Sacha Baron Cohen‘s best jotting so far in his theatrical put-on campaign for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, 11.3) wasn’t inviting “Premier George Walter Bush” to a screening of the film (Cohen actually went up to the White House gates on Wednesday to try and hand-deliver the invite), but the announcement that “Mel Gibsons” has also been sent one.

Cohen’s was at the White House to capitalize on today’s official visit by Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev. Kazakhstan press secretary Roman Vasilenko expressed again his and Nazarbayev’s concern that some might get the idea that Cohen’s Borat — an anti-Semitic Kazakh TV reporter — is a reflection of real-life Kazakhstan culture. Cohen “is not a Kazakh…what he represents is a country of Boratastan, a country of one,” Vasilenko told Reuters.

Nobody’s bothered by Scarlett Johansson agreeing to play the title role in Mary, Queen of Scots in a forthcoming mid-budgeted historical drama on top of already playing Mary Boleyn (older sister of Natalie Portman‘s Anne) in The Other Boleyn Girl for producer Scott Rudin and Columbia Pictures? The two characters were almost alive at the same time. (Anne Boleyn was born in 1504 and died of a severed head in 1536. Mary Queen of Scots was born in 1542 and died in early 1587.) I don’t mean to carp, but I already have issues with Johansson being in period dramas in the first place.

“I think this is Leo’s year,” a director said to me yesterday. He was referring to a generally presumed one-two combo from Leonardo DiCaprio‘s performances in Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed and Ed Zwick‘s Blood Diamond. The latter has everyone’s attention because Leo has nailed his South African accent quite well, to judge from what people are hearing in the trailer.

I’m developing this nob of an idea, however, that Djimon Honsou may be formidable also in that film. My information comes from an interested party so there’s nothing to consider all that heavily. And like I said before, The Last Samurai and Legends of the Fall are reason enough to instill caution when approaching a new Ed Zwick movie. And…I could say something but I won’t. I think it’ll be shown sometime in October, though, and not November.

Emanuel Levy on the art and accomplishments of Little Children‘s Kate Winslet.

David Poland is calling yours truly, “The Envelope’s” Tom O’Neil and and Fox 411’s Roger Friedman a team of “walking orifices” and “Butt Monkeys”. It has to do with my having praised Sienna Miller‘s performance in Factory Girl and then having put her on my “Envelope” Best Actress list, and O’Neil having written a piece about Harvey Weinstein intending to launch a Best Actress campaign for her, etc. I don’t know if Friedman has written anything about this, but Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers has put Miller on his Best Actress list also.
The only substantial bottom line on this matter is that I’ve seen Factory Girl and Poland hasn’t.
Harvey depends on certain journalists to push his agenda, yes, but Poland has himself turned the organ handle like a well-lubed Butt Monkey on behalf of certain films and filmmakers in the past, so let’s not play this tune too loudly. Poland’s point seems to be that Harvey has no other serious Oscar card to play with the Bobby steam depleting — maybe — and that Miller’s only chance is to nab a #5 slot due to Meryl Streep, Annette Bening, Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren and Penelope Cruz being already well planted. I see Bening and possibly Winslet possibly taking a hit if their respective films, Running with Scissors and Little Children, don’t play sufficiently well with the public…we’ll see.
The only rock-solid Best Actress locks at this stage are Streep, Mirren and Cruz — and I think calling Streep’s Miranda Priestley a Best Actress performance in The Devil Wears Prada is a stretch. She’s a “lead” in the same way Anthony Hopkins was a lead in Silence of the Lambs — a lead by force of presence and magnetism. But the only one lead in that film, obviously, is Anne Hathaway.

I don’t know or care, really, if Josh Hartnett and Scarlet Johansson are still entwined and it doesn’t matter either way, but the general belief is that they met during the making of Brian De Palma‘s The Black Dahlia. If they’re still happening at this moment, by the law of Hollywood relationships the failure of Dahlia — critically, commercially — means that if they’re still together, they won’t be for much longer. Doomed. A movie is like a child — a creative by-product of an alliance that began with an on-set affair — and if it goes out into the world and is dissed by critics and the ticket-buying public, it’s like a thumbs-down on the relationship itself. Which makes the lovers feel like they’ve contracted a virus of some kind. And before you know it they’re “done.”

More Flags of Our Fathers deck shuffling: a friend tells me Clint Eastwood‘s Iwo Jima film (Dreamamount, 10.20) was scheduled to screen in the evening in Manhattan over the last 36 to 48 hours, but then it was cancelled. (That’s on top of a few people alegedly being invited and then disinvited to see it at yesterday’s L.A. screening.) Flags screened this morning in New York at 9 ayem, and then the print flew out.

On one hand those Movie City News interview clips from last weekend’s The Departed junket are cool because they’re video — robust aural-visual immediacy! On other hand the quickie-question format reduces everything to banaility. Individuals lose, the promotion machine wins…and I always feel a little less alive and more like a spoon-fed monkey in a cage when I watch one of these pieces. The thing to run (and which I would be proud to create some day on HE) would be an ongoing Jamie Stuart-type video journal. Stuart is an avatar of a streetcorner reality vs, showbiz sensibility that’s fermenting out there right now.

It’s been a hunker-down week for Clint Eastwood‘s two Iwo Jima films. Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20) was screened for a tight little group yesterday, but if any press people were invited I wasn’t told about it. (Not that I made a big deal about finding out.) The first Left Coast journo showing apparently won’t be happening until next week. And Warner Bros., apparently, continued to explore and negotiate and re-examine all over again what date will be best for the release of Letters From Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s Japanese-soldier war film intended to complement Flags. Dither, dither, dither.

What an amazing, exciting, profitable thing all around: Peter Jackson is partnering with Microsoft to create at least two Xbox 360 video games, one of which will be based on Jackson’s upcoming Halo, under the aegis of a new outfit called Wingnut Interactive. I’m getting the chills just thinking about it. Jackson and close partners Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens will dream up the particulars together. Think of the joy, the jazz…the cultural adrenalin that will be felt from these games. Not to mention the truckloads of money to be earned.
I’m saying, in other words, that Jackson is perhaps better attuned or suited to the video-game creator mentality than that of a genuinely intriguing filmmaker, which is to say someone with an ability and/or willingness to hold back at times, to occasionally understate, to not always push the visual pizazz at level 10. Jackson always creates at an extremely showoffy, unsophisticated level, and I think this approach is more in synch with what gamers are looking for than what people who appreciate the sometimes more delicate chemistry that goes into making a truly fine film.
Water always finds its own level, and I think Jackson has just found — accepted — his.

“There has never been anything quite like Asger Leth‘s Ghosts of Cite Soleil,” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has written. “It’s amazing it even exists and that the director is still alive. Rough as can be in both content and style, Ghosts will be welcome everywhere tough, provocative docus are shown.”

This Matt Damon-Jimmy Kimmel confrontation happened a week or so ago. What’s wrong with it, of course, is that it’s an act. It would have been brilliant — historic — if Damon had really gotten angry and stormed off. It would have been something real and rude instead of another damn mock- ironic put-on. Everything is on this level these days — on talk shows, SNL, sitcoms. Nothing laid on the line, every statement in “quotes.”