So the $13 million earned by Fever Pitch on its opening weekend is said to be disappointing, and a shadow now hangs over over the nascent film career of Jimmy Fallon. The poor schlub just didn’t have the right chemistry with costar Drew Barrymore, blah, blah. I’m wondering, though, why the one-sheet made absolutely no mention of the fact that this was (look at me…referring to this puppy in the past tense already!) a Bobby and Peter Farrelly comedy? Don’t their names mean something to the fans of There’s Something About Mary, et. al.? Did Fox marketers hide this fact because the Farrelly’s Stuck on you only took in a lousy $34 million or so, and they were afraid this failure would taint Fever on some level? And while we’re on the subject, what killed the Farrelly’s Three Stooges film with Russell Crowe as Moe?

A bit more on the stall-out (what else can you call it? a case of profound head-scratching?) of Steven Soderbergh’s Che, a biopic that’s been expected to focus on the gnarlier aspects of the late revolutionary leader’s life and exploits. A little more than ten days ago, Benicio del Toro, who’s been intending to play Guevara in this particular vehicle for a long while, was asked about the project by an Empire Online reporter, and he replied, “I’m going to see [Soderbergh] in a week or so, and we’re going to sit down. We just want to make a good movie, and it’s really hard to take the life of that man and condense it in two hours…it’s just really hard. So we have to find an angle that we stay true and honest to the guy, and at the same time, you know, attack some of the questions of who he was, and make it work like a movie.” In other words, back to the drawing board. Despite earlier-announced plans to start shooting this moderately expensive drama next August (i.e., four months from now), the project is obviously on hold until sometime in mid to late ’06. Is “we need to find an angle” a euphemism for money problems? Could this mean that Terrence Malick, who was going to direct Che before Soderbergh stepped into the gig about a year ago, might pick up the reins yet again? Malick’s The New World will be completed and released by late ’05, so who knows? Soderbergh is currently working on the experimental Bubble, and in September will begin lensing The Good German, a post-World War II romantic thriller written by Paul Attanasio with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. (Yeah, I know — I’ve already said that.)

Kristin Scott-Thomas is telling BBC News that the success of the French-produced Arsene Lupin, which opened in Europe last fall but has apparently found no U.S. distributor, exemplifies a new approach to movies in France. “I think it’s very exciting,” Scott Thomas remarked, “because for a long time in France ‘commercial’ was a dirty word. Now it’s okay to make a lot of money with the films that you’re making.” It’s certainly okay for this 44 year-old French resident, because the producing of more and more empty fantabulous films in France means she gets to earn bigger paychecks. What she doesn’t acknowledge, of course, is that the movie is, to judge by reviews, on the fatuous side. As Boyd van Hoeij of European Films.net politely puts it, Arsene Lupin “is high on atmosphere and production values (the reported budget being 23 million Euros), though it treats the story only as a necessity to bring us from one skirmish to the other, from one lady’s bed to the other and from one flaming explosion to the next.” See what I mean? The cultural-aesthetic cancer that has all but taken over mainstream big-budget filmmaking in Hollywood has spread to France. Break out the Dom Perignon! “Arsene Lupin [can] be an old-fashioned adventure if you are willing to let it be just that,” van Hoeij continues. “The story and its internal logic are not its greatest feats, but indulge in this two-hour fantasy of this rakish burglar in an exquisitely imagined Paris and Normandy and you will come away entertained, amused and delighted.” Adhering to general principle, I am torn between shedding a tear and wanting to throw up.

Thunder Approaching

My baby blues have beheld the majesty of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6).
It may be a little bit early to say what it is, but I think it’s fair to say what it isn’t. That sounds, I realize, like I’m qualifying or being “careful” by saying as little as possible. Not so. I just need to set the record straight about something I wrote about this super-sized epic late last year.

In some ways surprising, in several ways stirring and in almost every way admirable, Kingdom is a big-canvas historical drama that dares to be different. I’m not saying it doesn’t give in to formula now and then, but it’s a complex and unusual thing for the most part, and altogether a textural masterpiece.
That sounds like I’m dodging the central issue of whether it’s entertaining or not. It is, but what got me is the beauty of the brushstrokes. That and the avoidance of the usual usual.
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Has there ever been a big expensive film about warring armies in which one side didn’t triumph absolutely? In which the loser wasn’t totally beaten down and slaughtered? I felt amazed and lifted up when this didn’t manifest…when life and sanity, in effect, is chosen over death and fanaticism.
The 12th Century milieu feels entirely authentic, the big siege-of-Jerusalem battle scene totally aces Peter Jackson’s similar third-act sequence in Return of the King, there are fine supporting performances throughout (especially from Jeremy Irons and a masked Edward Norton), and William Monahan’s script, praise Allah, avoids a lot of black-and-white, good-and-evil stereotypes.
In the title role of Balian of Ibelin, defender of Jersualem, Orlando Bloom has zotzed the girlyman image he created for himself in Troy . He is bearded, grimy, quiet and steady throughout Kingdom of Heaven. He is manly, in short, and does that classic Jimmy Cagney thing — planting his feet, looking the other guy in the eye and telling the truth.

Does he channel Laurence Olivier? No, but Bloom has definitely held his ground here, and the stage is now set for him to carry the ball into the end zone, maybe, in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.
Ghassan Massoud, the Middle Eastern actor who plays Saladin, makes an especially strong impression. He doesn’t just play a man of honor and a commanding leader — he seems to possess these traits himself, and has made them readable on the screen by just being. It’s one of those “wow, who was that?” performances that should be remembered at year’s end.
But let’s get back to my original point — what the film isn’t. Especially since the unspooling of Kingdom of Heaven argues with a forecast piece that I wrote about and posted on 12.29.04.
This is a film about the Crusades and a decisive late 12th century battle between Muslim and European armies over the occupation of Jerusalem. Given the invading Anglos vs. Middle East natives angle, one might expect Kingdom of Heaven to conjure a political echo or two about the U.S. occupation in Iraq.
At the very least, this seemed like a perfectly logical and reasonable thing to presume.
“9/11 was three years and three months ago, the invasion of Iraq happened in March ’03, and principal photography on Kingdom of Heaven began in Morocco last January,” I wrote. “And in the minds of Scott and his creative team, the U.S. vs. Iraqi insurgent situation didn’t weave its way into the film on this or that level?”

These echoes are there, I suppose, if you want to dig them up. I suppose you could regard the last ten or fifteen minutes of this film in a metaphorical light and say it addresses the fundamental folly of being an occupier, and in fact offers an honorable solution for those who find themselves in this situation.
But Kingdom of Heaven is such an atmospheric reconstruction of the 12th Century, such a devoted here’s-how-it-looked-and-smelled experience, and Scott’s eye is so painterly and his focus so unlike, say, what Oliver Stone’s might have been, that you just don’t get much of a Baghdad/Fallujah/Abu Ghraib residue.
In my 12.29 piece I said, “Can anyone think of another occupying Anglo force that went into a Middle Eastern country for bogus reasons and is probably fated to leave with its tail between its legs?
I then linked to an 8.12.05 New York Times piece by Sharon Waxman that explored this and related issues to some degree.
“With bloody images of Muslims and Westerners battling in Iraq and elsewhere on the nightfly news, it may seem like odd timing to unveil a big-budget Hollywood epic about the ferocious fighting between Christians and Muslims over Jerusalem in the Crusade of the 12th Century,” her story began.
“While the studio has tried to emphasize the romance and thrilling action, some religious scholars and interfaith activists…have questioned the wisdom of a big Hollywood movie about an ancient religious conflict when many people believe that those conflicts have been reignited in a modern context.”

I never got hold of Monahan’s script and I don’t know if Scott cut stuff out in order to de-politicize Kingdom of Heaven, but once it starts to be shown, those scholars and interfaith activists will, in my opinion, have a hard time selling whatever complaints they may have to journalists.
And I’m including anyone in the pro-Islamic p.r. community. I didn’t see anything in this film that dismissed or put down any Muslim characters, or which failed to respect their point of view.
One of my favorite scenes is when Bloom, freshly arrived in Jerusalem, asks where Jesus Christ was crucified and goes there, to the barren hilly area called Golgotha. Then he sits on a hillside and waits for something to happen. The movie becomes very quiet and still, and for almost a minute (or maybe a bit more), everything flatlines.
It doesn’t amount to a condensation of Bergman’s trilogy about God’s silence or anything, but I could feel pleasure seeping in…pleasure in the fact Scott isn’t afraid of taking this movie into a moment of meditation.
I also enjoyed a scene in which Bloom and his soldierly allies dig for water in a barren area, and then find it and create an irrigation system.
I will always remember this film for the sonic impact of those heavy thundering hoofbeats upon my ribs.
The pleasures of the stellar supporting cast are considerable. Everyone shines…Irons, Liam Neeson, Eva Green (last in The Dreamers), David Thewlis, Jon Finch (I always liked his Thane of Cawdor in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth), Brendan Gleeson, Alexander Siddig, Velibor Topic, etc.

I didn’t exactly “like” Marton Coskas’ performance as Guy de Lusignan, one of the really arrogant bad guys who creates most the trouble, but he fills the boots.
I can’t say I’m totally delighted that Scott is still queer for that herky-jerky, skip-frame way of shooting action scenes that he used in Gladiator, but c’est la guerre.
There’s another Gladiator echo in the form of an attacking horsemen scene about ten or fifteen minutes in. It appears to have been shot in the same forest used for the opening battle scene in Gladiator, with the same blue tint and the same digital snowflakes.
One of the Kingdom of Heaven sites is here .

Peet Problem

It was about two and a half years ago when I began to forgive Amanda Peet for being intensely dislikable. And she is that — make no mistake.
I’m sure she’s fast and hip and cool to hang with, but she plays the same kind of woman in film after film, and this can’t be just because casting directors lack imagination and like to play follow-the-leader.
There is something in Peet’s screen attitude that always seems to bring lying, insincerity and cynical mind games to the table. Just as there are faces that radiate warmth and kindness and all that other sweet stuff, there are faces that do the opposite and make you feel wary about everything. Peet’s basic vibe is that of a born conniver.

Peet could never (or at least, should never) be cast in a film like Kingdom of Heaven. There’s something grotesquely and opportunistically “now” about her that doesn’t, I feel, adapt to any other time or sensibility.
Her eyes are striking, to be sure (People called her one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world in 2000), but also shrewd and predatory. She has a smile right out of Fall of the House of Usher with Vincent Price. It says, “You don’t get me and you never will. I’m going to make sure of that.”
But she was truly exceptional as Ben Affleck’s soulless wife in Changing Lanes, particularly in that restaurant scene when she tells Affleck she married him because she knew he would always be the kind of guy who would kowtow to power and do what’s necessary to keep her in clover. It was such a cool scene I figured, okay, give it up.
And then she was fairly agreeable as Diane Keaton’s daughter in Something’s Got To Give and as Will Ferrell’s go-getter spouse in Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda.

But now she’s back as Ashton Kutcher’s romantic interest in Nigel Cole’s A Lot Like Love (Touchstone, 4.22) and I’m getting the creeps again. Those photo booth shots of her and Kutcher in the poster…the way she looks and sounds in the trailer. Everything is telling me to duck and hide.
This isn’t very interesting to write about. Gut likes and dislikes are so arbitrary. There must be tens of thousands (or more) who find Peet attractive or funny or whatever. A distributor who wrote me a couple of days ago swears A Lot Like Love is a sleeper, and for all I know I’m the only one who feels this way about Peet. But I doubt it.
A Lot Like Love is said to be an above-average film. It’s about Kutcher and Peet wanting each other and not doing anything about it for seven years because they don’t feel they’re ready to pull the trigger or take the plunge. In other words, it’s a twentysomething movie that basically says, “Relax…chill…you have all the time in the world.”
Well, don’t we?

Pollack Dissing

It has been observed that Sydney Pollack’s name is barely legible on the U.S. one-sheet for his latest film, The Interpreter (Universal, 4.22), and that this is probably not an accident.
The words “A Sydney Pollack Film” are printed in a light, barely visible gray and scrunched between the larger, bold-faced names of the film’s stars, Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. (Pollack’s name is so hazy and small I can’t even find a focused blowup.)

If Out of Africa had won the Best Picture Oscar in ’94 instead of ’84, you can bet Sydney’s name would be a tad larger and probably pop through a bit more. Universal’s marketing guys are definitely making a statement of some kind.
It’s interesting, also, that Pollack’s name is larger and more visible on the English and German one-sheets for the film.

The international ad guys are obviously less concerned about whatever it is that has scared their U.S. counterparts (memories of Pollack’s Random Hearts?). That or Random hearts did better in Europe than it did here.

Come September Steven Soderbergh is planning on directing The Good German, a post-World War II romantic thriller written by Paul Attanasio with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett in the lead roles. And I guess…whoa, wait a minute…what happened to Soderbergh’s Che? Last time I looked this $40 million Che Geuvara biopic, which has a script by Terrence Malick and Benicio del Toro playing the lead role (along with Benjamin Bratt, Javier Bardem, Ryan Gosling, Franka Potente), was going to start shooting in Bolivia next August. Obviously this much-delayed project has worries up the yin-yang. I was just hoping that Che would be Soderbergh’s bounce-back movie…the one that would finally pull him out of his slump. He’s currently shooting an experimental thing in West Virginia and Ohio called Bubble…and I’m saying “experimental” because he’s using amateur actors. Producer Gregory Jacobs has described it as “a character piece, maybe even like a slice-of-life story. There is a murder that takes place, but it’s not a murder mystery.”

Remember Nancy Travis? Remember all the stuff she did in the late ’80s and early ’90s? (Married to the Mob, Internal Affairs, So I Married an Axe Murderer, etc.) She was banished to the tube and theatrical semi-obscurity about ten years ago, but is now returning in the upcoming Ken Kwapis film, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Warner Bros., 6.3). Delia Ephron’s script, based on the Anne Brasheres book of the same name, is about four best friends (i.e., women) of different shapes and sizes sharing a magical pair of jeans that fits each one perfectly. And, the description says, “to keep in touch the friends pass the jeans to each other as well as the adventures they are going through while apart.” Awesome. I love chick flicks about best friends sharing experiences and keeping in touch and occasionally hugging each other and giving each other advice about how to handle problems with men.

Remember the magic jacket in On the Waterfront? It was passed from Joey Doyle to K.O. Dugan to Terry Malloy, and everyone who wore it told the truth (i.e., finked to the Feds) ahout Johnny Friendly and wound up getting pounded or killed by the torpedos. It was a hair-shirt thing…a burden-of-ethical-conscience jacket.

I’ve just noticed a trend in a a great number of my favorite movies. They all revolve around a couple or few sad sacks, losers, misfits, who bump into each other and embark (or are forced) on a journey together. The path is unpredictable and sometimes is entirely internal. This may be America’s vision of itself – a ragtag fleet of outcasts huddling together on a quest to find haven. Or maybe all screenwriters are such people. Beside the obvious (Revenge of the Nerds, Thelma and Louise) there are: Tampopo, Rushmore, Sideways, Swingers, Wonder Boys, Star Wars, The Muppet Movie, Major League, Stripes, Shaolin Soccer, Fight Club, Lost in Translation, Better Luck Tomorrow. Hell, I can even make the case for Collateral. More?

I’m jazzed about the Huffington Report, the new left-wing blog that Arianna Huffington is launching sometime later this month. Sounds kinda like an internet version of Air America, no? Of course, I don’t really believe that Warren Beatty, who has told the New York Observer that he’ll “probably” contribute, is going to bang out much in the way of monthly or weekly (much less daily) copy. Matt Drudge is right — the internet is a beast that needs to be constantly fed and fed. (And then fed again. And fed again.) The political site, which will be based out of Manhattan with editors and rented offices and blah-dee-blah, will also feature jottings by Barry Diller, David Geffen, Viacom co-chief Tom Freston, Tina Brown and…Gwyneth Paltrow. I guess this basically means that any Hollywood leftie who wants to write something will be posted. Gwynneth Paltrow?

Psycho Bondo

So how will the James Bond loyalists take to the apparent hiring of Daniel Craig as the new James Bond?
The Bond casting rumors been all over the map the last few months and ya never know, but reporter Sean Hamilton of London’s The Sun has just reported that Bond producer Barbara Broccoli has offered Craig a three-picture 007 deal, and I’m told by a knowledgeable source that “she really likes him [and] wants him bad.”

Didn’t I just read that the Sony guys, who’ve bought the 007 franchise from MGM, want to stay with Pierce Brosnan for one more film? And what about that plan to de-age Bond and make him into a early thirty-something (which is what Sean Connery was when he played 007 in the early `60s)?
Craig is a GenXer (he just turned 37), and about as far away from a Brosnan-type Bond as you can get. Like I said in a recent item, he strikes me as vaguely psychotic in a Timothy Dalton (i.e., smarter, more serious, less into the sardonic quips) vein. He’s a bit of an ice man. But when you think about it, so was Connery.
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Craig is clearly a serious guy with talent and focus and a certain screwed-down studliness. But there’s also something a bit creepy and even sadistic lurking within. Craig’s grayish-blue eyes have an inert quality mixed in with a hint of menace, and I suspect it’ll hard for the troops to warm up to a guy who just might strangle or throttle you on a whim.
A guy who’s met all the Bond actors (Connery, Brosnan, et. al.) says Craig is “slight…about five-nine or so. The other guys are all six-one or six-two…they command the room when they walk in. You can feel it.”
Craig will be co-starring with Eric Bana in Steven Spielberg’s Untitled Munich Project, which starts filming in the summer for release in late December.

He’s a fairly sympathetic, down-to-business drug dealer in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake (Sony Classics, 5.13).
He was a bit gnarly and impenetrable in Roger Michell’s Enduring Love, which Paramount Classics brought out last fall, but he was easily the most interesting player in Michell’s The Mother.
Maybe Craig’s chilliness will prove a healthy addition to the 007 casserole. Maybe Pierce Brosnan was too fey and quippy and Irish pub-ish. Or am I just reacting too strongly to the impression left by Craig’s psychotic son-of-Paul Newman gangster role in Road to Perdition?
I’d really like to hear some opinions about this. Send `em off today and I’ll post `em on Friday.

Talk

I mentioned in last Friday’s column the exceptionally cool commentary track delivered by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church on the new Sideways DVD, which came out yesterday.
I think it’s a classic — truly one of the hippest and most engaging DVD commentaries ever put forward.
Anyway, here’s a taste. It plays just as Giamatti and costar Virginia Madsen (described by Haden Church at one point in the conversation as “be-jugged”) begin their scene in Sandra Oh’s home in Los Alamos. You know…the beginning of that now-famous scene on the back porch.

Thomas Haden Church: Look at you. You look very handsome there.
Paul Giamatti: Thank you, sir.
THC: Look at you! Rakish…rakish.
PG: Rakish, yeah. Like a Renaissance prince. With that sculpted beard. Look at that sculpted beard.
THC: Absolutely.
[Note to reader: at a later point Giamatti says he thinks he resembles Fernando Rey in The French Connection.]
PG: Was this real wine…we were drinking the real deal here? I think we were.
THC: Now, did you shoot this in sequence?
PG: We shot this whole thing in sequence.
THC: I remember Virginia [Madsen] saying during the q & a, that she very much wanted sort of a mellow…kind of a real mellow thing going. I think Virginia’s tremendous in this scene.
PG: Oh, God..yeah.
THC: Because she completely…she, she badmintons…
PG: Wow. I’ve got it. I’m following you!
THC: The, the, the amateur vintner’s palette….right back at you.
PG: She keeps the birdie aloft.

THC: Well, she keeps you…
PG: Ah!
THC: On it.
PG: Nice!
THC: In the scene.
PG: Yes.
THC: Because you kind of play it off in a politic way.
PG: Correct. She plays it for real. You’re absolutely right.
THC: Yeah. You don’t want to insult Stephanie’s meager trappings.
PG: Hemmed in by…whatever.
THC: Yeah.
PG: By my doughy white flesh!

Bad Guys

I was in Chicago last weekend and got suckered into going on a gangster tour of the city in a dark brown chauffeured school bus. It cost me $24 dollars. It was half-embarrassing and half-interesting, and it reminded me that curiosity can sometimes lead to suffering.
Actually, I suckered myself. I wanted to see the Biograph theatre where John Dillinger got it and the hotel where Al Capone’s headquarters used to be and the parking garage where the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happened, etc. By the time it was over I felt I’d been worked over by a couple of low-rent thugs, which was more or less what happened.
The name of this sucker-bait operation is Untouchable Tours. I highly recommend it to any Chicago visitor who doesn’t mind being treated like an eight year-old as the price for learning a little history.

The owners have been running Untouchable Tours for 17 years, which means they’re not stupid and know what they’re doing.
They’ve learned that people sincerely enjoy being driven around town by a couple of aging hams dressed up as 1930s Damon Runyon characters.
They know that talking in fourth-rate Danny Aiello goombah accents that would get them fired from any respectable touring company of Guys and Dolls plays like gangbusters here.
They know that shooting off cap guns and playing rinky-dink tapes of machine-gun fire along with Nino Rota’s theme from The Godfather are fine atmospheric ingredients.
I felt so embarrassed by these coarse vaudevillian shenanigans, I was close to weeping.
The rubes loved it. I think it’s fair to say they were euphoric. They were poking the tour guides in the arm after the tour on the sidewalk and saying “great show!”…”okay“…”way to go!” I was ready to puke. These are the good people who re-elected George Bush, I told myself. Aristocrats of the American heartland.

A copy line on the Untouchable Tour website says, “Experience Chicago as it was during the 1920s and 30s!” Bunk. Pretty much every Chicago gangster landmark is gone, and the vibe created by the Untouchable bus bozos is pure Disneyworld.
The hotel where Al Capone’s headquarters used to be — the Lexington, at the northeast corner of East Cermak and Michigan Avenue — was torn down about ten years ago. The turn-of-the-century buildings that housed the saloons and whore houses on the South Side that Capone used to run for Dion O’Bannion are all gone. The St. Valentine’s Day massacre parking garage was destroyed a long time ago…terrific.
The only thing still standing is the Biograph, where the G-men closed in on Dillinger in 1934 and put two or three slugs into his back, and one in his left eye. The tour guy said that a female bystander went over to Dillinger’s body and dabbed her handkerchief in his blood, for a souvenir.
When you see movies about Capone and the Chicago gangs, the actors are always in their late 30s, 40s and early 50s. But the real guys were in their 20s and early 30s. Capone was in his early 20s when he started working for Dion O’Bannion, and was only 25 when he had O’Bannion killed in 1924. Hit man Earl “Hymie” Weiss was only 28 when he was gunned down in front of a cathedral at the corner of State and Superior. O’Bannion was only 32 when he died. Bugsy Moran was about 37 when the Valentine’s Day killing happened in 1929.

I kept asking the tour guys this and that, and they told me what they knew between their performance routines. A little begrudgingly, it seemed. Yo…why can’t this guy put the note pad away, sit back and enjoy the ride?
The basic attitude behind their performances is that gangsters are exotic, thrilling, vaguely lovable creatures. Murder in the street, bullets in the head…aayyyy!
At one point the more obnoxious of the two got out a cowbell and started clanking away as he told the story of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocking over a kerosene lantern in a barn on the night of October 8, 1871, and thereby starting the fire that ravaged old Chicago.
At this moment my cell phone rang. It was Michael Wilmington, senior film critic for the Chicago Tribune, calling to organize our meeting for later that day. But the guy with the cowbell didn’t like it that Wilmington had called — I guess he felt I wasn’t showing the proper respect for his performance, and he was probably right.
So he started clanging the cow bell right in my ear and riffing to the others in the bus about how “we have this guy in the front with a cell phone who thinks he’s something special,” or words to this effect.

Wilmington, hearing the ruckus, said to me in an irritated tone, “Jeff, are you in the middle of a cow pasture or what?”
After the tour was over I asked one of the Untouchable guys if they knew which Chicago subway line would be the best to get to a certain location, and he said he hadn’t been on a subway in ages. (A mark of a successful man!) As I was about to head off I asked the other guy if he knew where the nearest subway station entrance was, and he said, “I wouldn’t know, pal.”
That was it. That’s when I decided to do what I could to help their business.
I’m not suggesting this as a plan of action, but if a couple of pistoleros were to ambush one of these tour buses on North Lincoln Avenue and let go with some machine gun fire…no intentions of hurting anyone, of course…just put a few holes in the bus, shatter some glass, blow out the tires. If this were to happen, there would be a certain symmetry, I think. And it would really give the tourists a thrill.
Aayyyy!

Chicago Snaps

Destroy All Broccolis

“On one hand, Daniel Craig as 007 is sort of inspired: Fleming’s Bond was more than a bit of a bastard, and a true read of the character would reveal him as much more sociopathic than we’ve seen him on film.
“Indeed, I had the sense, watching Dalton’s two outings, that if he hadn’t been forced to make with a quip at stupid times, we’d have seen that simmering homicidal rage inside Dalton get out and get the real character.
“On the other hand, the Broccolis aren’t dead and haven’t turned the franchise over to someone who will actually make something other than a loud, exploding, popcorn film. So what fucking difference does it make, right?
“The Bourne movies have proven that there’s still room for quality spy films in the marketplace. Too bad Bond has no chance to be any of them.” — Marc Mason, “Should It Be A Movie?” c/o MoviePoopShoot.com.

Sin City

“I love your column and read it fairly religiously, and I’m amazed by how you and so many other people missed the point of Sin City.
“Yes, the direction was amazing, the actors played their roles faithfully, the lighting was great and the whole feel of the movie was fantastic, but that’s not what the movie was about at all.

“Did you ever stop to think about what was the philosophical differences between the good guys and bad guys? Did you ever stop to think why the most powerful women in the movie were prostitutes? It seems to me every critic who reviewed this movie just turned their brain off because they thought it was a piece of pulp fiction, but no-ones talking about the real message of the movie.
“Go see it again with attention to these details and I’ll let you know how I saw the movie. It went way beyond the skin deep treatment it’s getting.” — Aaron

Sleeper?

“Being the fan of Cameron Crowe that I am, I just can’t help wondering if he made the right choice when he fired Ashton Kutcher off Elizabethtown. Why? I just saw Kingdom Of Heaven and then went back to see Kutcher’s A Lot Like Love again.

“And my doubts were confirmed into a very fine conclusion: Ashton Kutcher is a truly wonderful and talented actor. Something that Orlando Bloom might become one day. He’s the only thing that’s keeping Kingdom Of Heaven from becoming a masterpiece. Let’s hope that he will not screw-up Elizabethtown. I’m pretty sure that Ashton wouldn’t.
“And, yes: A Lot Like Love will be first true sleeper hit of 2005.” — Zagreb-based exhibition guy.

Travis

“Your Jekyll and Hyde comments baffle me. What is it you don’t understand about Taxi Driver, the genius of Scorsese, or the greatness of screenwriter Paul Schrader? It’s listed as #47 on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest films ever made, so you must be mistaken.
“However, your comments on the brainless Sin City are absolutely correct. The film is geek noir — ‘hard guys talking tough’ — and it is, as you say, ‘all crap.’
“Taxi Driver, though gritty and unnerving, tells us something about who we are as a people, a commentary on the society in which we live. Sin City, while spectacular and slick, tells us nothing, and leaves us, like the old lady in the Wendy’s commercial, screaming ‘where’s the beef?'” — Ron Cossey.

A wet unmarried (i.e., interlock) print of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6) will be screened for junketeers in Pasadena this evening, and I’m sure that verdicts will be making their way to the surface fairly soon after.

Daniel Craig may be the new James Bond. Sean Hamilton of London’s The Sun has just reported that Bond producer Barbara Broccoli has offered Craig a three-picture 007 deal. Is it me, or am I hearing a big collective “hmmm” emanating from the fan base? Cool as he is on his own terms, Craig in a Bond guise strikes me as a vaguely psychotic Timothy Dalton. He’s obviously smart and talented and a fine riveting actor (superb in Matthew Vaughn’s forthcoming Layer Cake and Roger Michell’s Enduring Love, which Paramount Classics brought out last fall, and the most interesting player by far in Michell’s The Mother) but his gray-blue eyes have an emotionally inert quality that contain a hint of menace, and I suspect it’ll hard for the troops to warm up to a guy who just might strangle or throttle you on a whim. There’s something tucked away and creepy, maybe even a bit sadistic, hiding inside Craig’s chest cavity. Maybe that’s a healthy thing to add to the 007 mystique, and maybe Pierce Brosnan was too fey and quippy and Irish pubbish. Or am I just reacting too strongly to the impression left by Craig’s psychotic son-of-Paul Newman gangster role in Road to Perdition?