I can’t tell if the 190-minute “Extended Cut” version of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven opened at the Laemmle Fairfax on Friday 12.23 or three days ago (Wednesday, 12.28), but it’s playing there now…and I wish New Yorkers could see it also. Why didn’t they book this version into a smallish Manhattan theatre, or, better yet, why didn’t Fox Home Video release it as a year-end DVD attraction? (The 145 minute theatrical version came out on 10.11.) David Poland, who lives two and a half blocks from the Laemmle Fairfax, says the extended cut “is night and day from the original.” It makes it clear that as far as the theatrical version that came out last May 6th was concerned, “Fox literally cut out the story of the movie,” he says. “I was so shocked by what was back in that I had to rent the [theatrical version] DVD that is now out to make sure I wasn’t crazy. What is breathtaking is that every major character in the movie, except perhaps Ghassan Massoud’s already brilliant turn as Saladin, is significantly enhanced by the additions. Edward Norton’s cameo as The King of Jerusalem now feels like a real performance. Marton Csokas is no longer just a caricature. Liam Neeson’s character has history and motivation, not just people telling us how great he was. And even Orlando Bloom’s Balian is given greater depth, his despair and his need for forgiveness actually making sense when you see Scott’s real vision for the film. [Fox] gutted a great film and made us all think it was shallow. Shame on them.”

Wells postscript: Big studios have knowingly and deliberately gutted great (or very good) films in the editing room and turned them into merely good or passable theatrical cuts before…Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America and Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (far better as the “Untitled” version on DVD) are the two best-known examples. If Poland’s take on Kingdom of Heaven‘s “Extended Cut” becomes generally accepted, this will be another big example of this syndrome. What are some other films that went through this? (And don’t mention Robert Wise’s longer Star Trek: The Motion Picture…that’s not allowed).

A certain critic says that 2005 “was a fairly crappy year at the movies” and “while every year I seem to come up with more than 30 movies that I really cherish…this year 20 seemed like a bit of a reach.” That seems gruff and unduly dismissive to me. I came up with 41 films — 15 creme de la creme and 26 that were pretty damn okay. In any event, 2005 ends at midnight Paris time (6 pm in Manhattan, 3 pm in Los Angeles) and here they are again: Creme de la Creme: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, The Constant Gardener, A History of Violence, Hustle & Flow, In Her Shoes, Match Point, The Family Stone, Walk the Line, Crash, Cinderella Man, The Beautiful Country, Last Days, Grizzly Man, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (15). And Pretty Damn Good: Good Night and Good Luck, The Wedding Crashers, Syriana, The Aristocrats, Batman Begins, Broken Flowers, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, Cache (Hidden), The Interpreter (for the bomb-on-the-bus scene alone), King Kong (if you can excuse the first 70 minutes), Nine Lives (for Robin Wright Penn alone), Cronicas, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach has an assured place at the table), The Upside of Anger (for Kevin Costner’s performance), The Thing About My Folks (for Peter Falk’s performance), Mrs. Henderson Presents, Kung Fu Hustle, Kingdom of Heaven, Rent, Broken Flowers, Brothers (for Connie Nielsen’s performance and the austere and upfront tone of Suzanne Bier’s direction), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, War of the Worlds, Casanova, My Date With Drew (a good-humored rendering of a metaphor about youthful pluck and persistence and team spirit), My Summer of Love, Paradise Now. (26)

Newsday‘s John Anderson has decided Munich star Eric Bana deserves an A…for effort, talent and general coolness of character. Being a selective Bana fan myself (having really liked him in Chopper, Black Hawk Down), I have no beef with this. Here’s hoping Bana’s performance in Curtis Hanson’s Lucky You will be the charm.

“I thought you’d enjoy what I consider to be the ultimate proof that Brokeback Mountain is a crossover hit,” Toronto Star critic Peter Howell wrote today. “This afternoon, my 16 year-old son Jake and his same-age pal Connell went off to see BBM at the local bijou. They were curious about all the hoopla. Jake saw it as No. 2 on my Top Ten list, right after A History of Violence, and he wanted to check it out. (Although he didn’t show a similar interest in the Cronenberg.) These two guys normally won’t see anything that doesn’t involve an explosion, a laser beam or someone slipping on a banana peel. If BBM can grab their attention, it’s definitely exerting some weird pull on the masses.”

Richard Eyre, the director of the London’s West End musical of Mary Poppins that’s based on the 1964 Julie Andrews-Dick Van Dyke Disney flick, has told the Independent‘s Louise Jury that he’s been in talks with Steven Spielberg over a new film version. The story doesn’t say Spielberg wants to direct this, so let’s hold off for now. But if Spielberg does intend to direct a Mary Poppins musical, that’s it…his getting-older, wants-to-make-more-meaningful- movies cred is out the window.

“If this was a political campaign and this happened to a Presidential candidate, they be out…they’d be down in the polls and gone,” Pete Hammond told Kim Masters on her 12.30 NPR show. He was speaking of Munich, of course. I feel differently. If Munich was a middle-aged Presidential contender, he would still be in the race…but his aides would be telling him to think seriously about preparing a press conference in order to announce his withdrawal.

Here’s an unsurprising but very concise National Public Radio discussion led by Hollywood analyst and chronicler Kim Masters about which films are the leaders for Best Picture, with commen- tary by Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein and Maxim critic Pete Hammond. The piece was recorded about two weeks ago, which is a long time in terms of the twists and surges that can manifest in an Oscar race… but it’s worth a listen. Will Good Night, and Good Luck do as well as Hammond claims? I wonder.

“Who’s afraid of a couple of gay cowboys? Not moviegoers, who helped Brokeback Mountain post the highest per-screen average over the film-flush holiday weekend, reports Newsday‘s Sandy Cohen. “The Ang Lee film, which follows the 20-year forbidden romance between two roughneck ranch hands, earned $13,599 per theater, compared with $9,305 for weekend winner King Kong and $8,225 for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” If only Cohen didn’t quote box-office interpreter Paul Dergarabedian so much. What’s wrong with that? To explain I have to move on to another item…

I wrote a column piece nearly three years ago that lamented the persistent presence of the soul-stifling industry stooge Paul Der- garabedian, the Exhibitor Relations spokesperson who’s always quoted in box-office stories. My January ’03 piece, called “The Man Who Would Be Dull”, described Dergarabedian as “a nice, depend- able guy who always has the numbers at hand and is always ready to discuss them on Sunday afternoons, when box-office stories are usually written. And yet I feel he’s giving the art of Hollywood box-office analysis an unfortunate taint of roteness and tedium. His pronouncements are almost oppressively mundane. I can’t think of any statistic or judgment he’s ever put forward that was wrong, but to me he always sounds so damn- ably measured, safe, underwhelming and status-quo affirming, which has a kind of Orwellian effect after a while.”

In his well-written distributor-by-distributor summation of the great DVD year that was 2005, New York Times columnist Dave Kehr includes a very curious judgment. He calls Daryl F. Zanuck and Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the 1956 Gregory Peck-Jennifer Jones drama that Fox Home Video recently released as a “Studio Classics” DVD, “nearly unwatchable” and then double-slams it by equating it with Song of Bernadette. Please…this film is entirely watchable for various reasons (an intriguing 1950s time-machine aura, sturdy performances, handsome photography, solid dialogue) and more than respectable if you accept it for what it is: a somber and somewhat stodgy big-studio movie about An Important 1956 Subject, or the struggle of middle-class breadwinners to get along and get ahead while holding on to some vestige of passion about what their lives actually amounted to. Directed and adapted by Johnson (and based on the Sloan Wilson best-seller), this is the sort of overly serious, conservatively-staged and yet persistently probing drama that disappeared a long time ago from the culture, let alone from the Hollywood landscape. Nobody would be dumb enough to attempt a revival of the aesthetic behind it (except, maybe, as a one-shot irony piece like Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven) but if you take this richly colored widescreen film for what it was during its time and where its makers were coming from (and study its depictions of mid ’50s Manhattan and West- port, Connecticut), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is an oddly haunting thing. And Fox Home Video has done a better-than- average job of restoring it, although I don’t believe their claim of having presented a 2.55 to 1 image (the Scope ratio that Fox used in the mid ’50s) — it looks more like 2.35 or 2.4 to 1.

Here’s a comprehensive, perceptive and well researched piece about the Chinese film market (“Crouching U.S. Studios, Hidden Chinese Market”) by L.A. Times staffer Bruce Wallace. It’s especially concise in explaining the downsides. “The skeptics have a long list of reasons why you can’t do movie business in China,” Wallace writes. “The deplorable condition of Chinese movie theatres, a quota that limits foreign films to 20 a year and one of the worst revenue-sharing deals (just 13% of the ticket take) that Hollywood has negotiated anywhere. Then there are strict guidelines on content. No sex. No religion. Nothing to do with the occult. Nothing that jeopardizes public morality or portrays criminal behavior. But perhaps the most crippling obstacle remains China’s rampant piracy. The frenetic trade in pirated DVDs operates openly on Shanghai street corners, where Hollywood’s blockbusters and prime-time TV shows are sold from rickety stalls and suitcases, all for less than a dollar. It leaves China with a market — or at least a legitimate market — about the size of Peru. What studio executive is going to spend time and energy banging his head against the Chinese politicians and bureaucrats for a market the size of Peru? And yet, and yet…that potential. What if this economic superpower-apparent does open up, gets piracy under control, becomes a cultural Goliath? Because if that happens, what the Chinese choose to watch and how they choose to do so may dictate global trends and tastes for the next century.”