I’m not understanding Kevin Spacey‘s declaration that he based his Lex Luthor portrayal in Superman Returns on convicted Enron ogre Kenneth Lay. Read any of Lay’s statements during the Enron trial or watch him in Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and it’s all who-me? and equivocations and various modes of shoulder-shrugging. There’s no rage in the man…nothing but a calculated front. Spacey’s Luthor is nothing at all like Lay. If you ask me, he seems to have based his performance on John McEnroe.

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” — T.S. Eliot

It appears that Superman Returns is being marketed to Christians after all. Here’s a Bryan Singer interview in today’s Christianity Today, written by Mark Moring. Singer’s money quote: “I think that [Superman as a Christ figure] is kind of a natural evolution, because he began as kind of a Moses figure, of the child sent by the parents down the river to fulfill a destiny. Superman’s a savior. And even more so in my film, because he’s gone for a period of time, and then he returns. For me to say that those messianic images don’t exist in the movie would be absurd.” I’ve been told by a “fundie” reader that another Singer interview/profile will post tomorrow on Crosswalk.com.

I talked to a critic friend yesterday who said he had a great time with the new Pirates, although he admitted it’s a bit of slog during the first act or hour (whichever comes first). And now here’s David Poland saying that “like Superman Returns, Pirates 2 is too long by about 30 minutes, and the script tends to bog down every time the story gets a bit complex for its own good….it gets too confusing.” On top of which critic #1 said it’s an adventure fantasy “on steroids.” I know what “steroids” means and it doesn’t mean seductive or enticing. It means bigger, louder, crankier…a heavy boot. (Poland says one of the film’s charms is about Johnny Depp “pushing the envelope a little further.”) Anyone who felt un-levitated by the original Pirates should probably keep this Poland passage in mind: “Pirates 2 will never be as fresh” as the original…”that first film was expected to be a complete disaster in the mold of Kangaroo Jack and Treasure Planet…and then it turned out not only to be good, but a wonderful film .” Amazing…a movie that had me loudly exhaling, shifting positions in my seat, leaning forward with my hands covering my face, and escaping out to the lobby three times — one bathroom break, one soda refill, and one just to get the hell out of the theatre for a couple of minutes — was a “wonderful” film. Poland and I live on the same planet but the Pirates disconnect couldn’t be more profound. “Like the best of Spielberg (which this is one small step behind), [Pirates 2] really speaks to children of all ages,” Poland continues. “If your inner child died in a mine shaft disaster a few years back, you are part of the small group that won’t enjoy this movie.” Could that last statement possibly be amended to, “If you’re one of those who was theoretically into and wanted very much to drink the Verbinski-Bruckheimer Kool-Aid but found yourself involuntarily choking and gagging, you may find yourselves deja-viewing”? I love Poland’s admission that Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio‘s script “has none of the suspense of The Empire Strikes Back…the difference between this film and, say, Star Wars, is that there is not the big picture driving the emotional weight of the middle movie. The world is not about to fall to the evil empire. The lives and happiness of our heroes is really what drives these films and it isn’t as powerful.” And yet Pirates 2 “sends you out of the theater smiling, laughing, and applauding.” Everyone I’ve spoken to has said more or less the same thing and you can’t fight City Hall, I guess. But in the rascally spirit of Jack Sparrow…

Warner Bros. marketers have been too classy (or clueless) to try and sell Bryan Singer‘s Superman Reborns to Christian righties as a kind of Jesus-metaphor movie, the way Disney sold Narnia, etc. But maybe they should have? When those righties come out for a movie, they come out in force.

The marketing execs of Fox Home Video are just as determined to sell Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty as a dopey-ass lightweight mob comedy as its theatrical distributor, Yari Film Group Releasing, was during its brief theatrical release last March. These guys won’t quit until everyone in DVD-ville is convinced this film is a second-tier wash and probably not worth the rental fee. It is worth it…trust me.

Broadly played at times but meticulous and flavorful and dramatically solid, Guilty is Lumet’s best film since Q & A and before that, Prince of the City. It’s extremely well acted (Vin Diesel, Peter Dinklage, Ron Silver, Annabella Sciorra, Alex Rocco …everyone shines), beautifully shot and edited, and reeking of New York-New Jersey goombah-and-cop culture like many of Lumet’s better films.
I wrote last February that “it’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values. In a stuffed-manicotti way, Find Me Guilty is as much of a values-based entertainment as The Passion of the Christ, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Thing About My Folks and Madea’s Family Reunion. I’m serious.
These values can be summed up by the words ‘don’t rat’, ‘don’t roll‘ and ‘family is everything’. I’m no goombah but I sympathize with these sentiments, so I guess that’s part of the territory.” Here’s the whole piece.

Another global warming story from the L.A. Times, and scarier than the last one. Would the Times have run these stories on the front page at this particular juncture even if An Inconvenient Truth weren’t in theatres? You tell me.

To judge by news of her casting in Woody Allen ‘s next film (which will costar Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), British actress Haley Atwell is doing fairly well. But Google her and you get this, and put her name on the IMDB and all you get are some TV credits, her height (5 foot, 6 1/2 inches) and a statement that she went to England’s Guildhall School from ’02 to ’05.

Reading about someone’s obsessive dislike of a film they haven’t seen is pretty damn tedious, I realize, but pieces about Johnny Depp plugging Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest are much, much worse. Depp is mugging and prancing around in tall boots and a loose-flowing shirt and a three-cornered hat so he can get paid….end of story. If I could wave a magic wand that would make all the arts editors at all the big syndicates and big-city newspapers totally ignore this film, I would do so. Beware the commercial gleam in the eyes of Gore Verbinski and Jerry Bruckheimer because they are seducers, not lovers. They are not interested in the state of your soul or the beating of your heart after you’ve seen their two-hour, 30-minute “entertainment” — they’ll scamper out the rear exit door before the opening credit sequence is finished, laughing like hell. Beware Pirates screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio…beware their machinations. (They wrote both Zorro movies…they wrote the “story” of Godzilla…they’re bad people.) Beware Keira Knightley in all her manifestations, but especially in 18th Century gowns and hair extensions. I for one intend to arise early on July 7th and hike into the mountains and find an isolated spot and beat myself with birch branches like Max von Sydow in The Virgin Spring.

Ridley Scott‘s developing biopic about the famed Gucci family, on which World Trade Center screenwriter Andrea Berloff is now working, will not be any kind of chick flick. To judge by the melodramatic soap-opera basics of the family’s history, it’s going to be Visconti’s The Damned.

Last Thursday night (6.22) as the L.A. Film Festival was unveiling The Devil Wears Prada in Westwood, a quiet research screening of David Fincher‘s Zodiac happened at the Chinese 6 on Hollywood Blvd. (where an all-media showing of Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns was unspooling as well). The Fincher was shown under the title of The Chronicles (oh, God… we’re back to that one again…don’t ask), and three guys have posted reactions on Ain’t It Cool.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo in David Fincher’s Zodiac (or is it The Chronicles?)

The cut ran just over three hours, and 66 and 2/3 percent of the posters respected and admired it to varying degrees. (A third feels it may get there with further editing and fewer laughs.) Obviously Paramount’s motive for researching Chronicles/ Zodiac is that they want to give Fincher reasons to prune it down and make it shorter. (The eternal distributor mantra.) You may have read here (as well as on the IMDB and Coming Soon)that Paramount intends to bypass a late ’06 release and open Chronicles/Zodiac in January ’07, although that may just be an attention-getting diversion strategy with a plan to open it platform-style in New York and Los Angeles in mid to late December for critical and awards-consideration. Anyway, the most interesting passage of the three reviews is from a guy called “One Time Only”. “I go to test screenings all the time but never write in because I think the filmmakers shouldn’t have to have their rough draft scrutinized on the net,” he says, “but I’m breaking my silence on this one time because I’m concerned the film will get butchered by ‘the process’. As it stands now The Chronicles (or is it just Chronicles?…unsure) is over three hours long. It’s loose, slow, over-ambitious and it may just might be a masterpiece. It’s much more seamless than some of his other films in which the visual style calls attention to itself. What we end up with is a very visually interesting movie that doesn’t attack your senses. The filmmakers did an excellent job capturing the 70’s to the smallest of details as well. I heard someone in the audience gripe that the film felt like a novel, which actually strikes me as a fair assessment. This is a seven-course meal no doubt about it. To call this ‘another serial killer film from Fincher’, as I foolishly did in the past, does an enormous disservice to the film. This is not Se7en 2. This is a serial-killer film the way Heat is a cops-and-robbers film.”

“I will now retire to the green room and the fortification of a drink in order to cope with the inevitable moral pneumonia that always follows a blizzard of praise.” — Leonard Cohen to a live audience at Hollywood’s John Ford Anson theatre on Saturday night (6.24), prior to an L.A. Film Festival screening of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man.