Alan Cerny wrote in response to my Running With Scissors review that he’s heard the film “has a montage set to Al Stewart‘s ‘Year Of The Cat’ — that alone is enough to make me run screaming.” Hold on, soldier. First of all, director Ryan Murphy doesn’t use the whole song but just the opening piano section. Which is the best part of the song. And listening to a this, trust me, is the most enjoyable portion of the film. I took the song and copied the piano intro a couple of times and edited out the singing — this is almost exactly what’s on the Scissors soundtrack.
“Queen Jane Approximately”

Not realizing at the time that Flags of Our Fathers would be opening on only 1800 or so screens, I called it as the weekend’s top film a couple of days ago. Nope. The Friday numbers are in and Flags wll finish in third place with an estimated $10,749,000. The weekend’s #1 film will be The Prestige at $15,089,000 with The Departed at #2 with $13,733 and a total cume of $77,206,000. Open Season will be fourth with $8,572,000, Flicka fifth with $7,988,000, The Grudge 2 sixth with $7,910,000, Man of the Year seventh with $7,011,000 and I don’t care about the rest.
The Queen is now in 99 theatres — taking things slow and steady — and will earn about $1,464,000 this weekend with an average of about $14,8000 per situation. Marie-Antoinette opened in 859 theatres — if Sony had any kind of all-out confidence in Sofia Coppola’s film they would’ve gone bigger — and will generate about $6000 per situation for a weekend total of about $5,897,000. Running With Scissors has opened in eight theatres and has done pretty well, but I can’t read my own writing on this one so let’s wait until tomorrow.

Hollywood Elsewhere is seeking an intern to work on all aspects of the site except the writing (unless you’re a genius with a prose style very close to mine) in exchange for school credit. Work from your own place but it has to be someone enrolled in a Los Angeles (or L.A.-area) university. I don’t know how it usually works when a journalism major interns with a publication but I’d prefer someone who will commit to a longer rather than a shorter term. Access/entry to press screenings, occasional press junkets, industry gatherings, etc. I’ve been hearing from friends over the past two years that I need to do this. And now I’ve finally taken their advice about six weeks after most fall terms have already begun…brilliant.

“I came to London to study a three-year course, and about a year and a half into it, I was invited to do casting for Amores Perros. I got a phone call from Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director, and he asked me to read something, videotape myself and send it back to him. I had never done casting before in my life, so I did exactly what he told me to do. After that, I got a phone call back from him saying, ‘Let’s do it.’

“So he sends me the script, and I said yes. Well, I was going to say yes anyway. But there was one big problem. My school [London’s Central School of Speech and Drama] didn’t allow me to work. In England, they don’t let you miss school. If you miss school for three days, you get chucked out. In Mexico, this is completely incomprehensible.
“So I told Alejandro, and he came up with a very good Latin American solution to this problem. He said that a relative was a director of a hospital and he would be able to get me a medical certificate to say that I had contracted some big tropical disease on my last visit to Mexico. That was perfect because I had no hair when I got back here from Amores Perros and people believed me completely.” — from an excellent Nation Film Theatre q & a with Babel costar Gael Garca Bernal in The Guardian, complete with an mp3 podcast of the event.

The worst trailer mash I’ve ever seen. Uncreative, clunky, witless, tasteless, stupid…really loathsome. Especially the very end of it. “Oh my gosh” is right.

“A favorite quote of the week came from a producer of a major awards contender : ‘I guess since no one has seen it yet, Dreamgirls must be the front runner for Best Picture.'” — from Pete Hammond‘s latest Hollywood Wiretap column.

Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal has made some early Oscar calls, and decided that the top five Best Picture candidates are Babel (of course), The Departed (definitely), Dreamgirls (almost certainly), Flags of Our Fathers (most likely) and United 93 (brilliant!).

I haven’t even looked at this, but it’s an apparently legit link to a Borat press conference that happened today in Santa Monica.

The Envelope “Buzzometer” is up and running…sort of. Only five or six of the ten contributors — USA Today‘s Claudia Puig, Comingsoon.net‘s Edward Douglas, Newsday‘s Gene Seymour, myself, the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips, Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond (one of the slackers), Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, Ebert & Roeper‘s Richard Roeper, and The Envelope ‘s Steve Pond and Tom O’Neil — are there, but I guess everyone will be along by the end of the month.

Two YouTube files containing refreshers on that original 20/20 Chris Gardner profile that led to the making of The Pursuit of Happyness — part #1 and part #2.

With the exception of his performances in Enemy of the State and Ali, I’ve been fairly averse to Will Smith for years. He’s a calculating performer who always leans on his shtick and charm. Too smooth, too ready with a line and a smile. Some critics feel Smith has to pay for past sins (The Wild Wild West and chomping on that cigar and saying “now that’s what I call a close encounter!” in Independence Day ) and that he needs to just be still — just settle into himself and stop looking for love.

So when I began hearing about his being a presumed Best Actor nominee in Gabriele Muccino‘s The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15), I wasn’t buyin’ it. Then a week or two ago I watched the trailer and damn if he doesn’t win you right over, especially playing a father and a real-life figure with the older-guy makeup and the sideburns and all.
Now comes word from a guy who’s seen the film that Smith is restrained and focused all through it (the guy actually used the word “stoical”), and that the story — how businessman Chris Gardner went from homelessness and sleeping in bathrooms with his young son to great strength and wealth — holds back on the emotion until the final ten minutes. And at this point, the guy says, he succumbed. He choked up.
Smith is “a guaranteed lock for Best Actor,” the guy says. “It’s between him and Peter O’Toole.”
Between this guy and another guy, the two-man consensus is that Forrest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) peaked too early, Derek Luke (Catch a Fire) is good but may not deliver enough voltage to warrant a nomination, and that people are now snickering at Leonardo DiCaprio‘s South African accent in Blood Diamond so that one’s up in the air too. Fuck that, I said. It’s enough that DiCaprio kills in The Departed.

If the general critical barometer means anything, Flags of Our Fathers — despite the flaws, despite grousing from a few “name” critics, despite a director I know telling me that people who’ve seen it have been going “naah” — is going to wind up as a Best Picture Oscar nominee. The Academy doesn’t exactly look to film critics for guidance, but the Clint legend and Clint kowtowing are very powerful forces in this town, and critical huzzahs backing this up are always part of the dynamic.

The Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic averages for Flags of Our Fathers are about the same — 75% and 78% positive, respectively. One out of every four critics going “sorry, but not this time” doesn’t exactly constitute a mixed response, but it’s not anyone’s idea of a thundering critical consensus either. It basically means Flags of Our Fathers is no Million Dollar Baby.
One indicator is that within some the allegedly positive reviews, you’ll find some half-hearted statements. “The flaws in Flags of Our Fathers are at least partly attributable to Eastwood’s attempts to do too much,” wrote red-tomato raver Stephanie Zacharek of Salon. John Venabale of Supercalafragalistic.com, another supposed raver,says “it’s good, great in spurts, but overall leaves one longing for a story better suited for film.” L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss says that “making a movie like [Flags] is totally honorable, even pretty heroic. I just wish that it had moved me more.” Joshua Tyler of Cinemablend says Eastwood’s film “raises interesting questions about heroism and the uses of propaganda, but it left me hungering for more about the battle.”

Fact is, most of the unqualified raves are from the top-dog elite — Dargis, Turan, McCarthy, Puig, Roeper, Rea, Matthews — and I have a feeling that some of these critics are doing a subtle little dance. I’m not saying they’re shading or modifying their true opinions, but I know that Clint has a fraternity of film critic fans who are part of the faith and “on the boat” — and if you know anything about human nature you know we all like being on the boat rather than off it. I also know that almost every over-40 critic worships the Eastwood career metaphor (i.e., the older you get the better you get), and that admiration for an artist’s general body of work always slips into this or that particular review.