“There’s nothing worse than seeing a sex scene where someone’s got a T-shirt on because its unrealistic, so I think that if you’re going to do it, do it.” — Factory Girl star Sienna Miller talking to the U.K. Mirror‘s John Hiscock about “one the most explicit sex scenes ever seen in a mainstream movie.” Really? I don’t recall anything as steamy as Hiscock describes in the cut I saw last August. Perhaps it’s one of the recently-shot scenes?

There’s no question that the extended version of Barry Levinson, Warren Beatty and James Toback’s Bugsy, which runs 151 minutes or 15 minutes longer than the original 136-minute theatrical version, is a distinctly superior work.

N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr notes that “the extended version of Bugsy that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is releasing today adds 15 minutes of material, restoring what most of its participants saw as the finished version of the film before it was reportedly recut by Mike Medavoy, then the chairman of TriStar Pictures.”

(This may be incorrect: Bugsy screenwriter James Toback told me this morning that Medavoy declared that an early cut was “too long”, but he didn’t seize the print and have it recut in defiance of director Barry Levinson or producer-star Warren Beatty. On the other hand, Kehr, an exacting critic, got his information from Toback also. Kehr says it was recut by TriStar, but did not report that the film was taken away and recut against anyone’s protest.)

“With the seamlessly restored shots and sequences,” Kehr remarks, “the picture plays much more smoothly and inexorably than it did in the edited version. Bugsy Siegel’s rise now has the classical contours of tragedy, complete with a hero whose hubris — his vision of founding a city in the desert — comes in conflict with the gods, or at least those East Coast capos who controlled the purse strings.

“The most striking addition comes after Siegel (Beatty), a New York hood who has gone to Los Angeles to conquer the local rackets, is forced to execute an old friend (Elliott Gould) for informing. Filled with self-loathing, he returns to his Hollywood home and puts a gun in his mouth. The sequence is the film’s most precise revelation of Bugsy’s fatal flaw: he’s a gangster cursed by self-awareness and a growing moral sense.

“Released in 1991, Bugsy may have been a film with too many fathers. Beatty, who co-produced this dark, sensual, morally conflicted biography [and] who played [Siegel] with a Tony Curtis-like striver’s elegance, was of course the director of the acclaimed Reds. Toback was (and is) a passionately first-person artist who drew freely on his experiences in films he had both written (The Gambler) and directed (Fingers, Exposed). And Levinson was then at the height of his commercial potency, having turned out Tin Men, Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man in dizzyingly quick procession.

“Bugsy would not have been the densely detailed and complexly imagined film that it is without the contribution of any one of these men. But one wonders what might have resulted had the authorial strands been pulled apart and had Beatty been able to make another of his studies of an American naif (following Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde, George the hairstylist of Shampoo and John Reed, the radical journalist of Reds) blundering as best he can through the social upheavals of an era; or had Toback, with his fascination with sex, power and the romantic fatalism of the gambler; or had Levinson fully indulged his nostalgia for a lost era of sartorial elegance and tastefully lighted interiors.

“Levinson was the dominant force on the set, and the film duly reflects his fundamentally comic sensibility (even when the material dips into darkness) and affection for attention-grabbing period detail. Pulled in so many directions at once, Bugsy lost its center. Was it a steamy romance (with Beatty’s Siegel falling hard for a tough-talking bit player named Virginia Hill, played by his wife-to-be, Annette Bening), a harsh parable about American capitalism or a period film dripping in sweetly nostalgic detail?”

Jared Leto “played a junkie in Requiem for a Dream. And I was a junkie so I know what a amazing job he did. If the Academy was comprised of junkies, he would have won an Oscar.” — from Brent Bolthouse‘s remarks as he gave Leto a Hollywood Life Breakthrough of the Year Awards last Sunday night…two and a half days ago!…passed along by The Envelope’s “Styles & Scenes” columnist Elizabeth Snead.

“No one in Hollywood since Greta Garbo has had more mysterious allure than Sasha Stone, editor of Oscarwatch.com. In fact, let me shamelessly declare myself right here and now to be the self-appointed president of the Sasha Stone Fan Club. Not only is she a brilliant cyber-editor, but one of the savviest observers of the Oscar scene and, as every online Oscar nut knows, a great, gracious gal beloved by all who know her.

“But it’s hard to know her, frankly. She’s not a brazen, bugle-blasting self-promoter like me. As a result of her classy reserve — or shyness? — she’s become famously elusive and mysterious. A magnificent cyber-legend. Everywhere I hear, ‘Have you ever met Sasha Stone? I haven’t. Do you know what she’s like?’ Of course, being a fan, I sing her praises, but I’ve had to admit for many years, ‘Nope. Never met her. I only know Sasha via email and I keep trying to set up a dinner here, a cup of coffee there, but our plans always fall apart.’
“Alas, we haven’t pulled off that hookup yet, but we did manage a podcast chitchat today just hours after the New York film critics voted and one day after the L.A. media wags did the same.” — The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil intro-ing a 12.11.06 audio interview.

“Happy Feet is going to beat Cars for the Oscar, if not the boxoffice. Why? Because [director] George Miller is an artist, just as [Cars maestro] John Lasseter is, but Miller is a respected live-action director working in a new medium, innovating, in fact, and he has fashioned a classic feel-good topical story. Cars, despite its boxoffice dominance, is not the best of all the fabulous Pixar movies. It’s wonderful, but it’s not the best.” — from Anne Thompson‘s 12.11 entry on Risky Biz blog.

The Broadcast Film Critics nominations have covered all the bases — too many, as usual, as far as the ten Best Picture noms are concerned. (Why not twelve? why not fifteen? Spread it around.) But their choices are tasteful and well-considered, for the most part. Seven nominations each for Babel (but no Best Director nom for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine and Dreamgirls… plus both a Best Picture and a Best Foreign Film nomination for Letters From Iwo Jima. What, they couldn’t decide? I guess they’re just trying to up the odds of Clint coming away with a prize.
Two Best Actor noms for Leonardo DiCaprio (The Departed, Blood Diamond) either means a cancel -out factor (most likely) or that Leo has a shot at actually taking one from The Last King of Scotland‘s Forrest Whitaker.
There is, of course, one bizarre omisssion in the Best Foreign Language Film category: Florian Von Henckel Donnermarck‘s The Lives of Others . I can’t quite say this German-language film is “better” than Pan’s Labyrinth or Volver, my other two favorites in this exceptionally bountiful category, but it unquestionably delivers more, I feel, in the way of a symphonic, rock-your-world dramatic payoff. Either the BFCA nominators didn’t see it (inexcusable) or they’re playing political games for the sake of political gain.
This hypothesis seems not only credible but persuasive in light of the BFCA having included Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto as one of its Best Foreign Film nominees. What is that…a sop to Disney along with a chance that they can get Gibson to attend the awards ceremony?
Of all the Best Young Actor nominees, Little Miss Sunshine‘s Paul Dano gives the deepest, funniest andmost expressive performance. This guy, for me, is easily as affecting and on-target as Alan Arkin and Steve Carell are in their Sunshine roles.

I’ve been meaning to link to Anne Thompson‘s 12.8 “Risky Business” column about Blood Diamond but the title — “Diamond is rough, for a bigger purpose” — made me delay reading it because it suggested a softball approach. Then I realized after reading it that it’s largely (if not entirely) about Anne buffing her relationship with Blood producer Paula Weinstein. That’s fine. I buff also; everyone does. But all the buffing in the world can’t change the fact that Blood Diamond is over. Too many withering reviews and a truly weak opening-weekend tally. The Best Actor headwind for Leonardo DiCaprio is the only thing fanning the flames at this point.

Schlubby-looking guy: “Face it — Martin Scorsese‘s going to get robbed again.”
Balding, open-shirt-tailed older guy: “Are you nuts? Consider this: Robert Altman died with one less Best Director Oscar than Kevin Costner. The Academy won’t let that happen to Marty.”
— a snippet from “Chatter: The Oscar Race” in this week’s issue of New York magazine (“A Year in Culture”).

“With so many titles showing long before their theatrical release, studio representatives were insistent that print journalists (anyone outside the online fanboy community, that is) keep their reviews to themselves. Suffice to say that Craig Brewer‘s Black Snake Moan, in which an aging black man (Samuel L. Jackson) chains a white girl (Christina Ricci) to a radiator to cure her of promiscuity, is as outrageous as advance word indicates. Those who viewed √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúHustle and Flow as little more than an exploitation flick cloaked in Sundance pedigree will have more new evidence than they know what to do with come February.” — Austin 360’s John DeFore, from a report on on Harry Knowles‘ Butt-Numb-A-Thon.

I sat down early this afternoon for a small round-table discussion with Letters From Iwo Jima star Ken Watanabe. Watanabe isn’t so much a smoothie as smoothly mannered, and very much the gentleman. He listens quietly and carefully to questions, and maintains good eye contact when replying. He occasionally uses dramatic pauses and deft body language to emphasize emotions. He was assisted by two translators, but his English sounded pretty good to me.

Letters From Iwo Jima star Ken Watanabe — Monday, 12.11.06, 12:55 pm — 18th floor of Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

He plays a compassionate gentleman-hero type in Letters — Lt. General Tada- michi Kuribayashi, a bright, independent-minded hardcase with an old soul and an easy rapport with the lower-level foot soldiers. As the leader of the defending Japanese troops on Iwo Jima, he stands up for the little guy, occasionally pisses off his fellow bigwig officers, orders an unconventional island-defense involving the building of miles of underground caves and tunnels instead of the usual beachhead strategy, and generally goes his own way.
In short, Kuribayashi is a dignified rebel and, by anyone’s standards, a humanist hero. It’s a far more stirring and satisfying role for Watanabe than the ones he played in Memoirs of a Geisha or (poor fellow) The Last Samurai.
Here’s a recording of most of the discussion. The L line was against me this morning and so was the IRT Lex, so I came in a bit late and missed the first five minutes or so.