication, risked his life that day for men he had never met. Sereika said he was sure he would die when he crawled in. Unlike the police and firefighters who without hesitation sacrificed everything — and I in no way discount their selfless acts — Sereika was not called to duty by his unit. He arrived on his own accord.
“Serieka was a paramedic, but his license had expired and he had left that life behind as he sought treatment for addiction problems. But he grabbed his medic sweatshirt and his cell phone and headed down to Ground Zero to see if he could apply a few splints or perform minor triage. He never imagined that he would be involved in one of the few and most memorable rescues of Sept. 11.”

Hey, how come Toronto Star critic Peter Howell didn’t include The History Boys among his top 12 fall films? Does he know something? Or has Fox Searchlight’s low-profile campaign been too successful?

Art of the Dodge

What’s up with Fox Searchlight’s cards-to-the-chest History Boys campaign?
London publicists are preparing for a 10.13 opening, and so Nicholas Hytner‘s film is starting to screen for the press next week. With the pic opening stateside on 11.24, nothing’s doing here now. And yet — this is the unusual part — there are no plans to show the film version of Alan Bennett‘s Tony Award-winning play at the Telluride, Toronto, or Venice Film Festivals.

Portion of invitation to next week’s London screenings of The History Boys (Fox Searchlight, 11.24)

One interpretation is that Fox Searchlight marketers are so confident about Boys having the goods that they’re figuring they don’t need Toronto, Telluride or Venice.
Fox Searchlight COO Stephen Gilula wouldn’t respond to this, but said, “We want to do the right thing for the film itself, rather than satisfy expectations of the press and of conventional industry wisdom. We’re not playing a ‘game’ with this movie. Our first priority is to position it for the public, and not for the award community.”
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Another speculation is that homoerotic content in The History Boys is making Fox Searchlight nervous, and they’re figuring it’s better to keep the talk down for now.
Gilula says that “content is not a concern for us…we have absolutely not had that conversation. We’re the company, remember, that distributed The Dreamers with an NC-17 rating, and also released Quills.”
One reason for not showing The History Boys in Toronto, Gilula says, is that “it’s a British play and a national icon there and they wanted the world premere to happen there. Plus the show is still playing on stage and we want to respect that.”
If you respect the pedigree of the Tony Awards and especially if you’re an avid reader of Movie City News, you’re probably assuming that The History Boys is in the running for possible Oscar awards — Best Picture, Best Director (Hytner), Best Adapted Screenplay (Bennett, who wrote the play), Best Actor (Richard Griffiths), etc.

Because the currently-running Broadway play won six Tony Awards last June (including Best Play), and you have to figure at least some of the lustre will rub off on the film version. And because David Poland has link-blurbed The History Boys as a possible Oscar contender once or twice, and because MCN “Voices” contrib- utor Stephen Holt all but proclaimed The History Boys a multi-Oscar nominee in a piece that ran on MCN last June.
The Tony Awards sweep “paves the way for the film version of The History Boys to score heavily in the Oscar race, breaking out fast as an early favorite,” Holt enthused. “And Fox Searchlight execs on both coasts are understandably ecstatic about [the Tony Award win] and are going to focus all their Oscar-savvy energy on a major campaign for the film, which opens in the U.K. in October.”
But not showing a film of this type at one of the big prestigious September festivals is a definite eyebrow-raiser.
The rulebook says if you have a high-pedigree film opening in the mid-to-late fall that looks like a possible Oscar contender (like last year’s Brokeback Mountain or Capote), you take it to Toronto or Venice or Telluride. Period. You couple your openings at Telluride and Toronto, or at Toronto and Venice, or you go for a trifecta.
If you don’t do this, you either (a) don’t quite have the quality everyone’s expecting, or (b) you do have this and you’re figuring you don’t need early-fall festival buzz to start things off, or (c) you have the goods but something’s holding you back. A concern, say, about a subplot involving an iconoclastic middle-aged teacher who has an occasional thing about fondling the genitals of his male students.

A Fox Searchlight rep told me this morning that one reason for The History Boys not going to Toronto is that the mostly all-male cast can’t get out of their daily performances in the Broadway show. Except nobody in the press knows the cast members very well, and the general public doesn’t know them at all. In any event the press would much rather talk to Hytner or Bennett.
And if the cast is really the reason, why not show The History Boys movie at the New York FIlm Festival, which would eliminate the can’t-travel issue?
I’m told that Telluride honcho Tom Luddy made an overture about seeing The History Boys for possible consideration, but that he was told no-go.
“If you really have something, you don’t have to take it to Toronto,” an Oscar campaign consultant said earlier today. “If you feel you need to prove yourself, and if you really want people to talk about your film, you take it to Toronto or Venice or Telluride…but if you’re absolutely sure that you’ve got the goods, you don’t need a festival.”
And if this isn’t what’s going on…well, here it is again.
After the Tony sweep it seemed as if The History Boys had instant credibility as a year-end Oscar contender. I wrote, however, that “I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”

I saw The History Boys last May, and it’s a brilliant and impassioned tribute to the glories of inspired teaching, and of passing along those things that truly matter in life.
In the film, Griffiths (best known as Harry Potter’s mean-spirited Uncle Vernon) will repeat his Tony-winning stage performance as an eccentric history instructor in an English boys’ school who’s expected to prepare them as best he can for university entrance exams, but is forced to leave his post when the school’s headmaster learns about his erotic fondling of some of the students.
There’s a longstanding homoerotic tradition in dramas about English schoolboys and boarding schools (reflections of this were in Lindsay Anderson’s If) and it’s certainly no big deal to X-factor types.
The idea seems to be if you’re broadening a student’s mind with profound teachings (as Griffith’s History character certainly does), copping a discreet feel is a forgivable impulse/indulgence, but it’s a different story if you’re a priest passing along repressive Catholic dogma.
“Toronto is over two months before the History Boys [U.S.] opening,” the consult- ant says. “And when you have a film with complicated issues or feelings that you don’t want percolating for too long, you don’t want to show it too early.

“Everything is a moving target these days. The media changes, people’s tastes change…and maybe the world is ready for a fondling teacher. But the American public’s interest in sexual content is nil. They can’t handle sexual content, and maybe [Fox Searchlight] doesn’t want it out there too early because of this. They don’t know what the reaction is going to be.”
A gay guy who attended the same History Boys performance that I saw last May confided that he was mildly offended by the genital-fondling aspect. I figured if this guy was slightly put off…
“If it’s somewhat challenging material, no one’s going to fire you for saying no and not exposing it early,” the consultant concluded. “It may be better to be safe than sorry. Challenging material is just that…challenging. And there ‘s no projecting what’s going to happen. Maybe everybody took a step back and said, ‘Let’s not.’ Why give it two months to percolate before it opens?”
I read this to Gilula and he repeated, ” There’ s been absolutely no conversation about content at all regarding plans plans for the film. We’re not concerned about that. Content is not an issue.”