Late in arriving, but very well said by Elbert Ventura in The Australian: “Although everyone knows what they’re in for — ‘No nudity…no violence…unspeakable obscenity,’ as the tagline states — there is uncertainty about whether we all share the same threshold for outrage. At the outset, the first mentions of taboo sexual acts inspire a smattering of sniggers. As the movie keeps going and the language, impossibly, gets worse, the guffaws become less muted, the atmosphere less tentative. And on it goes, until, eventually, there is a collective mood of giddy surrender, as the Boschian depravities multiply at a rate too fast for sensibilities to be checked and upheld. That feeling of conspiratorial mischief gives The Aristocrats its giddy kick.”

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Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, 10.7) is on the longish side (a bit more than 140 minutes) but don’t let that temper your enthusiasm, says an overseas distribution guy who saw it a couple of weeks ago. “I really, really liked it,” he says. “It’s very well-written” — Jennifer Weiner’s book has been adapted by Erin Brockovich‘s Susannah Grant — “and down to the bone and extremely well made. Women will absolutely love it because they will recognize themselves in any of the three main characters.” He was speaking of Cameron Diaz’s flakey irresponsible sister, Toni Collette’s irked-at-Diaz, much more conservative older sister, and Shirley MacLaine’s grandmother whom Diaz goes to visit at an old folks’ home in Florida. “But guys will love it as well,” he says. “It’s extremely well acted and very well directed by Hanson, and...

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I don’t care that much one way or the other, but the new Bob Iger-led Disney has apparently smoothed things over with Pixar and the word is that reps for the companies are negotiating the fine points of a fresh new deal, so it looks like Pixar and Disney won’t be separating after all. Take it with a grain, but that’s I’m hearing.

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It’s ironic to say the least that with the divorce between Harvey and Bob Weinstein and Disney about to be over and done with and in effect, the talk is now that Disney is finalizing a deal to handle overseas distribution for four films made by Bob and Harvey’s new outfit, The Weinstein Co., and that the deal will be signed within the next two or three months. The Weinstein Co. films we’re speaking of are Derailed, Breaking and Entering, Scary Movie 4 and the Sin City sequel.

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What’s more pathetic? Director Martin Campbell and producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli still trying to figure out which semi-acceptable (i.e., not a complete unknown, and faux-studly in the Sean Connery mold) candidate they should sign and turn into the next James Bond, or the fact that journalists are still writing articles about this embarassing process? The latest indication of the latter is this article (“Search for a Swoonmaker”) from Australia’s The Age, which actually proposes casting Hugh Grant. Nobody ever mentions it, but there is only one trying-to-cast-the-new-James-Bond story, really, and it’s an oldie: nobody who knows the score or has anything career-wise on the ball wants to work with Wilson and Broccoli. They are stoppers and turkeys and micro-managers and caretakers of the lowest order, and this,...

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I’ve just come from Bennett Miller’s Capote (Sony Pictures Classics, 9.30). It’s an amazingly rich and resonant thing. It’s largely about stillnesses and intimations, and yet it’s very precise and careful in conveying a defining chapter in the life of author Truman Capote. It lets the actors — particularly the great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Capote — tell us what we need to feel and understand. I know someone who’s seen it and has said he’s not sure about Hoffman being a likely Best Actor nominee. (Although he’s very enthused about Clifton Collins, Jr.’s performance as Perry Smith, the sad-eyed Clutter family murderer, and a possible Best Supporting Actor nomination.) All I can say about Hoffman not necessarily being a shoo-in is the word “please.” No, I can say more than that: there’s a certain vividness of detail...

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Tracking says the biggest earner this weekend — oddly, given the buzz — will be Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm. Awareness last weekend was at 76%, definite interest was at 41% and those saying it would be their first choice stood at 17%.

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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…

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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...

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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...

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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.”

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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...

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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…

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“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

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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.

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

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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...

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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?

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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.

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I don’t understand why the crowd at the Manhattan all-media screening of Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin (Universal, 8.19) was laughing so much. Because this thing is mostly…you know what I’m going to say, right?…not even vaguely funny. And the first half is damn near agonizing. And it’s one of the ugliest, most flatly lit films (the dp is Jack Green) I’ve seen in a theatre in a long while. Matters improve slightly during the last third when Steve Carrell’s virginal electronic-store worker is allowed to behave in a less broad, less desperate-for-laughs way and comes down to earth and acts like a semi-believable unhappy guy with a slight…er, problem. The very last bit is the funniest bit. And okay, Henry Cabot Beck wasn’t wrong. Catherine Keener is warm and likable as a positive-minded 40ish woman, and in a way that feels for the most part grounded and reflective of someone you might actually meet...

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Time‘s Richard Corliss writes that a generic Ralph Fiennes performance — and particularly the very fine one he gives in The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.31)– “is a miniature device with intricate moving parts. Movie directors often want their actors to ‘go bigger.’ Fiennes goes smaller — and inside. His onscreen speech is a mix of concealments and confidences, of whispers in a cave or under the covers. And he’s not speaking softly just so you will be startled when he explodes.” A striking example is a scene in which Fiennes, playing a British diplomat stationed in Kenya, is told that his wife Tessa (Rachel Weiscz) may have been killed. “As the camera holds on him, searching for a reaction, Fiennes doesn’t conjure up a rage or a gasp. He doesn’t gush a stream of tears or obscenities. He moves...

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I’m finding this obviously way early and somewhat snarky pan of Doug McGrath’s Have You Heard? (Warner Independent, 9.06), written by Leon Neyfakh and appearing in the 8.22 New York Observer, a tiny bit curious, given the positive things I’ve been hearing all along about McGrath’s script….but you never know. Have You Heard? (formerly known as Every Word Is True) is the “other” Truman Capote biopic that Warner Independent is holding back from release until late next year so as not to get into a pissing match with Bennett Miler’s Capote, which Sony Classics is showing in Toronto and then opening on 9.30. Miller’s film starts screening next week for people like me, and I’ve been told by a weekly magazine writer who’s seen it that Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Capote is definitely award-worthy.

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Any e-mails anyone might have sent over the last two or three days of a pressing nature, please re-send them as my inbox has again been erased and I’m starting out clean as of this morning…thanks.

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ThinkFilm will be putting Keith Beauchamp’s The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till into theatres nationwide in October. The doc will have an early exclusive run at the Film Forum starting on 8.17. I’ve seen Beauchamp’s doc, and to be honest I found it an incomplete portrait of Till and the horrible crime that ended his life at age 14 in the summer of 1955. While visiting relatives in Mississippi from his native Chicago, Till was killed by at least two rural white guys (others may have been involved) for the sin of having made a sexually suggestive comment to one of the guys’ wives. The film acknowledges that Till may have unwittingly provoked this woman by flouting social taboos, but accounts of what he allegedly said to the woman are much more matter-of-fact in at least one other account of the case that I’ve read. (Check out the site for the PBS “American...

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