No one seems willing to spit out the truth about Superman II — the Richard Donner Cut (Warner Home Video, 11.28), which is that it’s a so-so, patience- straining thing to sit through…at best.

The ’81 theatrical version was shaped by the fact that Donner, who had directed the original Superman and a good portion of part II, was fired by producer Ilya Salkind and replaced by Richard Lester. So it’s theoretically agreeable that the film Donner wanted to make has been slapped into some kind of form. Original visions should always be respected, and the effort that went into this new DVD deserves a salute.

The problem is that Superman II was never that great a film to begin with, and now it feels like a lesser thing in nearly every respect. And the technical fact is that the Donner version feels only a step or two up from a YouTube re-edit.

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Revised 5-day holiday estimates based on Saturday numbers: Happy Feet will end up with $52,167,000, second-place Casino Royale with with $44,099,000 and Deja Vu (not doing quite as poorly as estimated a couple of days ago) with $29 million .

“He’s a murderer and an artist, he’s like a child and also like an old man, and he’s like an animal, but there’s something ethereal about him,” says Ben Whishaw in describing Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the character he portrays in Tom Tykwer‘s Perfume (Paramount, 12.27), in a chat with N.Y. Times writer Coelli Carr. “Because he hardly ever says anything, you start to read his behavior and look at those tiny things — posture, gait or the expression in the eyes — that are usually secondary to words.”
It is one thing to find fascination with Grenouille in the original Patrick Susskind novel, drawn in (as I was) by the well-sculpted prose and the fascinating evocations of aromatic transporation. It is another thing entirely to want to pay to see a movie about same and swim around in the head of a nearly non-verbal murdering creep for two hours. In talking with people who had seen the film, Whishaw found that “some had enormous sympathy for Grenouille, while others were repelled. ‘I like the fact that the film allows for those two very different responses,’ he said.”

Anne Thompson has linked to it, and Joe Leydon has linked to Anne Thompson linking to it. Here’s the thing itself: a blunt, perceptive and (if you ask me) very courageous Michael Moore piece called “Cut and Run — the Only Brave Thing to Do.”

Today — Sunday, 11.26.06 — “marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II,” he begins. “That’s right. We were able to defeat all of Nazi Germany, Mussolini, and the entire Japanese empire in less time than it’s taken the world’s only superpower to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad.
“And we haven’t even done that. After 1,347 days, in the same time it took us to took us to sweep across North Africa, storm the beaches of Italy, conquer the South Pacific, and liberate all of Western Europe, we cannot, after over 3 and 1/2 years, even take over a single highway and protect ourselves from a homemade device of two tin cans placed in a pothole. No wonder the cab fare from the airport into Baghdad is now running around $35,000 for the 25-minute ride. And that doesn’t even include a friggin’ helmet.
“Is this utter failure the fault of our troops? Hardly. That’s because no amount of troops or choppers or democracy shot out of the barrel of a gun is ever going to ‘win’ the war in Iraq. It is a lost war, lost because it never had a right to be won, lost because it was started by men who have never been to war, men who hide behind others sent to fight and die.
“There are many ways to liberate a country. Usually the residents of that country rise up and liberate themselves. That’s how we did it. You can also do it through nonviolent, mass civil disobedience. That’s how India did it. You can get the world to boycott a regime until they are so ostracized they capitulate. That’s how South Africa did it. Or you can just wait them out and, sooner or later, the king’s legions simply leave (sometimes just because they’re too cold). That’s how Canada did it.
“The one way that doesn’t work is to invade a country and tell the people, ‘We are here to liberate you!’ — when they have done nothing to liberate themselves. When tens of thousands aren’t willing to shed their own blood to remove a dictator, that should be the first clue that they aren’t going to be willing participants when you decide you’re going to do the liberating for them.
“A country can help another people overthrow a tyrant (that’s what the French did for us in our revolution), but after you help them, you leave. Immediately. The French didn’t stay and tell us how to set up our government. They didn’t say, ‘We’re not leaving because we want your natural resources.’ They left us to our own devices and it took us six years before we had an election. And then we had a bloody civil war. That’s what happens, and history is full of these examples. The French didn’t say, ‘Oh, we better stay in America, otherwise they’re going to kill each other over that slavery issue!’
“The only way a war of liberation has a chance of succeeding is if the oppressed people being liberated have their own citizens behind them — and a group of Washingtons, Jeffersons, Franklins, Ghandis and Mandellas leading them. Where are these beacons of liberty in Iraq? This is a joke and it’s been a joke since the beginning. Yes, the joke’s been on us, but with 655,000 Iraqis now dead as a result of our invasion, I guess the cruel joke is on them.”

“Pour some extra vinegar on that popcorn — the Borat effect has begun,” observes the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell. His basic thesis is that all comedic phenomenons and iconoclasts create spawns, and that Borat‘s success is unleashing a wave of imitators,wannabes and samplers. Hence the Michael Richards onstage “nigger” outburst at L.A.’s Laugh Factory. (Which led to Richards’ explanation the other night on “Late Night with David Letterman.”)

(l. to. r.) Michael Richards; still of Richards’ Laugh Factory appearance; Sacha Baron Cohen

“It may seem unfair or a stretch to link Richards’ appalling tirade to Cohen’s infinitely more clever satire,” Howell writes. “But the link is there and I’m not the first to make it. Paul Brownfield, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, coined the phrase “the Borat effect” this week to describe what happened in the Laugh Factory. (Brownfield also came up with an interesting phrase/tagline in his piece: “Cultural Learnings of Kramer to Make Benefit Wounds of America.”)
“The big difference between Cohen and Richards is that the former plays a ridiculous and naive journalist character, who says terrible things out of ignorance. Richards, unable to create a similar figure of levity, simply hurled insults like a schoolyard bully.
“Success breeds imitators, mostly inferior ones who want to push the envelope even further,” Howell writes. “Nowhere is this truer than in comedy, which forever follows the brave and the reckless. Just as true innovators like Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Steve Martin and the Saturday Night Live troupe all spawned countless bad knock-offs, so will Cohen’s Borat schtick lead to a host of fish-out- of-water screenplays in which a buffoon with a funny accent and obnoxious ideas foists himself on unsuspecting victims.”
Doesn’t Mel Gibson‘s Malibu tirate also fit into this on some level? Obviously it was anything but funny (although I confess to having laughed when I first heard the term “sugar tits“), but didn’t it seem to pry open the Pandora’s Box subconscious of a lot of closet racists out there? Didn’t it nudge the “ironic” hurling of ugly racist epithets a wee bit closer to the mainstream realm?

Whatever the interest may be in the recently released DVD of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Julius Caesar (1953), here’s one of the more stirring moments — Marlon Brando‘s “cry havoc” speech.

One of the best-written appreciations of Robert Altman‘s California Split I’ve read anywhere. The author is Tom Block; the site is called The High Hat.

‘You know, we don’t do things like you do in Hollywood, bling bling. Here, it’s bling pow.'” — pissed-off South African guy with a gun talking tough to Leonardo DiCaprio while conveying a reported threat to Djimon Honsou during filming of Blood Diamond, according to a story told by Honsou at a recent press conference and written up by L.A. Daily News critic and “Reel Deal” blogger Bob Strauss.

In an 11.23 L.A. Times piece about Robert Altman, Prairie Home Companion creator Garrison Keillor says when they first met he “tried to interest him in making a movie about a man coming back to Minnesota to bury his father, a winter movie. ‘There haven’t been many movies made in winter,’ I said. And Altman replied, “You would quickly find out why.’ He declined. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘the death of an old man is not a tragedy.'” (Joe Leydon sent me the call-out.)

Watched the trailer again for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.13), and you’re left with one main impression, which is that it’s a hormonal coming-out party. Daniel Radcliffe has developed a weight-lifter’s bull neck and has basically turned into Sammy Stud (the Katie Leung kissing scene, his plans to do Equus in the spring) along with a fiercer, angrier look in his face when asked to register deep emotion. Boys of 11 and 12 are into imaginary realms and barely notice the scent of girls — not so when they reach 16 and 17, and no amount of formulaic CG diversion can hide this simple fact.

Darren Aronofsky‘s The Fountain “is visually intoxicating — the images have a luminous psychedelic beauty — and the film’s themes emerge elegantly out of the story’s intricately-looped tri-level structure. It’s a new kind of science-fiction movie, and, unusually for that boys’ club genre, probably a great date movie too. Mainly, though, as they used to say back in the Roger Corman days, it’s a trip.” — MTV.com’s Kurt Loder refraining the stoner mantra.