Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents is a nicely confident British period piece…funny, ascerbic, touching at times. And it sinks in, yes, but not that deeply — it has that wry Frears sensibility, and satisfies only as far as it goes. If you’re looking for a delightful time at the Royal in West Los Angeles, it does the trick…but it’s not an A-list Best Picture contender. Why? It’s more of a chuckler than a feeler — it’s emotionally earnest and Judy Dench is terrific in the lead role (ditto Bob Hoskins as her stage manager), but even with the dead-son element it doesn’t quite put a lump in your throat. Almost, close…but not quite.

And yet Curtis Hanson’s In Your Shoes, dismissed by a certain columnist as a good commercial film but not an awards-calibre thing, has an emotional resonance factor (it’s not about shoes or bickering sisters but resolving family hurt) that might persuade some in the Academy to think about Oscar-ish distinctions. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I don’t think so. It got to me (and I can be kind of a hard-ass), and I’ve felt how it plays with a crowd. If any- one catches In Your Shoes at one of those sneak preview screenings being held across the country this evening (Saturday, 9.24), I’d appreciate some reactions.

“A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg’s latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis declared in her 9.23 review. “That sounds far grimmer or at least more relentlessly grim than this shrewd, agile, often bitingly funny film plays. The great kick of [it] — or rather, the great kick in the gut — comes from Mr. Cronenberg’s refusal to let us indulge in movie violence without paying a price. The man wants to make us suffer, exquisitely. Decades of mainlining blockbusters have, for better or perhaps for worse, inured us to the image of bullet-chewed bodies and the pop-pop-pop of phony weapon fire. For the contemporary movie connoisseur, film death is now as cheap as it is familiar. To which Mr. Cronenberg quietly says, ‘Oh, yeah?'”

A TV comedy show is usually two things — what the creators intend it to be in their heads as they’re fine-tuning the season opener, and what the creators change it into after they’ve shifted into panic mode after an initial bad review or two, or when the ratings are much lower than expected. So let’s see what happens with Comedy Central’s The Showbiz Show with David Spade from here on…

The instant a film is described as a “romantic comedy,” it’s dead to me. That’s why I wouldn’t watch Dirty Love on a plane…even if I was dead-bored. You can always depend on a “romantic comedy” to be arch, off-the-ground and phony as a three-dollar bill. There have been exceptions, yes, but 96% of the time the term means the movie will be farcical and dumb-assed. It will contain nothing angular or vaguely thoughtful, nothing perverse, no laughs… and it will have a juvenile and relentlessly hyper attitude about sex. It means loyal readers of Star, In Touch, People and Us will be there on opening weekend (maybe).

I don’t believe in airing dirty laundry if you’re profiling someone involved with a new film (actor, director, etc.) for its own sake. However, you should absolutely get into it if it applies to the work. Naturally, being an L.A. Times piece, you won’t find this criteria in Michael Goldman’s interview with Jenny McCarthy about Dirty Love (First Look, 9.23). Starring and written by McCarthy, the film is described on the IMDB as “an edgy comedy about a girl who has fallen out of love” and more particularly about “a jilted photographer who sets off on a mission to get back at her philandering model boyfriend.” It is therefore not only allowable but necessary to ask if the reason for McCarthy’s divorce from John Asher, the film’s director, is echoed in the movie’s plot. Goldman wimps out, of course. He writes that the divorce was due to “irreconciliable differences” and quotes Asher as saying that getting divorced “was something that Jenny felt she had to do.” Damn it, did they get divorced because Asher cheated or what? Did the idea of a “philandering boyfriend” come to McCarthy as she was writing the script because of marital experience with Asher…yes or no? If not, what real-life experience was McCarthy drawing from? The decision by Goldman and his Times editor to sidestep this was cowardly.

I love that they’re trying to sell the new four-disc Ben-Hur
DVD to the religious right, offering to Christian retail outlets a “Ben-Hur Bible Study Guide” by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller and his son, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, the co-chairmen of Crystal Cathedral Ministries. This is just as phony a sales pitch as the original author, General Lew Wallace, calling his book “A Tale of the Christ.” As co-screenwriter Gore Vidal explains on the “making of” doc, Ben-Hur is the story of unrequited love, betrayal and revenge between a Jewish boy and a Roman boy. Rage and bitterness are washed clean at the finale by Christ’s blood trickling into a stream, fine..but Ben-Hur never would have never been made into a film if the character of Judah Ben-Hur had followed the Nazarene’s teachings. If Judah (Charlton Heston) had returned from Jack Hawkins’ villa in Rome and decided to turn the other cheek and forgive Messala (Stephen Boyd) after learning that his boyhood friend had condemned his mother and sister to prison and the scourge of leprosy (instead of doing what he does in the film, which is to challenge and then defeat Messala in the chariot race, which results in Messala being trampled to death by horses), Ben-Hur never would have been greenlit.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson, Steven Soderbergh says the “skewed studio system” — i.e., the overall economics of cost vs. revenue — “needs to be rethought. People need to be made true partners in the real risk/reward ratio. Everybody needs to be talking about fair compensation and participation. It can be done. The force of economics is irresistible.” In other words, stars should risk it like the producers do…in line with the Robert Evans philosophy of “everybody risks it…if the movie hits, everybody makes out…if it doesn’t, at least nobody gets hurt.” That means putting a harness on their agents and pay-or-play deals…right?

You’re hearing it here again, and I don’t know anything except for having read the Jarhead script way back when and knowing how unshakably hard-core the “Troy” character is: Peter Sarsgaard is going to score big with his performance as this guy…the steely- eyed Marine buddy to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Anthony Swofford character…the hard guy who never wavers or shudders or loses focus…who always has his shit wrapped tight. I haven’t been to an early screening — this is merely what I got when I met this guy on the page, and I’m just tellin’ ya…

On the other hand, I can understand a reader’s reluctance to buy what I’m saying because I also claimed that Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown was going to be the shit based on having read the script…and look what happened in Toronto. (The shorter version is about to be screened for the junketeers, but let me repeat that the longer version isn’t a total wipeout because it finds the groove at roughly the halfway mark…it gradually becomes a film about what makes life joyful and worth hanging onto.) Scripts are blueprints — when you read a good one you start directing the “movie” in your head. But you also expect that this good script will be further tweaked before it’s actually filmed (most films are tweaked and tweaked within an inch of their lives), and there are so many ways to emphasize this or de-emphasize that. All I can say is that I wrote a pretty good piece in the mid ’90s called “Loved the Script, Hated the Movie.”

What happens when you see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan a second time? (My first exposure was in the Varsity 8 last Friday at the Toronto Film Festival.) This masterful doc, which I saw yesterday on the Paramount Home Video DVD, gets a little bit better because the basic theme seems that much clearer, and the half-ecstatic, half-tragic arc of Dylan’s experience from ’62 to ’66 is that much harder to miss. Dylan’s basic motto/game plan was to always live and work in a state of becoming — no standing still, no looking back, always the next thing, etc. This was the basic mindset that led to his early-to-mid-60s genius run. It was what took him to the top of the plateau, and also what enraged his folkie fans to the point that many of them wanted him pushed off when he went electric. The extras are cool (full-length clips of Dylan singing this and that song, four or five tribute numbers by other artists) but the coolest thing about it is the slight but distinct improvement factor which, after all, is what happens with all great films.

In a 3.16 lead piece called “9/11 Pitch Meeting,” I argued that the story behind the forthcoming Oliver Stone 9/11 movie, about a couple of Port Authority police officers named Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin who found themselves buried inside a small pit under 20 feet of rubble after the collapse of the North Tower, and were eventually found and dug out, isn’t nearly as intriguing as the story of Port Authority employee Pasquale Buzzelli. I’ve passed this along before…Buzzelli was the guy who was in a stairwell on the 22nd floor of the North Tower when it came crashing down and who somehow survived. (He awoke a couple of hours later on a concrete slab situated 30 feet above where Jimeno and McLoughlin were trapped.) Buzzelli’s story is ten times what Jimeno and McLoughlin’s is because of the surreal, full-throttle, hand-of-God quality of what happened to the guy…he’s almost the mythical “building surfer.” I’m mentioning this because Buzzelli’s story is one of many included in “102 Minutes,” the what-happened-inside-the-towers history by New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. Their book has been adapted into script form by Shattered Glass director Billy Ray for a possible film to be produced by Columbia-based Mike Deluca. Anyway, here’s the shot: before leaving Manhattan in late August I spoke to a friend who’s read a recent draft of Ray’s script and…my face turned ash-gray when I heard this…Buzzelli’s story isn’t in it. Don’t know if this is true, but if it is…?