Congrats also to Danish director Asger Leth and producers Cary Woods and George Hickenlooper for their doc, Ghosts of Cite Soleil, getting into Toronto also. I wrote about Ghosts after catching it last March. It’s about two pistol-packing Haitian brothers who ran slum gangs during the final months of Jean Bertrand Aristide‘s presidency, and how things got worse for them after Aristide was deposed.

After seeing it, I wrote that “I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom. In short, this excellent 88-minute film adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth.”

Ethan Hawke‘s The Hottest State is a drama based on Hawke’s debut novel, set in Manhatttan, about a frustrating relationship between a Texas actor named William (Mark Webber) and a singer/songwriter named Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno), with a previous romantic interest named Samantha (Michelle Williams) flitting in and out of his life. And now Hawke’s 117-minute film will play as an out-of-competition selection at the upcoming Venice Film Festival. Which means, presumably, it’ll show at the Toronto Film Festival also. State also stars Laura Linney, Sonia Braga and Hawke.

I’ve been reading about Doug Liman‘s currently-lensing Jumper, a $100 million-budgeted supernatural thriller based on the Steven Gould novel about a 17 year-old (played by 20 year-old Vanity Fair and Being Julia costar Tom Sturridge) with emotional problems who discovers he can teleport from one place to another, and how he uses this gift to sleuth around for the guy who killed his mother, blah, blah. Another variation on Spider-Man (young superhero with hang-ups) and Batman (murdered parent naturally calling out for exposure and revenge). I should mention there are reports that Sturridge has been whacked and that Liman is replacing him with (God forbid) human death-star Hayden Christensen or costar Jamie Bell. This Moviehole Comic-Con item, based on a chat with Jumper costar Samuel L. Jackson, says “Christensen might be joining [Jackson]” on Liman’s film. There’s are two IMDB postings stating flat-out that Sturridge has been fired. The plan is allegedly (emphasis on that word) to do re-shoots in November with whomever the new star is, if in fact Sturridge is history. I think I’m supposed to care about this and make calls to New Regency right about now. That’s the expected thing, I mean.

Episode #1 of “Tabloid Wars“, the six-part series focusing on the uphill, day-to-day hump that various N.Y. Daily News staffers experienced last summer, preemed on Bravo last Monday evening and will be repeating all this week. (There’s an airing today at 6 pm eastern.)
N.Y. Times critic Allesandra Stanley says the series is “not really about the circulation battle between New York’s two famously competitive tabloids” — Bravo’s home-team paper and the New York Post . The latter “is barely seen” in the series, she says, and its name “is invoked with smoldering hatred, like Osama bin Laden or Moby-Dick.” Instead, the series “follows reporters and city editors as they scramble to cover hate crimes, cop shootings and celebrity scandals.”
I’m especially interested in the episodes that focus on gossip columnist pals George Rush and Joanna Molloy, who were good enough to give my son Jett an intern gig last summer. George tells me that episodes featuring himself, Joanna and Rush & Molloy contributors Jo Piazza and Chris Rovzar are #1 and #5. (The Bravo guys shot footage of Jett so maybe there’ll be a glimpse.)

On one hand, this trailer for Asylum’s straight-to-video Snakes on a Train (8.15) makes a persuasive case that it’s just a jerkwad ripoff of Snakes on a Plane with ickier makeup and prosthetics. But having seen that eight-minute product reel for Snakes on a Plane at Comic-Con last weekend, it doesn’t seem that much sillier than the New Line film. It seems trashier, yes, but also trippier and more ludicrous. And with a wider selection of snake sizes. (Train‘s poster-art concept of a big snake putting its mouth around an entire train car isn’t, it turns out, just a drawing-board concept.) Oh, and here‘s New York Post critic Lou Lumenick interviewing Asylum’s David Latt.

I finally saw Stuart Gordon‘s film of David Mamet‘s Edmond last night, and I was startled by how good most of it is. Good as in brave, brazen, uber-declarative. It’s about a middle-aged businessman (William H. Macy) who just can’t stand it any more and cuts loose and goes mad over the course of a single evening in Manhattan’s seamy sexual underground. (If you have to ask what “it” is then you won’t get this movie.) I’ll get into this more in a day or two but here’s a taste of the dialogue. It’s a little echo-y and hard to make out, but it’s Macy and costar Joe Mantegna having a very pared-down, Mamet-like conversation.

Sometimes it’s okay to just go with an idea that pops into your head. Because sometimes that idea can be astonishing. (And sometimes it can go the other way.) A guy wrote in today said he didn’t care for the title of Curtis Hanson’s film Lucky You, and right away an alternative came to me: Lucky Jew. Not because it sounds like an impertinent Mel Brooks title, but because I would simply want to see a movie about a Jewish gambler. I just would. It speaks to me. It sounds like rude fun. I would also be a bit more intrigued if the film was called Luck You. This implies that being visited by luck can be a bad thing, because it throws you off your game. I don’t mind Lucky You as a title — it’s okay — but I like these alternatives better.

Oregonian critic Shawn Levy has interviewed Gus Van Sant about his next film, Paranoid Park, which the director-writer is calling “Crime and Punishment in high school.” (Wait…Larry Gross wrote a script in the late ’90s literally called “Crime and Punishment in High School”, and it was called Crime and Punishment in Suburbia when it came out in 2000.) Van Sant’s film will be based on a novel by “sometime Portlander” Blake Nelson. The book will be published in September by Viking Juvenile, and Gus’s film will begin shooting around Portland in the fall. Set in the world of Portland’s skateboarders, it’s about a teenage kid “who accidentally kills a security guard and has to figure out what to do when police start to investigate the death.”

Of all the weekend’s five openers, Little Miss Sunshine has by far the highest Rotten Tomatoes rating — 93%. In fact, it’s the only film with a passing grade (i.e., anything with a 70% or more average). But it’s only opening in L.A. and New York so the big opener, presumably, will be Miami Vice (64%), followed by The Ant Bully (33%). Woody Alllen’s Scoop (31%) is unfortunately the worst film he’s ever made, and no comment on John Tucker Must Die.

Kevin Smith is going to sit in for Roger Ebert “next week” (whatever that means in terms of air dates….the weekend after this one coming?) and trade quips with Richard Roeper. Wait a minute….Kevin’s My Space announcement says “we’ll be checking out Miami Vice, Ant Bully Talladega Nights, Barnyard and maybe (fingers crossed) World Trade Center.” In other words he and Roeper are going to review Miami Vice a week or so after the 7.28 opening? Is that how the show sometimes works? You’d think it would be reviewed this weekend…no?

Wait a minute…Curtis Hanson‘s Lucky You (Warner Bros., 9.8) is opening in six weeks? It’s a presumably well-written gambling flick (how can it not be with Hanson having collaborated with screenwriiter Eric Roth?) about a bigtime poker player with issues working against him. Hanson (In Her Shoes, 8 Mile ) has cast Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall and Debra Messing in the lead roles. You will obviously open during the Toronto Film Festival but it won’t be part of it, I’ve been told.

The trailer, which started playing in theatres last weekend, is now online at the AOL Moviefone site. But you need the dreaded Mozilla Active X plugin to see it and I’ve found it impossible to download this damn thing so I’m out of luck. WB should make it available through a different viewing software.
I’m one of those odd ducks who hates actual gambling — losing money to some guy across the table who has a better hand or is a better buffer makes me want to punch a refrigerator (especially if it’s the latter) — and yet I love good gambling movies like California Split, Rounders and The Gambler , so I’m pretty stoked about this one. Theoretically, I mean.
The only thing that gives me slight concern is the Bana karma. He’s only starred in two U.S.-made films thus far (The Hulk, Munich) and as far as I’m concerned they were both stiffs. I liked Bana in his modest role in Black Hawk Down and he was great in the Australian-made Chopper (which launched his career) but he doesn’t seem to have any heat right now. I hope Lucky You changes this, but so far the cards have been cold and the dice haven’t been rolling.

Just watched the trailer for Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10). It’s basically about Will Ferrell as an IRS agent named Harold Crick hearing his life being narrated by a woman’s voice as he lives it, and the narrator turning out to be an actual writer named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) working on a story about Crick’s life. Zack Helm‘s script is a variation on an idea floated in Woody Allen‘s The Purple Rose of Cairo, which is that characters have wills of their own that argue with the plot decisions made by the writers who’ve created them. If you’ve ever worked on a screenplay you know how true this can be. At a certain point the characters tell you what they would do, and not vice versa. The costars are Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Tony Hale and Kristin Chenoweth.
…thoughts?