Focus Features is screening Allen Coulter‘s Hollywoodland (9.6) on both coasts, and since I’ve written so much about its development (the death-of-Superman drama used to be called Truth, Justice and the American Way) over the past two years, it’s heartening to report that the reactions so far have been pretty good. “I thought it was a very solid piece of work, a noirish murder mystery with lots of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential influences,” says a Manhattan- based journalist. “Adrien Brody (who is excellent) plays a down-on-his-heels P.I. who is hired by the recently deceased George Reeves‘ mom (Lois Smith) to investigate whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Brody’s story is intercut with Reeves’ (Ben Affleck) back-story, particularly the latter’s frustrating attempts to be recognized as a serious actor, along with his affair with a wife (Diane Lane ) of a big MGM executive (Bob Hoskins). There’s also very solid character work from Robin Tunney as Reeves’ slutty fiancee, and Jeffrey DeMunn as his loyal agent. The film runs 126 minutes, with a pretty smart screenplay, and it could probably be cut a bit.” An L.A. correspondent agrees “it could be cut”, but says “it’s quite good and high entertaining…it definitely has that L.A. Confidential tone and delves into a lot of speculation about whether Reeves was killed by MGM, or maybe died accidentally, or commited suicide. Ben Affleck totally comes off the way George Reeves was, a nice, well-liked fellow who wasn’t Laurence Olivier, but the film belongs to Adrien Brody. There’s a subplot with Brody’s character trying to get closer to his son who is devastated by Superman’s death that pays off really well.” The New York guy adds that “Brody proves agains that he can definitely carry a whole picture.” He says that “the only thing I couldn’t figure out is Affleck’s performance? Is he just a bland actor without talent, or he is simply playing one? I’ve never had a problem with him in the past, but he seemed to be a black hole at the center of the film. Then again, maybe that was calculated.” The L.A. guy says, “I think that Affleck’s performance feelign that way is calculated…he’s playing a nice-guy actor who’s frustrated…there’s a great sequence in which Reeves is being watched by a preview audience as he acts in From Here to Eternity, and everyone goes ‘Oooohhh, there’s Superman! there’s Superman!’ and the director (or whoever it is) says to an assistant, “Cut him out.’ It’s a sad moment…you feel for him.”

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman is running an item about a possible paternal plot twist in Bryan Singer’s Superrman Returns (Warner Bros., 6.28), which is Brandon Roush‘s Caped Crusader is (or eventually becomes) a dad over the course of the film. “Previews already show that Lois Lane, played by Kate Bosworth , has what looks to be a four-year-old son and no husband,” writes Friedman. “The only other candidate for fatherhood would be Perry White’s son, Richard (James Marsden). But that not only makes little sense, [but] has a low-level function for a dramatic reveal. You can only imagine Lois screaming to Superman when the boy is in peril, ‘But Clark, he’s your son!'”

A 5.25 New Republic piece about the attempted swift-boating of Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.

Good God…The Breakup got only a 19% creme de la creme positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a lousy 30% from the general pool. The domestic weekend take is supposed to be in the low 30s, except for the word-of-mouth factor, which looks like it’ll be dismal. (The Atlanta Constitution‘s Eleanor Ringel Gillespie said that “watching these likable actors flounder around as they try to save a picture that’s not worth saving is, well, depressing.”) Is a sharp Friday-to-Saturday drop-off in the cards? Whoa…I was just told about a 1 pm screening at the UIP screening room on rue Mayerbeer (near the Opera)…heading there now, back later.

All over Paris each morning, the streets (many of them, but not each and every one) are given a water-soaking, with gallons upon gallons of the stuff spewing into gutters, which strikes me as kind of wasteful — Friday, 6.2.06, 8:20 am.

(a) Video-store ad for recently-released DVD of Tommy Lee Jones’ Trois Enterrements — Thursday, 6.1.06, 8:55 pm; (b) A nice little place on rue Risseau called le Cave; (c)…and some of the patrons who happened to be there when I walked inside — Thursday, 6.1.06, 9:25 pm; (d) There’s a tiny little cavity area in a tuna fish where all the basic organs lie, and then there’s this big, super-chunky tuna-meat body around it…until today I never bent down to actually look inside one;(e) The nutritional benefit of fish heads are what exactly?…are you supposed to grind them up and feed them to your cat?; (f) opposite the stairway leading down to the Jules Joffrin metro in the northern section of the 18th.

“He’s virtuous, he doesn’t lie, and he’s handsome! And I think these are, these are idealistic qualities in the male that you, in someone that you’d want as a husband, I’d imagine .” — Superman Returns director Bryan Singer on his lead character, quoted by N.Y. Times profiler Michael Joseph Gross.

AICN’s Harry Knowles has an engaging, certainly readable conversation with M. Night Shyamalan about Lady in the Water. This, for me, is the stand-out comment: “There’s a kind of very independent spirit about [this] movie. You know, we are in the mix right now and I’m watching it and I’m like, ‘God, this is like a Coen brothers movie or something.’ Like, this is way (chuckles)…it’s just very independent and that kind of humor and sensibility, really offbeat kind of stuff all over. It turns into kind of a mainstream movie eventually, but it really has its kind of language in a very independent spirit, and in a way, that’s where I was going — especially with The Village and coming into this for sure it’s this movement that’s kind of a more independent world, like the kind of stuff I would be doing I were just, you know, working-in-the-art-houses kind of thing. But again, it kind of comes in a mainstream body but definitely it peaks as all independent.”

Will Tom Hanks and Ron Howard return to Da Vinci Code Land by making a film of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, which would be based upon Brown’s six year-old novel? “We are definitely planning to make this movie with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks,” Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal has told Slate‘s Kim Masters. Lord help us indeed. Sony has hired The Da Vinci Code screenwriter Akiva Goldsman to write Angels & Demons “but there’s no deal with Howard or Hanks,” Masters writes, “and many question whether either will return. Going through the opening of The Da Vinci Code had to be one of the most complete agony-and-ecstasy experiences for any filmmaker — and that’s leaving aside the stress of dealing with the religious objectors. First the picture was savaged by reviewers, and then it opened huge. It’s nice to make money, but even the rich and successful don’t like to be heaped with public scorn. So, there’s a strong incentive for the principals to declare victory and move on.” Please, guys…do that.

War is Cruel

I finally caught up this morning with Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Road to Guantanmo (Roadside, 6.23). I realize that I’m expected to jump up and down like many critics did when this half-doc, half-recreated drama had its debut last February at the Berlin Film Festival, but I don’t quite feel it…sorry.
I never felt less than absorbed by Guantanamo. I respected and believed what I was seeing…but I didn’t feel all that heavily caught up in it for reasons I’ll soon explain.

Rizwan Ahmed, Farhad Harun and Afran Usman, although not necessarily in left-to-right order. (If anyone can help…)

Guantanamo is an anti-American political horror film. It’s a true story of three young British Muslims who made an ill-advised visit to Afghanistan after celebrating a wedding in neighboring Pakistan in October 2001. The upshot was that they were rounded up as suspected Al Queada collaborators and later flown to the U.S military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and then detained for over two years.
I don’t mean to say that the film has an anti-American attitude — the facts about what happened to these guys are damning in and of themselves.
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It’s a sad portrait of what undoubtedly happened to many innocent Muslims unlucky enough to get caught up in America’s Mideast assault on all suspected 9/11 collaborators and/or supporters, in the weeks that followed the World Trade Center attacks.
The stories of Shafiq Rasul, Ruhel Ahmed and Asif Iqral (who recount their saga in talking-head footage while being portrayed in the dramatic sections by Rizwan Ahmed, Farhad Harun and Afran Usman) are shocking, pathetic, appalling. Their brutal treatment at the hands of American troops and various U.S. intelligence officers smells like stupidity, ignorance and racism every step of the way.
The heart of the film is the depiction of their abusive treatment at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta. Geneva Convention be damned — America was enraged and hell-bent on vengeance after 9/11, and these poor guys caught the brunt of it.

But I have to say I felt a certain distance from their story, despite the repellent nature of their treatment and the deplorable behavior of their captors, because their decision to travel to Afghanistan in the first weeks after 9/11 was awfully reckless.
The real guys say to the camera that no one expected American troops to come thundering into Afghanistan so they were caught unawares…to which one can only say, “Come again?” The entire world knew that US forces were going to hit Afghanistan in a search for Osama bin Laden. Anyone watching CNN knew that Afghanistan was definitely not a smart place to be back then, especially if you were a Muslim from England.
Nonetheless, with all manner of military Armageddon being predicted to slam into Afghanistan by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and every other media guy in the U.S. and Britain, these three dudes decided to visit that beleagured country because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
A little perspective, if I may: Berlin women were raped by Russian soldiers. Those conquered by Roman troops in the ancient days were humiliated and slaughtered by God-knows-how-many-thousands? Innocent people have been getting victimized, bludgeoned and chewed up by wars for thousands of years. The conquering army marches in, looking to punish and subjugate (or interrogate), and those too weak or old or dumb to get out of their way catch hell.

So Lord knows it’s a horrid world when warriors pick up the sword, but only a careless person walks into a potentially lethal situation without fully considering the consequences.
I’m not saying that the “Tipton 3” (the victims were all from the British town of Tipton) were stupid, but they sure didn’t think things through.
In fact, given the worked-up state that Americans were known to be in after 9/11 and the virtual certainty that bombs would soon be falling upon Taliban forces and suspected Al Queada sympathizers in that region, why didn’t the Pakistani woman that the British-residing groom (a guy named Monir, who later disappeared) intended to marry come to England instead, so both parties would be out of the danger zone?
The first half-hour of Guantanamo, which quickly intros the trio and begins the renactment of their story, immediately pulls you in. Their initial visit, fleeing the bombs, seeing dead victims being buried…all of it feels authentic and then some.
The pace slows, naturally, after their capture by British troops in Afghanistan, their being handed over to the U.S. military and taken first to Kandahar Air Base (where the beatings and interrogations start) and then flown to Guantanamo in January 2002.

The poor guys are kept inside chain-linked cells that are always lit and resemble dog kennels. No sleep, constant inspections, berated and brutalized…all depicted with terrible realism.
They’re interrograted by careless intelligence officers who claim to have video footage of them attending an Osama bin Laden speech, which of course the three guys deny.
And they’re beaten up and shat upon in all kinds of grotesque ways. The most Orwellian torture they’re put through involves being tied up and forced to absorb super-loud heavy metal music with incessant strobe lights flashing.
Their innocence is eventually discovered in 2004 and they’re slowly, gradually freed. Winterbottom and Whitecross remind us, however, that 500 or so prisoners are still sweating it out in Guantanamo.
But my basic problem remains: I didn’t identify with the Tipton 3 because if I were Muslim, I certainly wouldn’t have travelled to the Middle East for a wedding in the immediate wake of 9/11. I mean, who would? Think about it.

Alpha Dog director Nick Cassevettes and producer/financier Sidney Kimmel wanted their film, a controversial, taken-from-real-life, River’s Edge-like drama about a pack of teens dealing with the death of one of their own, to be released wide, or at least wide-ish (1000 screens or thereabouts). New Line, however, wanted to platform it. So the guys have jumped ship and now Universal has agreed to distribute it in a wide-ish fashion in early 2007, or a bit more than a year after Cassevetes’ film played at Sundance ’06. Something about this explanation in Variety doesn’t ring entirely true. Methinks there’s more to it.

If you take the time to read this review of Milos Forman‘s Goya’s Ghost (Warner Bros., late ’06 — wide release early ’07) and particularly the description of the alleged Natalie Portman nude scene, it tells you straight away it’s a torture scene. (Portman’s character is put through major Spanish Inquisition suffering because she’s suspected of being Jewish.) Anyone who reads this through and then goes “whoa…a Natalie Portman nude scene!” (as some guys in the talkback section do) is effin’ diseased and needs professional help. Ghost also stars Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgaard (as Goya) and Randy Quaid.