In all the coverage of Sony Pictures refusing to distribute Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, no one has noted the obvious, which is that the title makes it sound like a documentary. We all know Brooks to be a hip and shrewd comic, but doesn’t the movie also sound a tiny bit…what’s the word I’m searching for? Cornball? A little dopey? How sharp and live-wire does anyone expect Muslim humor to be? Isn’t Muslim culture patriarchal and redneck-y and disparaging of women, etc.? I should just shut up and wait to see it, right? Warner Independent has stepped in as the distributor.

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I love this line from a review of Capote by Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman, in which he examines the final beat in the relationship between Truman Capote and condemned murderer Perry Smith: “[Philip Seymour] Hoffman
makes Capote’s dissolution a theatrical miracle of devastation. In his final scene with Perry, he’s so conflicted that he does something I’ve never seen on screen: He cries, honestly, and lies at the same time.”

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I don’t want to get too excited or lose my mind or anything, but this parody trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is clever as shit, but it also has a dark undercurrent because it perfectly nails the idiot-virus affecting movie advertising attitudes right now. It shows that you can take footage from any drama and lie through your teeth and make it look like a total fluffball movie…and this is what marketing people do all the time, because all they want to do is get people to show up on opening weekend, period. The creators are affiliated with a Manhattan media-advertising outfit called P.S.260.

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For a while there, John Stockwell was the director who put soul and character into movies about young people involved in personal struggles and spiritual crises. He did this with crazy/beautiful, about a smart and responsible-minded East L.A. Hispanic teenager who falls for Kirsten Dunst’s alcoholic, self-destructive rich girl from Pacific Palisades, and then with the under-rated Blue Crush, a beautifully-shot, nicely finessed North Shore surfing movie with Kate Bosworth. But now, suddenly, he’s become the go-to guy for exotic outdoor thrillers starring hot-looking 20-somethings. He’s directed Into the Blue (Sony, 9.30), a throwaway diving-for-treasure-and-finding-thrills movie with Jessica Alba, Paul Walker and Scott Caan. And he’s now down in Brazil shooting Turistas, about “a group of young backpackers whose vacation turns sour when a bus accident leaves them marooned in a remote Brazilian jungle that holds an...

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Oh, and by the way? I had an appointment to meet Scott Caan early last July at a hip hotel on Thompson Street in Soho, the intention being to discuss that above-average film he wrote and directed called Dallas 362…and he disappeared. He wasn’t at the hotel, there was no “sorry” message left with the concierge, and no message was left on my cell phone. That makes him a Man of Honor.

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Last week’s tracking figures for In Her Shoes, before last Saturday’s sneak, weren’t that hot — 2% first choice, awareness 55%, and definite interest 23%. (The under-25 female awareness was 66%; over-25 female awareness was 68%.) But the sneak has definitely bumped things up, and today’s tracking says first-choice for Shoes is now at 9%, general awareness 66% and definite interest 32%. The second sneak this weekend will bump things up a bit more and so on until the opening on 10.7. For perspective, Flightplan had a definite interest tally of 44% and 14% first-choice the day before it opened.

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You want surreal? Read Laura Holson’s New York Times story about the Universal-buying-DreamWorks negotiations that have fallen apart. Because two recent DreamWorks films — The Island and Just Like Heaven — respectively flopped and underperformed, NBC Universal executives involved in negotations to purchase the live-action filmmaking side of DreamWorks (along with the company’s 60-film library) “lowered their projection of the rate of return for DreamWorks” and therfore lowered their offer from $1.5 billion to $1.4 billion. This still would have handed about $900 million to DreamWorks’ partners and investors (David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, Paul Allen and…?). But because of the $100 million downgrade, Geffen, who was repping DreamWorks in the negotiations, said “forget it” and the deal has gone...

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We all want to be recognized for our own accomplishments, but it still seems…well, funny that the mini-bio for director-writer Rodrigo Garcia in the Nine Lives press kit doesn’t mention that his dad is novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez(“One Hundred Years of Solitude”).

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My advice is to brush aside David Poland’s dissing/dismissing of Tony Scott’s 9.25 N.Y. Times piece about Republican party pro-life talking points in Just Like Heaven, The Exorcism of Emily Rose , and even Michael Bay’s The Island. Libertas, the rightie website affiliated with the Liberty Film Festival, discussed the right-to-life issue in The Island with some enthusiasm last summer, and it seems to me that Scott’s observations about Heaven and Emily Rose are fairly astute, and a long way from wild ravings. To some extent, Hollywood is obviously winking at Bubba Nation with these films.

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It was in the cards for several weeks, and now Miramax president Daniel Battsek has finally announced his acquisition of Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, a profoundly gripping drama that I saw and wrote about during the latter stages of the Toronto Film Festival. More in the vein of Walter Salles’ Central Station than Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, Tsotsi has the chops to shoot right to the top of the list of Best Foreign-Language Feature hopefuls.

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If you have the slightest appetite for good political theatre, reading this Daily News story about Warren Beatty’s anti-Arnold-Schwarzenegger speech in Oakland the other day will get your blood going. There are those who would love to see Beatty run against Schwarzenegger, but I there’s no way he’ll ever drop his Artful Dodger mentality and hang his hide over the side. It would be terrific, of course, if he did run. And I don’t agree at all with the view of Dick Rosengarten, co-publisher of California Political Week, that a Beatty candidacy wouldn’t fly. “I’m not sure two movie stars can run [against each other], not even here,” he told the News. Wrong — two former movie stars battling it out for the California governorship would be a totally natural and logical expression of the way Hollywood and politics have been bleeding into each other and upping the ante over the last 45 years.

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The Great Liberal Hope who might actually pull the trigger some day will be Ben Affleck. Truth, Justice and the American Way will probably result in a career upsurge so it won’t happen any time soon, but when Affleck hits his next career pothole (five or ten years from now…who knows?) he might actually start making the moves. If you saw him on the political talk shows during the ’04 Democratic Convention in Boston, you know he’s got the makings.

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You should have heard the crowd chortle with delight when Bill Hurt went into his irritated-older-brother shpiel in the last act of A History of Violence at the Grove yesterday afternoon. Hurt had them in the palm of his hand. He got a laugh with almost every line, every facial tic…and it was fantastic to feel a performance work as well as this. Being there put all doubts to rest: Hurt will be one of the Best Supporting Actor nominees when they’re announced in January. A performance that rocks as well as this one can’t not be recognized. Hurt nails it the way Beatrice Straight nailed it with that one marital-outburst scene in Network, opposite Bill Holden. There was a 4 pm and a 5 pm show on Saturday (I went to the latter), and nearly every seat was taken. And that ending…whoa.

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Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents is a nicely confident British period piece…funny, ascerbic, touching at times. And it sinks in, yes, but not that deeply — it has that wry Frears sensibility, and satisfies only as far as it goes. If you’re looking for a delightful time at the Royal in West Los Angeles, it does the trick…but it’s not an A-list Best Picture contender. Why? It’s more of a chuckler than a feeler — it’s emotionally earnest and Judy Dench is terrific in the lead role (ditto Bob Hoskins as her stage manager), but even with the dead-son element it doesn’t quite put a lump in your throat. Almost, close…but not quite.

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And yet Curtis Hanson’s In Your Shoes, dismissed by a certain columnist as a good commercial film but not an awards-calibre thing, has an emotional resonance factor (it’s not about shoes or bickering sisters but resolving family hurt) that might persuade some in the Academy to think about Oscar-ish distinctions. Maybe I’m alone on this one, but I don’t think so. It got to me (and I can be kind of a hard-ass), and I’ve felt how it plays with a crowd. If any- one catches In Your Shoes at one of those sneak preview screenings being held across the country this evening (Saturday, 9.24), I’d appreciate some reactions.

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“A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg’s latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis declared in her 9.23 review. “That sounds far grimmer or at least more relentlessly grim than this shrewd, agile, often bitingly funny film plays. The great kick of [it] — or rather, the great kick in the gut — comes from Mr. Cronenberg’s refusal to let us indulge in movie violence without paying a price. The man wants to make us suffer, exquisitely. Decades of mainlining blockbusters have, for better or perhaps for worse, inured us to the image of bullet-chewed bodies and the pop-pop-pop of phony weapon fire. For the contemporary movie connoisseur, film death is now as cheap as it is familiar. To which Mr. Cronenberg quietly says, ‘Oh, yeah?’”

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A TV comedy show is usually two things — what the creators intend it to be in their heads as they’re fine-tuning the season opener, and what the creators change it into after they’ve shifted into panic mode after an initial bad review or two, or when the ratings are much lower than expected. So let’s see what happens with Comedy Central’s The Showbiz Show with David Spade from here on…

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The instant a film is described as a “romantic comedy,” it’s dead to me. That’s why I wouldn’t watch Dirty Love on a plane…even if I was dead-bored. You can always depend on a “romantic comedy” to be arch, off-the-ground and phony as a three-dollar bill. There have been exceptions, yes, but 96% of the time the term means the movie will be farcical and dumb-assed. It will contain nothing angular or vaguely thoughtful, nothing perverse, no laughs… and it will have a juvenile and relentlessly hyper attitude about sex. It means loyal readers of Star, In Touch, People and Us will be there on opening weekend (maybe).

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I don’t believe in airing dirty laundry if you’re profiling someone involved with a new film (actor, director, etc.) for its own sake. However, you should absolutely get into it if it applies to the work. Naturally, being an L.A. Times piece, you won’t find this criteria in Michael Goldman’s interview with Jenny McCarthy about Dirty Love (First Look, 9.23). Starring and written by McCarthy, the film is described on the IMDB as “an edgy comedy about a girl who has fallen out of love” and more particularly about “a jilted photographer who sets off on a mission to get back at her philandering model boyfriend.” It is therefore not only allowable but necessary to ask if the reason for McCarthy’s divorce from John Asher, the film’s director, is echoed in the movie’s plot. Goldman wimps out, of...

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I love that they’re trying to sell the new four-disc Ben-Hur
DVD to the religious right, offering to Christian retail outlets a “Ben-Hur Bible Study Guide” by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller and his son, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller, the co-chairmen of Crystal Cathedral Ministries. This is just as phony a sales pitch as the original author, General Lew Wallace, calling his book “A Tale of the Christ.” As co-screenwriter Gore Vidal explains on the “making of” doc, Ben-Hur is the story of unrequited love, betrayal and revenge between a Jewish boy and a Roman boy. Rage and bitterness are washed clean at the finale by Christ’s blood trickling into a stream, fine..but Ben-Hur never would have never been made into a film if the character of Judah Ben-Hur had followed the Nazarene’s teachings. If Judah (Charlton Heston) had returned from Jack Hawkins’ villa in Rome and decided to turn the other...

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Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson, Steven Soderbergh says the “skewed studio system” — i.e., the overall economics of cost vs. revenue — “needs to be rethought. People need to be made true partners in the real risk/reward ratio. Everybody needs to be talking about fair compensation and participation. It can be done. The force of economics is irresistible.” In other words, stars should risk it like the producers do…in line with the Robert Evans philosophy of “everybody risks it…if the movie hits, everybody makes out…if it doesn’t, at least nobody gets hurt.” That means putting a harness on their agents and pay-or-play deals…right?

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You’re hearing it here again, and I don’t know anything except for having read the Jarhead script way back when and knowing how unshakably hard-core the “Troy” character is: Peter Sarsgaard is going to score big with his performance as this guy…the steely- eyed Marine buddy to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Anthony Swofford character…the hard guy who never wavers or shudders or loses focus…who always has his shit wrapped tight. I haven’t been to an early screening — this is merely what I got when I met this guy on the page, and I’m just tellin’ ya…

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On the other hand, I can understand a reader’s reluctance to buy what I’m saying because I also claimed that Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown was going to be the shit based on having read the script…and look what happened in Toronto. (The shorter version is about to be screened for the junketeers, but let me repeat that the longer version isn’t a total wipeout because it finds the groove at roughly the halfway mark…it gradually becomes a film about what makes life joyful and worth hanging onto.) Scripts are blueprints — when you read a good one you start directing the “movie” in your head. But you also expect that this good script will be further tweaked before it’s actually filmed (most films are tweaked and tweaked within an inch of their lives), and there are so many ways to emphasize this or de-emphasize that. All I can say is that I wrote a pretty good piece in the mid ’90s called “Loved the Script, Hated the Movie.”

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What happens when you see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan a second time? (My first exposure was in the Varsity 8 last Friday at the Toronto Film Festival.) This masterful doc, which I saw yesterday on the Paramount Home Video DVD, gets a little bit better because the basic theme seems that much clearer, and the half-ecstatic, half-tragic arc of Dylan’s experience from ’62 to ’66 is that much harder to miss. Dylan’s basic motto/game plan was to always live and work in a state of becoming — no standing still, no looking back, always the next thing, etc. This was the basic mindset that led to his early-to-mid-60s genius run. It was what took him to the top of the plateau, and also what enraged his folkie fans to the point that many of them wanted him pushed off when he went electric. The extras are cool (full-length clips of Dylan singing this and that song, four or five tribute numbers by other artists) but the coolest thing about it is the slight but distinct improvement factor which, after all, is what happens with all great films.

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In a 3.16 lead piece called “9/11 Pitch Meeting,” I argued that the story behind the forthcoming Oliver Stone 9/11 movie, about a couple of Port Authority police officers named Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin who found themselves buried inside a small pit under 20 feet of rubble after the collapse of the North Tower, and were eventually found and dug out, isn’t nearly as intriguing as the story of Port Authority employee Pasquale Buzzelli. I’ve passed this along before…Buzzelli was the guy who was in a stairwell on the 22nd floor of the North Tower when it came crashing down and who somehow survived. (He awoke a couple of hours later on a concrete slab situated 30 feet above where Jimeno and McLoughlin were trapped.) Buzzelli’s story is ten times what Jimeno and McLoughlin’s is because of the...

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In Glenn Whipp’s interview piece with Jodie Foster, she relates a story about seeing March of the Penguins with her two kids at a Sunday noontime matinee and getting into an argument with a woman who went “beserk” because one of her kids was talking in the usual piercing way that little kids talk and disturbing the vibe. “One son’s older, so he was quiet all the time, but my little one says things like, ‘Is that the baby? Is he carrying the egg?’” Foster relates. “And I’m trying to keep him quiet, but he’s not screaming or anything. He’s just asking questions, and kids don’t know how to talk quietly really. And this woman in front of me is just beserk. She started with the shushing from the get-go. ‘Fine. You can shush forever.” And then she starts yelling at me. Finally, I just turn into the most perfect police officer where...

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If you want a demonstration of how fair and thorough David Poland’s Movie City News is in terms of links to showbiz stories on its main page, click on it right now. (I wrote this Friday morning at 7:19 am.) The link at the top of the page says “Kilday On The Doc Race for Oscar…But Leaves Out A Lot Of Titles, Including Sony Classics’ Sundance Directing Winner The Devil & Daniel Johnston , Which Is Oscar Qualified.” And of course, naturally …you expected otherwise?…Poland ignored my lead piece on the exact same topic, which went up last night around 6:30 pm.

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