The latest Telluride Film Festival lineup is as follows: Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust, Be With Me (from Singapore), The Bee Season, Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated, Live and Become (a French-Israeli production), Merry Christmas, Paradise Now, John Turturro’s Romance and Cigarettes, and a film from Cameroon called Sisters in Law. The festival runs from Friday, 9.2 through Monday, 9.5. I never manage to get there because it’s too costly, but someday…

There doesn’t seem to be any denying that the buying of movie ads in newspapers is starting to taper off and that the studio marketers are looking more and more to digital ads on niche internet websites. In last week’s Nikki Finke column (“Hollywood to Newsosaurs: Drop Dead”) in the L.A. Weekly, it was asserted that “every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in [newspapers] because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, ‘older and elitist’ compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.” Finke also claimed that “at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.” And then came a report by Joel Topcik in today’s New York Times that pounded the nail in further. Topcik observed that while “web advertisements will not eclipse print and broadcast ads anytime soon” (the industry spent about 2.2 percent of its 2004 ad budgets online), there’s a kind of sea change underway in which “blanket ad purchases seem ready to decline in tandem with box office receipts with studios [looking] more and more to the internet to find audiences. Westport, Connecticut-based marketing consultant Joseph Jaffe says buying online ads with the right sites is “the opposite of buying a spread in a newspaper or a slew of 30-second slots on TV…studios need to stop trying to reach the most people and focus on reaching the best people.”

Matt Damon doesn’t want to hear about Ben Affleck going through any career slump. “People forget that Ben is a terrific actor,” Damon tells Chicago Sun Times reporter Cindy Pearlman. “And maybe through some fault of his own, Ben hasn’t made the best choices in the last couple of years. I ust think it’ll be funny when his new movie, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, comes out and he plays George Reeves [TV’s ‘Superman’]. Everyone will be like, ‘Ben, it’s a comeback!’ I’ll sit there and say, ‘What the f—? The guy has always been great. He never went anywhere.” Loyalty and support is what friendship is all about, but Affleck’s stock has been sinking since the Bennifer/Gigli/Paycheck dog days of ’03 and Surviving Christmas only underlined the problem. Wearing those blue tights and then shooting himself in the head in Truth, Justice, et. al. may bring him back (I hope it does) but there’s also Mike Binder’s Man About Town (done and, I’m told, waiting to make a big debut at Sundance ’06) and Affleck’s direction of Gone Baby Gone, whenever that’s supposed to happen. Will it? Calling Patrick Whitesell!

Screenwriter Josh Friedman‘s blog, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” is a well-written, refreshingly frank look into his struggle to get credit for writing War of the Worlds, his face off with David Koepp, and his epiphanies about the industry. “Because if there’s a lesson it’s this: you can be David Koepp or Josh Friedman or f***ing Shakespeare…If you’re a screenwriter you’re a screenwriter and if you want people to give you love at your premiere you better bring ’em with you.”

Harold Becker and Al Pacino are onto a good thing in remaking Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), a classic noir famous for a totally silent heist sequence that lasts roughly 30 minutes…no dialogue or music and next to no “action,” but hypnotic from start to finish. Brian DePalma shot a vaguely similar sequence in the first Mission Impossible (’96), but it wasn’t quite as long. Will today’s audiences sit still for another silent robbery, or will Becker and Pacino blow it off because they don’t want to deal with people like me hammering them if they don’t do it as well as Dassin? Becker will have to make the job as technologically challenging, of course, as the one Dassin’s thieves faced in their day. One assumes that Pacino will play the “Tony le Stephanois” character, an ex-con with a hacking cough who organizes the robbery (and who was portrayed to hard-boiled perfection by Jean Servais in the original). And Becker and Pacino need to come up with a new title since Rififi slapped onto an English-language remake set in the U.S. would sound precious and anachronistic. Together, Pacino and Becker have made two films before, Sea of Love (’89) and City Hall (’01). No distributor or start-date has been announced, but this story should serve as a reminder to those of you who haven’t seen Dassin’s film to rent or buy the Criterion Collection DVD.

This is why I love…no, worship Terry Gilliam. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Hugh Hart, Gilliam says “he hates most computer-generated imagery. He hated The Patriot, though he grew to love its star, Heath Ledger. He thinks mammoth battle sequences have been ‘done to death,’ doesn’t like Men in Black‘s ‘smart-ass’ humor [and] has no patience for ‘macho’ action movies.” Yes! But on the other hand…

“Whether I like it or not, or whether anybody else does, when I start a film I have a few ideas,” Gilliam tells Hart in the same piece. “And as you’re getting into it, you think, ‘Ooh, there’s another idea,’ and you’re shooting some more and, ‘Oh, here’s another thing. Let’s do that.’ I’m always changing and adding. That’s just the way my mind works.” And that’s pretty much why, I gather, Gilliam’s The Brother Grimm (Miramax, 8.26) feels like such a hyper crazy-quilt thing. It’s imaginative, all right, but Gilliam throws it all together in such scattershot fashion that his ideas begin to feel like flies you’d like to swat with a rolled-up magazine. Variety‘s Robert Koehler says Grimm is filled with “cumbersome action set pieces that are neither quite fairy-tale fanciful nor convincingly real…it’s this in-between-ness, along with Gilliam’s numbing use of filming with ultra wide-angle lenses that turn [it] into the director’s glummest and most visually clunky production.”

It’s time to admit something and be done with it. I’ve been a big fan of My Date With Drew since I saw it in April ’04, and I’ve written two or three column pieces about it, and it finally opened on August 5th after a long wait and…it tanked. Box Office Guru’s last posting as of 8.14 had total earnings at $181,041. It took in $85,000 on the opening weekend in 85 theatres. People didn’t care. A good thing was ignored, waved away, dismissed…and that’s what happened. Too bad, but I guess those distributors who said people wouldn’t pay to see it because it’s too much like TV were right. I saw it with a festival crowd and they went apeshit and it got a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes, but ticket-buyers were another story.

“I never found a companion who was as companionable as solitude.” I wish I wasn’t quoting someone…

I was feeling fairly revved about Rachel McAdams after seeing her in The Wedding Crashers in July, and now, after catching her in Red Eye, I’m starting to realize that she’s really quite the comer, and I may be putting it too cautiously. She’s probably the fetching-est actress to come along since…I was going to say Reese Witherspoon but she’s a lot more subtle and far more intriguing than Witherspoon and, for that matter, Julia Roberts when she was good (before the calendar and motherhood and everything else caught up with her). It has seemed for a long time that every actress playing a woman-in-peril uses a lot of the same moves. It’s always primarily about what they’re feeling (fear, anxiety) and all that oh-my-God shrieking and heavy panting, and never that much about what they’re thinking or plotting in order to get back at the bad guy. This is McAdams in Red Eye — she’s emotional and vulnerable, but she never screams or crumples or goes nuts, and she’s thinking all the time…waiting, watching, calculating. She’s got something else going on. In her Red Eye review, Manohla Dargis said, “If you don’t look too closely, if you fail to see past the lissome figure and the dimples that punctuate her smile, you might not notice how [McAdams] holds her gaze a few beats longer than need be, suggesting a depth of intensity uncommon in most Hollywood ingenues.”

This is kind of a Defamer-ish thing but here goes: Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner is reporting that a Paramount Pictures staffer has told him that 50 Cent has very impressive equipment. The Paramount guy’s opinion is based, says Ebner, on having seen full-frontal footage of the rapper in Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (opening 11.9), an urban biopic in which 50 Cent plays himself. Ebner says Paramounters “have seen much of Get Rich and have been astounded by the…size of 50’s [instrument].” He quotes the staffer as saying Sheridan “wants to leave some of the full-frontal stuff in the movie, but there wouldn’t be room for much else on the screen!” I’m presuming the guy who told Ebner this is straight…right?

I’m sorry to say this because I’m a Rotten Tomatoes man all the way, but there’s something very wrong somewhere when The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, according to these guys, the best-reviewed film of the year so far with a 90% positive. Can’t they fix these figures or something? Even though Virgin‘s rating has dropped to 89% since this announcement was posted, let’s consider a few things. One, RT’s review poll only considers the wide releases (no platforms, no little indie releases) which means a higher piece-of-shit percentage. Two, The Forty Year-Old Virgin is, at best, a half-tolerable funny-in-spots comedy. (The critics who gave it unqualified raves should be deeply ashamed of themselves.) Three, the fifth most favorably reviewed wide release of the year was Revenge of the Sith so give us all a friggin’ break.