Liam Neeson “is prepping for his role as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s film about the Great Emancipator,” it says in Rush & Molloy’s 12.6 column. “[In so doing] Neeson toured the New York Historical Society’s exhibit ‘New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War’ and attended a lecture by ‘The Gettysburg Gospel’ author Gabor Boritt.”

Good heavens, hold on…Neeson was preparing for the same role when I spoke to him twice about it in August 2005 — 16 friggin’ months ago — and there hasn’t been any announcement since that Spielberg is going to finally commit to making the historical biopic, which will cover Lincoln’s Presidency from his inauguration to assassination. Maybe Neeson knows something we don’t? It would be nice if Spielberg were to finally pull the trigger or at least let someone else step in. Lincoln obviously has the earmarks of a great Neeson role.

Director Chris Kentis and producer Laura Lau made a big indie-level splash with Open Water, which was about a husband and wife stranded in the ocean and defenseless against sharks, who eventually eat them. And now in the latest example of “duh”-level associative thinking in corporate Hollywood, Warner Bros. has hired Kentis and Lau to write and direct Indianapolis, an adaptation of the Douglas Stanton book “In Harm’s Way” about 900 sailors who went into the Phillipine Sea in July 1945 after their ship sank, leaving them stranded and defenseless against sharks.

Before rescuers arrived four days later, 587 guys sailors were dead, the majority of these due to jagged teeth and terrible chompings.
Michael Fleming‘s story about the Kentis-Lau deal says Warner Bros. “has tried several versions — Mel Gibson almost starred five years ago for director Barry Levinson — and Universal has a rival project that J.J. Abrams is eyeing based on the story of a youth whose school research project helped force a posthumous reconsideration of the ship’s court-martialed captain, Charles McVay.”
Fleming doesn’t mention that one of the screenwriters on the WB Indianapolis project was Donnie Darko/Southland Tales director-writer Richard Kelly. In March 2005 I wrote in a Radar magazine profile of Kelly that “his most recent gig was writing a screenplay for a $100 million, special-effects-heavy World War II film about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Kelly calls it √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äúthe tightest thing I√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ve ever written.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
“Because of the 317 men who lived,” I added, “Kelly has titled his WWII script Optimistic.”

The return of former Disney production chief Nina Jacobson to active status — she’s now a DreamWorks-allied producer on the Universal lot — is welcome news. Jacobson, HE readers will recall, was bizarrely whacked last summer — bizarre as in out-of-the-blue and what-was-that-about? The guy who gave her the bad news, Disney distribution chief Dick Cook, won the all-time Superb Timing award for telling Jacobson just as her partner was giving birth in a hospital.

“Looking back at his five marriages, many lovers and his indifference to family life, he is aghast at his own cruelty at the same time that he is strangely unapologetic,” writes N.Y. Times reviewer Stephen Holden about legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman as he appears in Marie Nyrerod‘s documentary Bergman Island (now at the Film Forum).

“I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can’t for a moment be equal to the suffering you’ve caused,” Bergman tells Nyrerod. “I haven’t put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have.”

The trade review date for Clint Eastwood‘s Letters from Iwo Jima is supposed to be either this Friday (12.8) or Monday (12.11). I don’t see how delaying reactions serves anyone’s purpose. The time is now, we’re right in the thick of it, Letters opens two weeks from today… gentlemen, start your engines.
After all, MCN’s David Poland started his last Saturday, right? The the cat was 80% out of the bag as of that moment, and it was totally out yesterday when Poland made Letters his #2 choice for the Best Picture competish in the latest Gurus of Gold chart (which went up yesterday).
This made it clear he was speaking of Letters four days ago when he wrote that “there is a very real chance that one of the ‘new’ movies will grab one of the five Best Picture slots. I could be wrong. A second viewing will answer that question more clearly. But as with Dreamgirls, if you feed the Academy a movie that allows them to do what they really want to do, most of the time they will do it.”
I don’t know what that last statement means at all, but Letters From Iwo Jima, which I saw last weekend and also admire a good deal, is in no way analagous to Dreamgirls in terms of its Academy appeal and/or psychology. But I’ve got my review half-written and I’m ready to boogie. Others are too. Let’s do it.

“Dramatically, the relentless pileup of atrocities [in Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto] becomes self-defeating,” Newsweek‘s David Ansen writes in this week’s issue. “At a certain point — was it the spear that went from the back of a running man’s head through his mouth? The jaguar tearing another man’s face to shreds? The snakes? The hornets? The hundreds of rotting corpses in the ravine? — you become inured. Some may find the overkill exploitative, but there’s nothing cynical about Gibson’s obsession with blood and pain. The pathology is genuine.
“But for all the anthropological research that went into the movie, what is Apocalypto trying to say? According to the production notes, Gibson wants us to contemplate the parallels between the decadence of the Mayan empire on its last legs and our contemporary, spiritually and environmentally ravaged world. You could have fooled me. The question on my mind as I contemplated Apocalypto‘s lurid panoramas of bleeding, violated flesh had nothing to do with politics: why does Gibson get so turned on by this stuff?”

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness.” — from Woody Allen‘s Love and Death.

Yesterday I intended to discuss Sharon Waxman12.4 piece contending that Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto has created some confusion and tension among Academy and DGA voters who had wanted to just ignore Gibson’s film due to his anti-Semitic outburst last summer, but are now torn about this due to the film’s alleged excellence, which they may feel obliged to honor with a nomination or two. I tried to get into it but I so radically disagreed with what she’d written that I felt tongue-tied on some level.

As I explained in last Friday’s review, Apocalypto very well made but there are far too many slit throats, chest-cavity guttings and bouncing severed heads for anyone to take it seriously as any kind of awards contender. (I’m sorry, but a\ny scene about the chewing of recently-killed tapir testicles has to be considered one too many in that vein.)
The bottom line is that the only DGA and Academy members who may feel torn about whether or not to nominate Gibson for Best Director or Apocalypto for Best Picture are people, in short, who either (a) have no taste, or (b) share Gibson’s diseased obsession with the clubbing, throat-slicing, head-severing, disembowelling and general torturing of human beings as a subject deserving prolonged meditation.

Howard Burns, editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter, unknown to probably 99% of HE’s readership, has packed his bags and left the room. L.A. Observed wrote that he said to the staff at a meeting yesterday, “If I told you this was voluntary, I’d be lying.” Burns was, in fact, whacked by THR publisher John Kilcullen for the same reason that lions who’ve moved in on a new lioness usually kill her cubs so make way for their own brood.
Publisher/editorial director Robert Dowling made Burns editor after Anita Busch resigned in May 2001. Several months ago Burns was named editorial director so Cynthia Littleton could be made editor — she’s been running things at THR for some six months.
After Dowling left the paper a year ago due to illness, Tony Uphoff, his second-in-command, was named publisher. The Dutch-owned VNU, which owns the Reporter, was sold to a consortium of investors after this. The investors hired a guy from GE named David Calhoun to take over the list of properties — including A.C. Nielsen and several trade papers (including THR and Billboard) and trade shows. The star and cash cow is the Hollywood Reporter, but ad sales didn’t meet projections last year so heads had to roll. Bob Krakoff (formerly with Reed Business) replaced Mike Marchesano as head of VNU business, and he replaced Uphoff with VNU veteran Kilcullen, who has turned Billboard around. So Kilcullen is the new publisher and he’s reorganizing his team.

Patrick Goldstein‘s annual “early betting line” column about Best Picture contenders gives the best odds (4-1) to Dreamgirls. His only qualifier is that “its chances of a best picture victory depend on whether the academy, which has a soft spot for showbiz stories, will embrace a crowd-pleaser that isn’t daring or original. In other words: Does the soul outweigh the schmaltz?”

Goldstein doesn’t mention the well-known fact that there are some out there — maybe a few, maybe a lot — who are foursquare against Dreamgirls. A Manhattan publicist told me last night there are a lot of people “in the closet” about it — they don’t like it but don’t feel secure enough to go up against the gay media-industry mafia by saying so with any conviction.
I’m mixed on Dreamgirls — I like the pizazzy song-and-dance stuff but feel it zips along too fast and that there ‘s not enough emotional particularity or undertow, and that it lacks connective story-telling tissue. But for me, it’s not Chicago or Munich — if it wins I’m okay because the parts of it that I genuinely admire are fairly kick- ass, and because director Bill Condon has delivered genuinely admirable work in the past (Kinsey, Gods and Monsters) and will again.
The other thing that Goldstein omits is another awesome foreign-language Best Picture contender besides Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver. I’m referring, of course, Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others. I’m sorry, but Goldstein not even mentioning this film as at least a very long shot seems like dereliction of duty.
There is no avoiding the fact that this Sony Pictures Classics release has the the stuff that penetrates and lifts up and lasts — a riveting paranoid thriller, two kinds of love stories, superb acting (Ulrich Muhe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck), tangy adult sexuality and a truly stirring finale. I’m pretty cynical about the Oscar race, but is any aspect of the Best Picture race about nominating those films from whatever nation and spoken in whatever language that really and truly knock your socks off? If so, there is simply no way to keep Others out of contention.
Goldstein gives lousy 18-1 odds to Volver. “If there were ever an endangered species in the best picture race, it’s the foreign film, which, like animation, has been ghettoized in a separate but not equal category,” he says. “Sony Pictures Classics has made a big push for this…film, but it doesn’t look to have the depth of support needed.” No depth of support for one of the all-time great Pedros? Is everyone on Ritalin?