It’s official: the Hollywood Film

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It’s official: the Hollywood Film Festival has labelled itself as the shallowest and whoriest film festival on the face of the planet. The festival’s “Board of Advisors” managed this in one fell swoop by announcing that George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith is the winner of this year’s “Hollywood Movie of the Year” award. Lucas, an over-praised hog-at-the-trough if there ever was one, will be given the award at the Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on 10.24. The Lucas announcement was made by Carlos de Abreu, the festival’s founder, exec director and reigning oral-love-bequeather. “Mr. Lucas is a creative genius, a visionary at its best,” de Abreu said. The award was chosen by “more than 70,000″ online voters at Yahoo Movies (movies.yahoo.com) and Entertainment Tonight (ETonline.com).” The festival fathers should have obviously ignored the results once the winner was known, etc. American ticket-buyers have to be led, guided, pushed…saved from themselves! The other nominees for this year’s award were Batman Begins (fine), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (get outta here), Cinderella Man, The Constant Gardener, Crash, Hustle and Flow, War of the Worlds, Wedding Crashers (all cool), Sin City (forget it)…and yet Sith received nearly one-third of the votes cast. What kind of morons…?

I think it’s vaguely whorish

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I think it’s vaguely whorish that Ridley Scott wants to direct an “Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective” movie. Scott and Howard Deutsch, who owns the rights to the series of novels written by Donald J. Sobol (despite Sobol’s claim in Sharon Waxman’s N.Y. Times piece that the rights will eventually revert to him and anyone who cuts a deal with Deutsch “will be stuck”), are trying to launch another Potter-like tentpole series…and all I see are a couple of guys trying to cash in. I would feel differently if my kids were eight or ten years old, but they’re not and so this franchise, if and when it gets rolling, is going to the top of my list. Sobol’s books (all 23 of them) are about the efforts of 10 year-old Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown and his best bud Sally to solve various mysteries. Waxman’s piece says that “every book has 10 mysteries within it, with solutions printed in the back of the book…readers are challenged to solve the cases using deductive reasoning and careful observation, which has led to the character’s sometimes being referred to as Sherlock Holmes in sneakers.” In other words…hello?…inherently un-thematic, un-cinematic and who-gives-a-toss? Deutsch told Waxman he “envisions the series as more an action-adventure type movie rather than a straight- ahead detective story.” Scott told Waxman that “in the case of ‘Encyclopedia Brown,’ we have a classical hero and heroine who just happen to be kids. They are ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, and that makes these books attractive.” The whole concept makes me want to throw up.

Thanks to the Washington Post’s

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Thanks to the Washington Post‘s Ann Hornaday for the really nice plug in Sunday’s (10.16) edition: “[Hollywood Elsewhere] is the blog of Jeffrey Wells, a Los Angeles-based film writer and critic who offers pithy, insightful observations about the industry as well as smart reviews of movies he’s just seen at advance screen- ings and festivals. A nifty compendium of gossip, reflection and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, this is the first thing I go to in the morning. A must-visit for cineastes as well as garden- variety fans, Hollywood Elsewhere manages to be lively without being snarky and enthusiastic without being overweening. A rarity and a gem.”

The only film opening this

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The only film opening this Friday (10.21) that’s tracking to any degree is Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Doom (Universal)…which the elitists have almost no interest in seeing. The only 10.28 openers with decent numbers are Saw 2 and The Legend of Zorro. The likable and smoothly made Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (10/21) snuck last weekend and isn’t tracking…yet. Shopgirl and Stay, both out 10.21, aren’t tracking either. And there’s not much interest in Gore Verbinski’s Weather Man with Nic Cage, Paradise Now or The Dying Gaul, which all open on 10.28.

It’s tough out there but

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It’s tough out there but Jesus God, the poor guy…Charles Rocket, the former SNL star, killed himself in Connecticut a little more a week ago. I knew him and worked with him a little bit in ’87 when I wrote the press notes for a truly crappy Cannon film he starred in with Carrie Lowell called Down Twisted. The last film he made came out two years ago…RKO Pictures’ Shade with Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith and Gabriel Byrne. In 2000 he costarred in the TV series Normal, Ohio, which starred John Goodman as a gay guy living in oddball-holmey Ohio. Rocket was 56…what sadness.

Explaining to Time’s Richard Schickel

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Explaining to Time‘s Richard Schickel that sometimes “you have to trust your gut” and go with “a premonition that you can get something decent out of it,” Clint Eastwood is doing something fairly startling. Come February he’ll begin shooting Lamps Before the Wind, a kind of cultural reverse-angle, Japanese-soldier companion piece to his World War II war battle-of-Iwo-Jima drama Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks, due in Nov./Dec. ’06) that focuses on the Marines who raised the U.S. flag on top of Mt. Surabachi. Schickel’s excellent piece (“Clint’s Double Take”) reports that Flags screenwriter Paul Haggis begged off writing the Japanese saga, but recommended a young Japanese-American screenwriter, Iris Yamashita. “Taken together, the two screen- plays show that the battle of Iwo Jima — and by implication, the whole war in the Pacific — was not just a clash of arms but a clash of cultures,” Schickel writes. “The Japanese officer class, imbued with the quasi-religious fervor of their Bushido code, believed that surrender was dishonor, that they were all obliged to die in defense of their small island. Yamashita’s script is much more relentlessly cruel [than Fathers]. In essence, the Japanese officers compelled the bravery (and suicide) of their troops at gunpoint. Only the Japanese commander, Lieut. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (a mysterious historical figure who fascinates Eastwood), and a fictional conscript, Saigo, whose fate Yamashita intertwines with his commanding officer’s, demonstrate anything like humanity as a Westerner might understand it.” Flags of our Fathers (which costars Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Ryan Phillipe, Paul Walker and Barry Pepper) and Lamps Before the Wind will be released simultaneously in late ’06.

Doug Pratt of DVDlaser.com says

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Doug Pratt of DVDlaser.com says we should all check out a five-minute video piece by director Sydney Pollack on the new DVD of The Interpreter that explains the importance of letterboxing. “His plea for getting braindead viewers to understand why letterboxing is better is exceptionally well composed and engaging — essentially the best piece ever done on the topic in a DVD supplement,” writes Pratt. “Pollack talks about how he made films in a scope format initially, and then switched to the boxier, TV-friendly format when he saw what happened to his wide films on TV. He then explains why he chose to return to widescreen for The Interpreter, and demonstrates what the viewer is missing when the presentation is cropped. It is a calm and rational explanation, but his passion is communicated with an equal clarity, and the segment ought to be playing in a continuous loop in the video department of every Wal-Mart and Target in the country.”

Director Peter Jackson has, in

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Director Peter Jackson has, in a very friendly, brother-to- brother way, whacked composer Howard Shore over creative differences on the King Kong score and brought in James Newton Howard as a replacement. Last-minute score replacements are usually a sign of trouble (it happened on Gangs of New York) but let’s not jump to conclusions. If I were Jackson I would make sure of one thing: the ceremonial drums emanating from the native ceremony on Skull Island (as heard from Carl Denham’s ship anchored a few hundred feet off the coast) would sound just like Max Steiner’s… they would sound crude and spooky and not in the least bit orchestral.

I’ve said it before: the

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I’ve said it before: the snaggle tooth that Peter Jackson has given his big ape is, I suspect, a blade of grass that hints at what may be going on in the emotional universe of King Kong (Universal, 12.14). The snaggle-tooth is a way of Charlie Chaplin-izing Mr. Kong…of making him seem vulnerable and endearing. (But that’s Jackson…an incorrigible emotional underliner.) Harry Knowles agrees — he says “the wonky tooth [is] a bit lame” and gives Kong “a goofy look.” I’m just saying that the comparison shots that Harry has run (with and without snaggle-tooth) probably don’t mean anything. The tooth footage would almost certainly be locked in at this stage (wouldn’t it?). Beware the tooth…the tooth is the movie…beware the tooth…the tooth is the movie. Although I have to say the stills on the official Universal-Kong site are fantastic. This is going to have wonderfully composed, exquisitely lit visuals. Each and every still looks scrumptious.

The shooting of Michael Mann’s

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The shooting of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28.06), which stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, is generating talk among guys in the production-chat circuit. Before I pass this along, understand that similar yarns were spun during production of Mann’s Collateral (i.e., shooting and shooting with no end, unhappy crew, budget overruns, etc.) and look how that one turned out…brilliant. Remember also what Uma Thurman said in Pulp Fiction about guys gossiping with each other, and that the stuff I’m getting now is second-hand. That said, the Vice chatter is that “Mann, Foxx and the budget are out of control,” a friend confides. “One thing that has slipped out is that Mann’s inner circle is turning on him — they can’t deal with him anymore. My source says Farrell’s mullet hair style is the least of the problems. He also worked on Collateral and he wouldn’t say too much about Vice except that he feels like a character in ‘Devil’s Candy 2.’ Mann still doesn’t have an ending to the film and the production is going to Latin America for a month and a half. He said that a majority of the gossip coming off the set is true.” I don’t know about this at all. To me, Mann is the king and can do no wrong. I had a gut feeling about about this second-hand source when the Collateral stories were coming in, which is that he’s one of those whiners who likes his relaxation, doesn’t like to work long hours or do the hard-core thing in order to create lasting quality. In other words he’s a candy-ass, so I wouldn’t put that much stock in these stories…although those mullet reports are troubling. Has anyone heard anything from real men on the set (i.e., non-girls) in a position to actually know stuff?