The ridiculously drawn-out Becket saga (thanks to those ass-dragging dilletantes at MPI Home Video) is at an end, thank fortune. Peter O’Toole‘s Oscar campaign team — i.e., the Miramax publicists pushing his Best Actor candidacy for Venus — will be comforted to know that this 1964 multi-Oscar nominated film, in which O’Toole arguably gave the finest performance of his career as King Henry II, will open at Manhattan’s Film Forum on 1.26.07 and then L.A.’s Nuart on 2.9.07.

O’Toole’s Venus performance must sink or swim based on its own merits, of course, but reminding Academy voters what a brilliant, world-class performance he gave 42 years ago (plus the fact that he was flat-out robbed of the Best Actor Oscar when My Fair Lady‘s Rex Harrison took it instead) clearly enhances the brief.
Peter Glenville and Hal Wallis‘s widescreen historical epic, which was remastered in ’03 by the Motion Picture Academy’s Bob Pogorzelski, will also open in several Landmark theatres in February, March, April and May via Marty Zeidman‘s Slow Hand Releasing, which was hired by MPI to handle theatrical as a promotional prelude to the Becket DVD release.
MPI spokesperson Christie Hester stated earlier this year — disingenuously — that MPI “intends” to release the Becket DVD in the first quarter of ’07. The more likely release will be next fall. Perhaps MPI should announce a release during the first quarter of ’08, just to give themselves a little leeway? Make it the summer of ’08 — then they’ll really be covered.

L.A. Times columnist Claudia Eller has written a fairly glowing, nicely observed profile of Paramount Vantage chief John Lesher, who’s used his talent relationships (i.e., nurtured during his many years as a hot-shot Endeavor agent) to build the former Paramount Classics into a formidable producer and distributor that’s easily on the level of Fox Searchlight and Focus Features. Here’s hoping that Paramount Vantage’s Babel, which goes wide on 11.10 into 1200 theatres, does as well en masse as it did last weekend.

New Line Cinema appears to have pulled back fairly radically on its Little Children bookings. The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy is reporting that Todd Field‘s Cheever-esque drama is “getting a very scattershot release from its distributor and, frankly, may be in trouble. It was meant to open in Portland on 11.3, but that date has been pulled and no new date has yet been announced.”

We all know Children hasn’t done much business, or been given much of a chance to, I should say. Since opening on 10.6.06 it’s only been booked into 32 theatres, and has taken in a total of $801,000, according to www.boxofficemojo.com. I understand that a film of this stripe might not play in the boonies, but it’s been fairly well reviewed (it has an 88% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) and is widely respected, and you’d think, given this, New Line would at least give it a limited art-house opening for Chrissake in a major city like Portland, if for nothing else than to prime the market for the DVD release in early ’07.
I called four New Line people in a position to know something and they were all in meetings.

A Mystic River-ish childhood anecdote from Little Children director-writer Todd Field, passed along to Oregonian critic Shawn Levy and posted on his “Mad About Movies” blog:
“I remember coming home one day on my bicycle along this gravel path, and this Ford Falcon pulled up, this white Ford Falcon with two guys in it, and they said ‘Come ‘ere kid, come ‘ere.’ And you know when you’re near trouble, at any age. And I knew they were bad, and I knew they were gonna get me in that car, and I knew that no one was every gonna see me again and they would do bad things to me and I would be dead. And I was screaming and tried to get away, and my bike fell in the gravel and they started chasing me, and lo and behold the next-door neighbor started coming down the street and saw me, and these guys ran and they sped off. And they didn’t catch them.
“And I went home and I told my parents and they didn’t show the fear that they had about the situation, but they didn’t stop letting me have my independence. And that’s what formed me as a human being: being allowed to have that childhood. And I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I’d just as soon have gone off in that car and not exist as not have the childhood that I had, which was tremendous — a great, great childhood. And [yet] as I’ve observed other parents in places I’ve lived — Los Angeles, New York and even London — it was a rare childhood.
“It didn’t have to do with my parents being good consumers and going out and buying everything and making you safe. They let us be as children and let us be feral and let us figure out who we were. They let us fight our own battles and some of them were hard.”

For the two-month shoot of Borat (20th Century Fox, 11.3), Sacha Baron Cohen “was in character from early in the morning until night,” reports Time‘s Joel Stein. “The crew shot so much footage that director Larry Charles is trying to sell the unused parts to HBO as a series. Even when the cops came, Baron Cohen never dropped character. It’s an impressive, perhaps insane, performance: Johnny Knoxville with a sense of humor, Andy Kaufman with a desire to please, Peter Sellers set loose on the public instead of David Niven. “It’s like Marlon Brando‘s performance in On the Waterfront,” says Charles. “Before that, everything was stylized, the John Barrymore school. After that, you couldn’t act in the old style anymore. I believe that Sacha’s performance does the same thing.”

Newsweek‘s Devin Gordon does his part to help devalue originality while bumming out readers in the bargain by saluting…well, not quite…acknowledging with muted respect the increasing popularity of prequels, a slightly re-energized indication of Hollywood’s boundless tediousness. The latest include, in no particular order: Casino Royale, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Halloween (young Michael Myers), Friday the 13th (young Jason Voorhees) and Hannibal Rising (young Hannibal Lecter). I need to find a hole to get sick in.

On Saturday morning Breadly Moore wrote in and said he’d seen Saw III on Friday and that he was “stunned to find it booed at the very end by the full house.” (Not scattered boos, in other words.) He said it “made [him] happy” to hear this since he figured the type of people that enjoy these films would swallow any tripe the producers decide to shovel down their throats.” I was stunned by this news myself. Has anyone heard of audiences booing or sneering Saw IIIthis weekend? If so, what did the beef seem to be, other than the general fact they didn’t like it? What, I wonder, can a horror-gore film possibly do to earn boos?

Richard Donner showed up at ComicCon last summer to talk about the forthcoming “ Superman II — The Richard Donner Cut” DVD (Warner Home Video, 11.28), and now that it’s only a month away from delivery I’m wondering if there’s much interest out there among the HE smarty-pants regulars, or if the dismay some felt about Bryan Singer‘s Superman Returns (which I still think is a solid film in a spiritual sense, even if I came to the conclusion it was a bit too long after seeing it a second time) has diminished interest or what.

The new DVD will contain Donner’s original cut, which was never released because the totally nutty Ilya and Alexander Salkind fired him and got Richard Lester to finish it. It’ll include footage shot but not used (Donner showed a new Daily Planet rescue sequence at Comic Con), including a never-before-seen beginning, a never-before-seen resolution, 15 minutes of restored footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El, additional scenes, commentary by Donner and creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz, plus a featurette called Superman II: Restoring the Vision.

During our Friday lunch Michael Sheen, who’s played British Prime Minister Tony Blair not only in The Queen but also in an ’03 British TV movie called The Deal, said that a “plan” is afoot between himself, Queen director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan to make a third Blair film.

This will be about Blair’s downfall due to his alliance with President Bush, his pitching the weapons-of- mass-destruction b.s. to the British people, and sending British troops to fight in the invasion of Iraq. It will begin with President Clinton‘s parting advice to Blair as the former leaves office to buddy up with Bush and find common ground. Out of this were sewn the seeds of Blair’s demise.

Nikki Finke has reported that among the 11.10 openers, Marc Forster‘s Stranger Than Fiction is tracking much better than Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year. Ironic given the unmistakable fact that Year is a somewhat better film — not a great one, but certainly better written, better assembled, and more in touch with itself and how to best say what it’s saying.
Year isn’t a comedy, like I said a few days ago, but a light mood piece about nurturing those things in one’s life that need nurturing. One of those tonic-for- the-soul movies about slipping out the back door and being a little bit happy at times, it left yours truly in a pleasant, sitting-outdoors-as-the-summer-sun-sets, enjoying-a-good-glass-of-wine frame of mind.
Fiction has some amusing moments but it isn’t “funny”, trust me — although the folks out there who buy books because of their covers are thinking it must be at least clever because it stars funny-guy Will Ferrell. When I saw it in Toronto I called it a middle-range mindfuck movie that isn’t especially clever or funny or up to anything that holds metaphorical water. That’s because the “imaginative” meta- physical scheme behind it doesn’t really add up or pan out. I almost hated it. In some ways I do hate it. It’s a half-assed little failure.
But Ferrell is biggger than Good Year star Russell Crowe, and Ferrell never threw a phone at anyone so there it is.

This has been kicking around for some time, but just for the HE record and in case somebody hasn’t read this on Defamer or elsewhere, there are indicators that strongly suggest Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat character is based on a real-life Turkish guy named Mahir Cagri, whose doofus-level web page attracted internet notoriety six or seven years ago.
Make your own assessment, but Cagri’s Wikipedia page says that “chief similarities between Mahir and Borat include facial hair and taste in formal wear. Borat also shouted out Mahir’s catchphrase ‘I like sex‘ to the crowd at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon and at a Savannah Sand Gnats baseball game. In Borat, Cohen not only quotes ‘I like sex’ and ‘You can stay my home’ in the introductory scenes, but poses during a game of ping-pong in revealing red shorts, referencing two of Mahir’s famous shots.
It’s been claimed, however, that the Borat character “has been in development since 1995, four years before Mahir’s page was online. Cohen has allegedly said it was based on a Russian doctor.”