I should have linked to this piece two weeks ago when it first popped up on Slate, but it’s extremely thorough and brilliant here and there and deserves everyone’s attention. Written by Field Maloney, the article (called “The O Factor: Was Owen Wilson the key to the Wes Anderson phenomenon?”) wonders if the biggest problem with The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was Anderson’s having co-written it with Noah Baumbach and not Wilson. The theory is gaining some ground as people recall the reaction to Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s a fairly good piece, but it’s very Wessy…maybe a little too Wessy here and there…and that it needs is what Aquatic probably needed, which was Wilson’s “sharp-edged intelligence gleaming underneath the chilled-out Texas veneer.”

The punctuation police have finally gotten through to George Clooney and his producers, the result being that his Edward R. Murrow drama is now being presented as Good Night, And Good Luck, and not, as they had it before, Good Night. And, Good Luck…which was awful.

Is this going to be an awesome Toronto Film Festival or what? The selections will include Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst; Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble; Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride; Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story; George Clooney’s Good Night, And Good Luck; Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page with the rediscovered Gretchen Mol; Liev Schrieber’s Everything is Illuminated; John Turturro’s Romance & Cigarettes with James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet; Abel Ferrara’s Mary; Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents; Phyllis Nagy’s The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet with Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley; Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto with Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea; Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Bee Season; John Gatin’s Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story; James Mangold’s Walk The Line; Niki Caro’s North Country; Udayan Prasad’s Opa! with Matthew Modine; and Roger Donaldson’s The World’s Fastest Man with Anthony Hopkins as New Zealand motorcycle maven Burt Munro. Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a smart-and-quippy-but-no-great-shakes genre piece, will also be shown.

Earlier this summer a few sci-fi geek sites covered pretty well the similarities between The Island and a 1979 low-budget sci-fi flick called Clonus (a.k.a., Parts: The Clonus Horror )), which came out on DVD last March. I summarized the claims in a piece that ran in this space on 7.8. And now the producers of the earlier film have gone to court to sue DreamWorks and Warner Bros. over the alleged ripoff. In a suit filed last Monday (8.8) in federal court in Manhattan, Clonusproducers Myrl A. Schreibman and Robert S. Fiveson (a) asserted that The Island was based on their film, (b) asked for unspecified damages and part of the limited proceeds from the DreamWorks bomb, and (c) asked the court to order the studios to withdraw Michael Bay’s futuristic thriller from release until the matter is settled. And to think that the whole magilla could have been avoided if Island producers Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald had just written a check to Schriebman and Fiveson early on…as many producers do in order to cover their bases if their new film is remarkably similar to a previous work.

The high-def DVD format war is not coming to an end and may extend another year or two…to everyone’s disappointment. I went down to Sony Studios a few months ago to see a demonstration of Sony’s Blu Ray high-def DVD (i.e., footage from Lawrence of Arabia), and it was mouth-watering. Blu Ray is the somewhat more expensive but clearly more high-tech option compared to the other high-def format called HD-DVD, which is supported by Paramount, NBC-Universal, Warner Bros. and New Line. But the recent decision by 20th Century Fox to jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon (joining such tech companies as Sony, Apple, Dell, HP, Panasonic, Sharp and Samsung, along with Disney and MGM) has balanced out the forces. The costlier Blu-ray technology promises to put 50GB of data on a two-layer disc, which is enough for more than four hours of HD content. HD DVD can hold up to 45GB on three layers.

I’ve been slow to pick up on the fact that Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, the Middle Eastern espionage drama about CIA complacency with George Clooney and Matt Damon, has been held back. It now has a limited release date of 11.23 and will open wide on 12.9.

So The Weinstein Company has four films going to the Toronto Film Festival — (1) John Madden’s Proof; (2) Transamerica, a tranny comedy-drama from Duncan Ticker and starring Felicity Huffman; (3) Richard Shepard’s Matador with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear; and (4) Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents (which I hear is quite good). But I’m hearing mixed things about distribution. I know that Harvey and Bob Weinstein, former toppers of Miramax, have sat down with all the distributors about handling ads, publicity and all the other nececssities of putting films before the public, but nothing’s come of it. There was a rumor kicking around two or three weeks ago that they might have an impending deal with Warner Bros., but a Weinstein Company spokesperson told me today this isn’t true.

“Hollywood is wondering just what, precisely, is going wrong — not just with The Island and Stealth but with the whole high-octane action/adventure/sci-fi genre to which they belong,” Hollywood Reporter‘s Nicole Sperling observes. People are worried, in other words, that audiences aren’t lining up to see crap like they used to. Since the dawn of the blockbuster mentality 30 years ago (born of the mega-successes of Jaws in ’75 and Star Wars in ’77), Hollywood has been making more and more big-budget, high-concept theme-park movies. Inevitably, most of these have been second- or third-tier. And now suddenly people are saying “no” when a couple of second-tier films like The Island and Stealth come along and that’s…what?…a bad thing? I can see why people would regard this as scary, but sometimes that’s good medicine. Hollywood has been told, simply, that boilerplate movies won’t do and they’ll have to do better. That seems like an excellent thing to me. The more failure that happens in this town, the harder it’ll be for the bullshitters to survive and the more chances there will be for the new guys with the fresh ideas.

Lasse Hallstrom’s An Unfinished Life, one of the films that Miramax shelved last year and is now finally getting released before their Disney contract comes to a close, is opening on September 9.9. Like 98% of the other films coming out in September and October, Life has its own website…or at least a page on the Miramax site. And yet John Madden’s Proof, another holdover that Miramax is releasing on 9.16, or just a week after the Hallstrom film, doesn’t have a page on the company site, much less a website of its own.

Carroll Ballard’s Duma, a $12 million family film that’s won praise from critic Scott Foundas and a three-and-a-half-star rating from Roger Ebert, has been getting the brush-off from Warner Bros, according to this August 8th L.A. Daily News story by Glenn Whipp. The studio opened it in five Chicago theatres last weekend, and “if it does well, it will expand to other cities, including Los Angeles,” WB’s distribution honcho Dan Fellman told Whipp. Another little film getting the blow-off treatment is 20th Century Fox’s Little Manhattan, about a 10-year-old kid’s love for an 11 year-old girl. It’s set to open exclusively on its home turf, New York…fine. It’s standard procedure for a big studio to dump a little movie like this one (which Whipp calls “wonderful”), but you’d think Fox would at least do what they can to drum up business by showing it to columnists like myself. So far, I haven’t heard a thing from Fox about this.

Eisner, Ovitz, Semel, Diller, Katzenberg, Geffen, Guber…riding off into the sunset, their eras drawing to a close. “In the same way that audiences have lost their taste for film, filmmakers have lost their passion,” says David Thomson, author of “The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.” “It is not surprising that some of the moguls are giving up as well. They are as depressed and tired of the business as the rest of us.” This from a sharp and concise sum-up piece by David Carr in the New York Times…worth reading.

Scratch that $32 million-or-so projection for The Dukes of Hazzard. Saturday’s (i.e., yesterday’s) earnings were only $9.4 million compared to Friday’s $11.9 million, which is a drop of about 21%, which means the word-of-mouth is catching up with it fairly fast. Warner Bros. may or may not try to report a $30 million weekend later today, but either way it’ll fall short of that figure. Next weekend’s business will probably drop over 50%..fast burn.