2006 has been a significant just-say-no year as far as publicists screening (or not screening) movies for critics and journos. Earlier this year the trend of publicists deciding against holding press-screenings of mediocre movies seemed to accelerate. And now there's a new development affecting...well, just Hollywood Elsewhere right now, but maybe others as the trend spreads. I'm speaking of being barred from screenings of a couple of films because of too much meanness and negativity in my postings.

I've been told in no uncertain terms that I'm off the invite list to screenings of Running With Scissors, in part because I wrote a...Read More

Here's an absolute Hollywood Reporter Key Art Award nominee for best movie poster -- Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.8). The Berlin-based, black-and-white noir is set in the late 1940s, and the poster seems to have been designed back then also. It's not a blindingly brilliant concept -- a fairly obvious one, in fact -- but something about it is unusually authentic-looking, like it was really and truly slapped together in 1948. George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire costar.

The Calgary Sun's Kevin Williamson spoke to yours truly a few days ago about the sudden trap-door trend of studio execs just saying 'no' to humungous big-star deals. "There is definitely a sea change [happening] in Hollywood," said Hollywood Reporter int'l general manager John Burman. "Not just in L.A., but in the world." And one my quotes was, "Is it definitely a bend in the river? Is it analogous to the 1989 [anti-socialist] revolution in Eastern Europe? I don't know, but I love that idea ."

One look at this shot from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.13.07) and it's obvious that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson have reached full biological maturity. They're contractually obliged, of course, to portray "Harry" and "Hermione" in the movie, but given the formulaic rigidity and corporate salivation behind this franchise, any and all implications of what being in your mid-teens inevitably involves will almost certainly be ignored/repressed. Which means that the fanciful archness of the franchise is about to intensify a bit more.

Radcliffe and Watson in Harry Potter and the Order of...

"'[My parents] didn't like the class system, and the royal family is the pinnacle of the class system. I was brought up very anti-monarchist. I was a bit cheeky, a little uppity [in my younger days] about why the queen won't smile. Does it hurt her to smile? Isn't that what she's there for?' " -- Helen Mirren talking about her much-admired performance in Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax, 9.30) with Newsweek's Barbara Kantrowitz.

"I've finally seen Tom Tykwer's Perfume in a plex in my home town of Augsburg, Germany , and I'm even more convinced that it will go the route of The Name of the Rose, which was a blockbuster in Europe ($120 million) while earning a miniscule $7 million in the U.S.," says a former exhibitor who runs a site about box-office in Germany and elsewhere.

"Just keep in mind that Perfume has so far grossed $31.8 million in five European markets in just 11 days.

"Even though it feels a bit lengthy in parts, the...Read More

Warner Bros. is telling me they still haven't decided when to release Clint Eastwood's second Iwo Jima movie -- the Japanese language Letters from Iwo Jima. Despite what Variety editor Peter Bart wrote on 9.3.06 with Clint's apparent input (i.e., that Flags of Our Fathers "will open Oct. 20" [and then] Letters From Iwo Jima will open two months later"), I've been told that senior Warner Bros, distribution execs intend to open Letters sometime in January '07, or perhaps even later...but they aren't sure when.

All I could get from a Warner Bros. publicity rep today was two things: (a) "I know...Read More

"The humiliating box office returns for All the King's Men may have trickled in over the weekend (a pathetic $3.8 million), but the death knell sounded almost a year ago and unintentionally came out of its producers' mouths. When Sony Pictures announced, just two months before the film's planned Christmastime release, that its opening would be pushed into the next year, the official reason was that more time was needed to complete the editing and score.

"But the unmistakable message sent to savvy audiences (that means everyone now) was: This movie is in trouble," begins a 9.26 Caryn James piece in...Read More

When Columbia decided several weeks ago against putting Mike Binder's Reign O'er Me into the derby by opening it in early December, one of the factors, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, was that "Columbia had a heavy fall/Xmas slate (four films) and they didn't want to add another film to that list in the first place,"

Those films were All The King's Men, Running With Scissors, Stranger Than Fiction and The Pursuit of Happyness.

It's funny how things change so quickly. Here is it only late September (four or five weeks after writing that short article)...Read More

Sharon Waxman's latest N.Y. Times piece (dated 9.25) is about Jim Carrey 's recent decision to leave UTA agent Nick Stevens and how the move "rumbled through Hollywood like a storm [and] signaled changing times for a tight network of stars who have dominated Hollywood comedies for several years -- Carrey, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell and writer-directors Judd Apatow, Adam McKay -- and how the key to this web of interwoven talent has been Stevens and his deputies at the United Talent Agency, and the talent managers Jimmy Miller and Eric Gold, who...Read More

There are implications of laissez-faire rich-girl posturings in Sofia Coppola's decision to stroll around Paris with a New York Times photographer (who, I'm told, is a personal friend of Coppola's) and pose for shots here and there. Coppola is female and fairly young and a lover of the alluring eyefuls one normally finds in the shops and parks and museums of Paris, and that's fine...but the montage provides an echo, for me, of the rank emptiness (i.e., the constant regarding of 18th Century surfaces) in Coppola's Marie-Antoinette. The shots by the Times are appealing and some are exceptional, but I shoot...Read More

I wasn't having all that terrific a time with the entirety of Todd Phillips' School for Scoundrels last night (I went to one of the commercial sneak showings), but I did enjoy the sour-shit attitude in some of Billy Bob Thornton's put-down lines. Particularly the retort to costar Jon Heder when he talks about a developing relationship with Jacinda Barrett (who doesn't do it for me, by the way...especially not after The Last Kiss) and Thornton goes, "Yeah...I'm sure you're days away from adopting a Chinese kid together." If that reminds you of something you read about in People a few years...Read More

In an upcoming (10.2.06) Al Pacino interview on James Lipton's "Inside The Actor's Studio" series on Bravo, the 66 year-old actor tells a simulated rear-entry Oscar statuette story.

It happened right after he'd won his Best Actor Oscar for Scent of a Woman. I get in the elevator and I'm going down with a lot of people," Pacino tells Lipton. "And I had my Oscar [and] a very well known actress is in front of me and she starts to squirm. And I realized the head of my Oscar was touching her behind. I leaned over and said, 'Oh pardon...Read More

"Murders have continued almost unabated [in his films], and at 66, Brian De Palma has been at it a long time, since the mid-'60s. While the other major directors of his generation -- Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola -- have ranged high and low, De Palma keeps hitting the same groove. Like Hitchcock, to whom he has often been compared, and not always favorably, his name represents a brand. [But] even in a film as roundly slammed and wildly unsatisfactory as The Black Dahlia, there are moments when De Palma's ecstatic love of filmmaking comes through. But his ardor can be...Read More

"I found the whole time [in the writing of The Queen] that I had to dampen down the inflammatory nature of what I was being told," screenwriter Peter Morgan tells N.Y. Times profiler Sarah Lyall . "You have no idea how much hosing down and cooling of information we had to do. We were shedding and throwing out sensational information the whole time." A little too much!

In this well-researched, skillfully written New Yorker piece about the life and legacy of the life of Marie-Antoinette, Judith Thurman says the following about Sofia Coppola, director of the empty and for the most part despicable Marie-Antoinette (Columbia, 10.20):

She "is a fashion celebrity and muse who helps to publicize the work of designer friends by wearing it with the teasing glamour of a jaded virgin playing dress-up in her mother's clothes. She has always been drawn to beautiful, trapped girls, who belong to a generation too cynical to unite in rebellion and...Read More

Queer Lady

Stephen Frears' The Queen (Miramax, 9.30) will open the New York Film Festival this Friday (9.29), but it's also been shown at the Venice Film Festival. It would have been okay to write about it after that festival debut, but I've been holding back. I've decided to let go today because a guy called me a candy-ass the other night for doing so.

I don't want to put The Queen down -- it's intelligent and restrained, and Helen Mirren gives us a fascinating Queen Elizabeth II -- but there's not a whole lot to it,...Read More

Four days ago TMZ's Claude Brodesser-Akner (where did the "Akner" come from?) wrote a short piece about the whacking of Bradford Simpson, the top guy at Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way. A big reason Leo fired the poor guy, Brodesser-Akner reports, is that "lots of interesting stuff was in development [at Appian Way], but little has come to fruition." Brodesser-Akner mentions Appian Way's interest in developing a film about LSD guru Timothy Leary , (with the idea of Leo eventually playing him), hiring playwright Craig Lucas (The Dying Gaul) and Leary archivist Michael Horowitz to develop the screenplay. Hold on, hold on...I know...Read More

"'What's human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?'" -- alleged Mel Gibson remark following last night's Apocalypto screening at Austin's Fantasticfest. The film, which Harry Knowles saw twice yesterday, is about big bad Mayans (aggressive, militaristic) conquering and mauling a smaller and simpler grass-hut society.

So there's the critique of the U.S. and the Bushies -- an idea to hold onto -- but the thing that seemed to have really impressed everyone last night are the B-movie action-driven aspects.

"After the second screening, I have to say it plays even better," Knowles has written. "The...Read More

Mel Gibson, wearing a mask and a wig so he wouldn't be noticed, visited two Oklahoma towns on Thursday and Friday to attend test screenings of Apocalypto, which Disney will release on 12.8. The Friday screening played before "a mostly American-Indian audience" -- the film is about an ancient Mayan culture -- at the Riverwind Casino in Goldsby, Oklahoma. The Thursday screening happened at Cameron University in Lawton. If anyone who saw Apocalypto at either screening wants to share, please get in touch. It's strange that Gibson would wear a "mask", no?

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20) has been seen on the Left Coast, and it's "damn good," according to a certain eyeballer. The word is that some kind of limited peek will be given to a select group within a few days. That doesn't mean anyone's necessarily going to write anything about it straight away. Let's see how it plays out.

There's a certain John Fordian echo in Flags of Our Fathers that I won't explain but which I loved hearing about this morning. If the film has a primary focus, it's about the battle...Read More

There was a Big Unaddressed Element in Michael Fleming's 9.21 Variety story about Crash director Paul Haggis suddenly abandoning Against All Enemies, a feature adaptation of Richard Clarke's best-seller about the roots of 9/11, and his jumping into "talks" to direct Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron in The Garden of Elah .

The BUE is why did Against All Enemies, a Sony project with Sean Penn playing Clarke, suddenly disassemble? An ICM source close to the situation says Fleming's story creates a misleading impression since "there's always been this little movie" -- i.e., the Garden of Elah project -- "that...Read More

"But for the most profoundly cinematic/ thematic take on our shared global dilemma, nothing compares to Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27.06). It's the apotheosis of the multi-story, meta-tragic approach Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga have been perfecting with Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Here the scope is wider, the craftsmanship gives Martin Scorsese a run for his money, and the emotional, political and philosophical implications are devastating yet, in their simple, honest way, reassuringly humanistic as well." -- L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss on the recently-launched "Reel Deal" site.

Postscript to yesterday's riff about Pete Hammond's what-about-Zodiac? piece: a certain know-it-all is saying there's no way Paramount is going to platform-release David Fincher's drama in late December in New York and Los Angeles because they don't want anything else in the soup that might dilute their efforts, even a little bit, to get World Trade Center a Best Picture nomination.

The likelihood of this happening is just about zilch -- ask anyone, it's not in the cards -- but WTC is the only pure-Paramount, pure-Brad Grey, pure-Gail Berman contender and apparently it's a point of pride. Flags of Our...Read More

Hold up on those wildcat Friday numbers from back east and consider this studio projection: (1) Jackass: Number Two will end up #1 with roughly $27,317,000 for the weekend; (2) Jet Li's Fearless will end up with $9,716,000; (3) The Gridiron Gang will end up a hair below that with $9,617,000; (3) Flyboys will come in with $5,042,000; (4) Everyone's Hero, $4,823,000, (5) The Black Dahlia, $4,358,000; and All The King's Men will finish with $3,709,000...dead.

While speaking to Factory Girl star Sienna Miller, Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye makes mention of the fact that "those who have seen early rough-cut versions" -- partly a reference to yours truly -- "tell me the performances of Sienna and leading man Guy Pearce, as Warhol, are brilliant. So much so that studio chief Harvey Weinstein plans a year-end Oscar campaign for them."

I never said anything rock-solid about Harvey planning to release Factory Girl, so presumably Baz has done some digging of his own. That or Sienna said so.

Here's how I...Read More

This Dutch trailer for Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (Sony Classics) is interesting for the extreme widescreen framing. It looks like a 3 to 1 aspect ratio...odd. The film is supposed to be Verhoeven's return to his Dutch roots, but it looks like it was shot with the same technical slickness that he applied to The Hollow Man. I have to give David Poland credit for making me laugh by calling it Showgirl's List. He called it"a perverse delight...Verhoeven has a strong, kinky voice that is on full display here. Sex, Nazis, excrement, pubic hair bleaching, Lugers, explosions, Jews, redheads, singing, dancing...woo...Read More

What you have to do is watch this Good Shepherd trailer and then read my mid-August HE piece called "Sussing Shepherd" and then let it all sink in, and then you need to stir it around until it becomes a kind of oatmeal mush.

There's some kind of defensive gatekeeper vibe coloring the advance-screening policy on behalf of Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.20). The first hint came in mid-August when it was made clear that Scissors wouldn't be going to the Toronto Film Festival ("The Old Toronto Sidestep"). Then a mild-mannered journalist told me the other day that publicists working the Scissors junket next week have been talking some enforcing very strict rules about who'll be allowed into the screenings. And over the last two days every call I've made about trying to see it has been met with stony silence. A fellow columnist says that...Read More

Last year Brokeback Mountain became a kind of milestone for gay subject matter in mainstream films, in part by lending an aura of class because of all the critical praise and Oscar nominations. This year we have three gayish films of an allegedly strong distinction -- for lack of a better term I'm calling them the Gay Trilogy -- opening during award- contender season, plus a couple of second-tier so-sos.

None are on Brokeback's level -- not even close -- but they all have same-sex encounters woven into their fabric, and I'm wondering how much of this is a Brokeback legacy thing,...Read More

The MCN link says "The NY Film Critics Circle Sets Its Award Dates for January"...bullshit. They'll vote on Monday, 12.11 and of course, the winners will be announced right away. The awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, 1.7.07, at the Supper Club, "a new venue for the organization this year."

89% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics have spat upon All The King's Men, and in such an atmosphere three or four people have remarked with surprise at Kenneth Turan's rave in the L.A. Times. I shouldn't say anything because I slept through about 30% to 35% of Men when I caught it in Toronto, but a sign of a formidable critic is one who says what he/she likes despite the herd mentality, so Turan's okay in my book. And he isn't completely alone. A quick scan of the Metacritic survey tells you tthat Time's Richard Schickel is mostly a...Read More

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has penned a column about Zach Helm's fabled Stranger Than Fiction script, which "five studios, 37 directors and scores of movie stars threw themselves at." I knew all about that excitement when it was happening. Everyone was creaming over that script except I couldn't get past page 20 when I tried to read it (twice), and then I saw the finished film in Toronto and I went, "What the fuck was that about?"

Ostensibly, Fiction is about a problem afflicting IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), which is that...Read More

Said this before, saying it again: despite Clint Eastwood having told Variety editor Peter Bart earlier this month that Letters From Iwo Jima, his Japanese-soldier-POV Iwo Jima movie, will be released "two months" after Flags of Our Fathers, or sometime in mid to late December, and despite Pete Hammond considering a scenario that Letters will indeed be competing 'against' Paramount and Dreamworks' Flags and Warner Bros. "sources" yelling him "they are only seeing the film for the first time this week and have not yet decided when it will be released but that "it will 'not' be in 2006"...despite all...Read More

Pete Hammond jumps into the will- Paramount-give- Zodiac-a-platform-opening-in-late-December story in his latest Hollywood Wiretap column, which is basically about how end-of-the-year crowding has left the studios with an embarassment of riches. But before exploring the Zodiac particulars, I have a suggestion.

Robert Downey

Paramount is apparently still on the fence (i.e., reluctant but unwilling to give this reluctance a full voice) about opening David Fincher's allegedly top-drawer policier in New York and L.A. on or before before 12.31.06. (The studio intends to release it wide on 1.17.07.) I've written two or three articles pushing...Read More

"If I see one more bus ad for one more fucking animated movie with fucking animals in it, I'm going to start screaming" -- an actual comment from a director to his manager-producer, apparently in response to seeing an Open Season poster.

Caught up as I was in my 9.19 Jim Carrey indifference ("Does anyone really give that much of a hoot if he continues to be a big star or not?"), I went all "meh" on Nikki Finke's latest L.A. Weekly column, which details the blow-by-blow of how UTA's Nick Stevens lost Carrey as a client (largely due to the finaglings & ministations of Carrey's manager Jimmy Miller). I should've paid faster attention. It's a well reported, extremely tasty story.

Here's a sample graph: "A furious Stevens confronted Miller and [Carrey's other manager-at-the-time, Eric Gold): If he were doing such...Read More

I didn't hear anything all that good about Michael Ian Black's The Pleasure of Your Company during the Toronto Film Festival. Maybe I wasn't talking to the right people. Whatever the rumble, MGM has acquired the North American rights to this GreenStreet Films and Fugitive Films co-production....go figure.

"I mean, I get depressed like everybody. I have angst. I have anxiety. I worry about the world. Nobody was expecting the kind of fearful times that we live in. It's really out of the blue. It's like, 'My God, what the hell is happening?'" -- Jack Nicholson (plugging The Departed is his usual roundabout way) to Erik Hedegaard in a relatively fresh-off-the-vine issue of Rolling Stone.

It would be nice if Toronto Film Festival slackers like myself had a shot at seeing films they wanted to catch in Toronto but didn't. Like Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, which Sony Classics has acquired for distribution in North America and other territories. I didn't prioritize it in Toronto, frankly, because of mixed word of mouth...but then Variety's Robert Koehler convinced me it was worth seeing. Now comes an announcement that the Netherlands has submitted Black Book, a sexually- pronounced World War II drama, as its official foreign language entry for the Oscars.

A trailer for Zack Snyder's 300 used to be on this AICN page, but it appears to have been taken down. (I don't know what happened.) I know the film is based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name -- kind of a Sin City take on the Battle of Thermopylae. Impressively stylish (or do I really mean stylishly impressive?), but also over the top. People like me are always looking for ground-level echoes while graphic-novel guys are always looking for "whoa!" and "awesome!" More's the pity since the story -- how 300 Spartans held back tens of...Read More

The only 9.22 opener that looks like anything commercially is Jackass Number Two (Paramount) with, according to a tracking survey, an 81% general awareness, 40% definite interest and 13% first choice. (It also has a 25% definitely not interested, but that's just the older audience harumphing.) The two liveliest 9.29 openers, to go by the numbers, are The Guardian -- 62, 36, 8 -- and the animated Open Season -- 47, 32, 3. (32% definite interest among adults is a very strong number for a kids film.) And The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6) is looking very strong -- 55,...

Suber Lesson #5: "There are three things that a memorable popular film is never about -- (1) unrequited love, (2) impotence, and (3) despair. In real life, people experience unrequited love, impotence and despair all the time. But the gospel of popular entertainment is based on individualism" -- the belief that you can become anything and anyone if your determination and inner resources are up to the task -- "and anything that suggests otherwise is forbidden."

Not literally forbidden, Suber is saying, but pretty much isolated, marginalized... barred from the realm of mass-acceptance. Which has nothing to do with critics and...Read More

"...then I realized, Gawd laeft this playce a lawwng time ago"...that's Leonardo DiCaprio 's final line in the trailer for Ed Zwick's Blood Diamond (Warner Bros., 12.15). This is being positioned by Warner Bros. as an Oscar-worthy movie, but The Last Samurai taught everyone that you have to be careful with Zwick. He can be tasteful and restrained at times, but also ham-fisted -- for my money his emotional points have too often been underlined with a black felt-tip marker.

But the trailer tells me that DiCaprio -- one of the three leads in...Read More

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20), the WWII epic about Iwo Jima and the p.r. effort to celebrate the men who raised the flag atop Mt. Surabachi, began screening for selected journalists this week in New York, according to a 9.21 N.Y. Times piece by David Halbfinger.

He calls it "a big, booming spectacle that sprawls across oceans and generations," with "much of [it] following the flag raisers as they crisscross the country in the spring and summer of 1945 pitching war bonds for a government in desperate financial straits. It is neither a pure war movie nor, given...Read More

Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is a well made, relentlessly shallow film about an 18th Century Paris Hilton (Kirsten Dunst) living inside a whimsical fantasy membrane in and around the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in the years leading up to the French revolution. Camille Paglia is a brilliant writer, a social seer and a fearless pretense-puncturer, and she's written a piece about...well, not Coppola's film but how Marie-Antoinette is back in vogue. I was hoping she'd seen the film and might have hated it....pity. It is not enough to merely hate Marie-Antoinette. One needs to organize against it, storm its...Read More

ESPN's "Page 2" writer Sam Alipour follows Rescue Dawn producer and Clippers All-Star hotshot Elton Brand around Toronto as he went to the premiere and the after-party and whatnot. If there's a serious money quote in this piece, I haven't found it yet. Maybe I need to read it again .

Black Film.com's Wilson Morales has transcribed what reads like a portion of last weekend's Departed press conference. Matt Damon, Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, producer Graham King, Vera Farmiga and screenwriter William Monahan sat and suffered through a series of brain-novacaine press-junket questions.

A publicist I spoke to during a lunch earlier this afternoon told me that 80% of the "people" (journalists, I presume) she's spoken to about Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel have been iffy about it -- too long, too much like the previous Innaritu films, etc. But there's no basis for anyone to "meh" this film, I argued. It's too well crafted, too full of feeling and echoes about parenting and children. Later I talked with an industry guy who's spoken at length with Samuel L. Jackson, who saw Babel as a judge at the Cannes Film Festival, and the guy said Jackson...Read More

FILMdetail's Ambrose Herron on yet another anti-blogger screed written by a print journalist (the Guardian's Rachel Cooke). Cooke's piece was posted roughly three weeks ago (9.3) -- why does it take people like Herron and Anne Thompson so long to respond to these things? Why am I posting this item myself? I don't really give a shit about any of this. That's not true -- I do give a shit about some of it.

Suber Lesson #4: "In many of the most memorable stories, th central character is torn between desire and duty, between what the self seeks and society demands. The inner voice whispers, 'I want...' but the outer voice responds, with an echo-chamber resonance, 'You must...' The duty of the hero is not merely to stand up; he must stand for something. It's not something he desires; it's something he's got to do."

For some reason I've never forgotten this line from a David Mamet script for a 1987 "Hill Street Blues" epsode that he did a one-shot thing for: "I went to...Read More

Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer who shot Ingmar Bergman's best films with some of the most exquisite black-and-white compositions in film history, has died. I admired his color photography on Woody Allen's Another Woman and especially Crimes and Misdemeanors, but deep down he will always be the silver-monochrome painter who shot Bergman's The Virgin Spring, The Silence, Persona, Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly. I met him on the set of King of the Gypsies in Manhattan back in '78 or thereabouts. Sven was only 83 years old. He lived his last days in a Stockholm nursing home where he was...Read More

Scorsese Wired

At long last and after weeks of conflicting buzz-hype, Warner Bros. finally had a screening last night of Martin Scorsese's The Departed (10.6), and what great Scorsese stuff it has. And what a relief! The fabled director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas is back on the contempo urban turf where he once belonged. Here, at long last, is a return to an old-school, brass-knuckles crime flick with piss and vinegar and style to burn. It may not be profound or symphonic, but it's cause for real cheering.

Every piston in this film...Read More

Germany has chosen Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others as its offical entry for the 2007 Best Foreign Film Oscar...what a shocker. The 1980s-era drama won seven Lola awards (i.e., the German Oscars), it was the toast of Telluride and Toronto and it's looking to everyone like a very strong contender. What was Germany going to do? Was there a choice?

Suber Lesson #3: "Like religion, people to go movies not to see the world as it really is , but to see a world that compensates for the one they know."

A film will almost certainly be made out of "Hannibal Rising" (Delacourte Press), Thomas Harris's new Hannibal Lecter book that's due on 12.5, but Anthony Hopkins can forget it. It's strictly a young Hannibal thing that covers ages 6 through 20. Meaning two or three actors, right?

"Close readers of Mr. Harris’s previous novels, which also include 'The Silence of the Lambs' and 'Red Dragon,' may recall that Dr. Lecter saw his entire family killed during World War II in Eastern Europe," Motoko Rich recalls in this New York Times story. "The new novel...Read More

A study conducted by MarketCast on behalf of Google has concluded that "89% of moviegoers initially hear about a film from traditional sources including TV, in-theater trailers or word of mouth, while only 8% do so online. However, once people find out about a film, 49% typically do additional research before deciding to see a film; for them, the internet is the most popular tool. Of those researchers, 70% use the internet to discover more about the film. That's about one-third of overall moviegoers, whom the study dubbed 'moviegoing infoseekers.'" -- from a story 9.19 story by Variety's Ben Fritz.

"Imagine if Peter Pan had been a fucked-up teenage vagrant with a permanent hard-on, Wendy had been a cum-drenched junkie living in Brooklyn and Captain Hook had looked something like Mickey Rourke "...and then imagine this diseased movie being directed by Larry Clark. I don't know about the three principals, but I see Christina Aguilera as Tinkerbell and Ethan Suplee as Smee.

From the pages of Howard Suber's The Power of Film" (Michael Weise, 424 pages), here's Suber Lesson #2: "I.A.L. Diamond,who co-authored Some Like it Hot with Billy Wilder, once said that a good comedy uses 'a sub-structure that's as strong as it would be in drama...I think any comedy, with a slight change of emphasis, should be able to play as a drama." People who have never learned the essence of telling a joke will often begin by telling you, 'This is funny.' But effective humor, whether it's in a joke or a feature film, depends on the teller of the story...Read More

Lorenza Munoz's L.A. Times story about FoxFaith, a new division aimed at Christian moviegoers, says that this new division of Rupert Murdoch's film studio "plans to produce as many as a dozen films a year." Uhhm, okay, but that's not correct, according to Fox publicity chief Jeff Godsick and Fox Home Video spokesperson Steve Feldstein.

"Fox is basically acquring [Christian-themed films] for home video," Godsick said. "The whole deal is through Fox Home Video." Feldstein confirmed that the 12 initial films mentioned in Munoz's story "are going to be acquisitions, and a company called The Bigger Picture is going to be...Read More

Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.22) doesn't open for another three months, but Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett are currently in Los Angeles doing some preliminary Oscar drum-beating. They did a question & answer session before the Hollywood Foreign Press Assoc. yesterday following a screening, and tonight (Tuesday) they're doing back-to-back q & a's in front of separate SAG and BAFTA gatherings. Dench and Blanchett's performances are both presumed to be Oscar quality, but nobody knows anything. The film involves an illicit affair at a private school.

David Thomson makes a half-emotional case for Peter O'Toole finally winning his Best Actor Oscar for his work in Roger Michell's Venus, and in the meantime slips this into the general discussion:

"For those of us who remember O'Toole dancing on the roof of the ambushed train -- a romantic figure in white robes -- or [Venus costar] Vanessa Redgrave hunched over her own breasts, begging to get the pictures back in Blow-Up, it's astounding to see these two great players looking like noble wrecks. Is it possible that the change that has overtaken them has affected us too?"

There's only one...Read More

In trying to to set things straight yesterday about that Len Klady MCN remark about an alleged "film industry emissary" being part of the discussion or dialogue regarding the New York Times deciding to change the way it covers the New York Film Festival -- i.e., no more pro forma reviews of films on the day they "open" at the festival, and in their place running a kind of "Times portfolio" with little critical quips inserted -- even more feathers have been ruffled, so let's review what happened and try to calm this thing down.

Times film critic Manohla Dargis...Read More

That story about Brad Pitt supposed being "lined up" to replace Tom Cruise in the next Mission: Impossible film is " totally untrue" and "utter fiction," a senior Paramount Pictures spokesperson said early this afternoon.

Okay...the Pitt deal is a pipe dream. Does this mean Paramount intends to make M:I:4 (assuming they want to produce it) with Cruise, despite Viacom chief Sumner Redstone having recently booted him off the Paramount lot? The Mission: Impossible franchise "has been an extremely successful one for this studio, " the spokesperson replied, "but whatever moves we make regarding the future makeup of these films...Read More

I'm not sure that the question of whether or not CAA will represent Jim Carrey following his dumping of UTA last week is of critical importance to anyone, but here's Kris Tapley's take on what's shaking right now. In all candor, I'm not dead certain that Carrey necessarily matters to anyone these days. Where is it written that the cosmic order of things (the rotation of the globe, etc.) will be adversely affected if Carrey fails to remain the bigshot he's been over the last 13 or so years and be praised and make tens of millions over the next 20 to...Read More

In honor of UCLA film professor Howard Suber's recently released "The Power of Film" (Michael Weise, 424 pages), Hollywood Elsewhere will be running a series of bite-sized Suber Lessons taken straight from the book. Lesson #1: What do the following popular classic films have in common? Amadeus, American Graffiti, Annie Hall, Apocalypse Now, Bonnie and Clyde, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Brokeback Mountain, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Capote, Casablanca, Chinatown, Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, The Deer Hunter, Doctor Zhivago, Double Indemnity, Dr. Strangelove, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, Easy Rider, Frankenstein, The French Connection, From Here To Eternity, The...Read More

C.C. Goldwater, Tani Cohen and Julie Anderson's Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater has its nationwide debut on HBO tonight (9.18) and will play repeatedly for the next few weeks.

After seeing this 91-minute doc at the L.A. Film Festival last July, I came to realize that former Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater was a man of much greater character than I knew. The film is an engaging, very successful attempt to remind the public who Goldwater really was in terms of core beliefs and personal integrity. The irony is...Read More

"Newspapers are still profitable; the Journal reports that theL.A. Times has an operating profit of 20 percent. But they are under pressure from declining readership and advertising revenue as they face competition from new media sources, such as the internet." -- from a 9.18 CNNMoney story about offers (including an all-cash one from David Geffen) to buy the L.A. Times. That "still profitable" statement is hilarious. Who would have imagined ten years ago that a serious financial news story would feel the need to make this declaration in case readers might infer otherwise?

Hollywood Interrupted's Mark Ebner taps out a lively piece about Dan "Danno" Hanks and Fred "Mad Dog" Valis, undercover investigators known in the industry as the Backstreet Detectives. This is the beginning of a book, a movie pitch, a TV series pitch...it's not just this.

According to esteemed Variety critic Joe Leydon, The Guardian (Touchstone, 9.29) is "a shrewdly updated version of classic (and not-so-classic) military-themed pics about grizzled, blunt-spoken vets who transform cocksure hotheads into coolly efficient professionals." Right away you're thinking about seeing it -- it sounds routine but mildly appealing -- but four or five months from now on DVD. "With Kevin Costner well cast as a demanding mentor haunted by past failures, and Ashton Kutcher surprisingly effective as a brash recruit dealing with his own demons, the overlong (139 minutes) but involving drama has obvious cross-generational appeal. Add some exciting rescue-at-sea sequences, and you...Read More

For L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, the Toronto Film Festival movie "that had the most indelible connection to current events was Catch a Fire, the much-praised Phillip Noyce drama set in 1980s-era South Africa.

"When a friend asked what it was about, I told him it was the story of a country so traumatized by its fight against terrorism that it arrests and tortures an innocent, peace-loving man, doing such a good job of infuriating him that when he's released from prison he becomes the most ardent terrorist of all.

"My pal joked: 'So, it's really about today.' And so it...Read More

No more low-budget arthouse distractions for George Clooney. He's signed to direct and star in a front-and-center commercial flick called Leatherheads, an alleged romantic comedy about the birth of pro football in the 1920s. There's only one thing wrong with the packaging, and that's Rene Zellweger in the lead female role. Guys I know don't want to see her. She's always been a talented actress -- she was good in Cinderella Man -- but nobody in my circle wants to hang with her in the dark for a couple of hours, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my heart...Read More

Jack Matthews is, I feel, correct in every one of his post-Toronto assessments in this N.Y. Daily News piece except for two: (a) Doug McGrath's Infamous, commonly known as the other Truman-Capote- goes-to-Kansas-to-write-In Cold Blood film, is emphatically not better than Bennett Miller's Capote, and (b) John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus felt like more of a slog than "a trip." To me anyway. It's not that I'm against the graphic filming of one's sexual tastes and adventures (and those of your friends and hires) and weaving the footage into a form of cultural propaganda; it's mainly that movies of this sort strike me...Read More

Have any German readers of this column seen Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer? This Berndt Eichinger production, based on Patrick Sueskind's period best-seller of the mid '80s, opened in Germany last weekend and did extremely well commercially. Ed Meza's Variety story says it "looks like the most successful German film of '06 after attracting 1.04 million moviegoers and earning $7.3 million in its first four days of release, which amounted to a 53% share of all [German] box-office revenue."

DreamWorks will open it stateside on 12.27, but I'm getting the idea...Read More

General Idi Amin of Uganda "was the most famous African in history until Nelson Mandela got out of prison," says Last King of Scotland director Kevin McDonald. "Literally there was no one who was as well known in the West as [Amin], and I think that is because people always found him compelling. There was quite a seductive element to him that made him more dangerous and more terrifying in the end. I think he was a monster, but I think he was a complex monster, and to see him as complex makes not only for more interesting drama. He's not just...Read More

N.Y. Times film critic Manohla Dargis has informed me that MCN columnist Len Klady's reporting about why her paper has decided to change the way it covers the New York Film Festival -- i.e., no more pro forma reviews of films on the day they "open" at the festival, and in their place running a kind of "Times portfolio" with little critical quips inserted -- is "wrong" and that she's asked him to run a correction .

Klady's error, Dargis says, was in writing that "the exact reasons behind the decision are a bit sketchy, [but] it appears the Times...Read More

Cheatin' Hearts

Two movies about issues of trust, truth-telling and fidelity between loving couples played during the Toronto Film Festival, and the lessons of both -- Tony Goldwyn's The Last Kiss (which opened Friday) and Bob Goldwaith's Sleeping Dogs Lie (Samuel Goldwyn, 9.29) -- are pretty much the same but told from different gender perspectives.

They both say don't lie to your partner about anything -- lies are poison-- but at the same time don't tell them the absolute 100% truth, which can be worse than lying.

The Last Kiss is about 30 year-old architect Zach...Read More

MCN's Len Klady has written that the New York Times "has decided it won't print reviews of selections playing at the upcoming New York Film Festival. Though the exact reasons behind the decision are a bit sketchy, it appears the publication was persuaded by a film industry emissary that a potential blot on a [NYFF entry] was neither good for it or them." What the hell does that mean? Exactly which "film industry emissary" said what to which person or persons at the Times? Nobody's gonna bully me into not writing about The Queen on the day it opens the...Read More

When in doubt, when something in your chest tells you those sourpuss Toronto Film Festival critics can't be trusted, consider the jottings of Larry King.

When I think of the respectable and rewarding things about the films of Brian De Palma, I always think of those visual arias that are his well-known specialty -- those searing displays of virtuoso camerawork and choreography that are worked out just so.

My right-off-the-top-of-my-head favorites: (a) a fantasizing Angie Dickinson being mauled in the shower in Dressed to Kill, (b) Sissy Spacek's freckled hand reaching out of the grave to grab a horrified Amy Irving, (c) Al Pacino lying on a Grand Central Station escalator in Carlito's Way, (d) Tim Robbins meeting instant death when his face plate is...Read More

"Silence is hugely important. I use silence to fight against the tyranny of noise, the fucking noise of TV and even movies. In silence, the seeds of profound things can grow." -- Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu to the Toronto Globe & Mail sometime late last week.

"Will Martin Scorsese's The Departed becomes a question-mark film?" asks Dennis McDougal in a 9.17 N.Y. Times piece. "Will it reintroduce Jack Nicholson to a new generation, as Batman once did? Or will his Frank Costello [character] smack of geriatric retread: The Last Detail's Badass Buddusky meets The Shining's Jack Torrance, only more debauched?"

(l.) Jack Nicholson in The Departed; (r.) in The Last Detail

I won't see The Departed for another couple of days, but of all the characters Nicholson has played, Badass Buddusky is by far the the most kind-hearted, sentimental...Read More

Everyone loves or at least greatly respects Tombstone, the 1993 cult western with Kurt Russell, Val Kilmer, Bill Paxton and Sam Elliott. And many of the more ardent fans have probably watched the Disney Home Video Director's Cut DVD, which came out in January '02. Now it turns out there's an ironic element contained on that nearly five-year-old disc -- ironic bordering on comedic, I'd say -- by way of the commentary track by director George V. Cosmatos, who died in April 2005.

The Cosmatos rap will seem like a mild hoot to anyone reading...Read More

I'm sitting in the Philadelphia airport, my plane is late (naturally) and one of the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice awards went to Alejandro Monteverde's Bella, and the FIPRESCI Critics Prize went to Gabriel Range's Death of a President, which I saw and isn't half bad. Read all about it at IndieWire.

Flying back to Los Angeles today. Back up sometime tonight, or certainly by Sunday morning.

Condolences to Sony Home Video's Ben Feingold on the occasion of his termination as head of Sony Home Video, but I always heard he was a real mass-market, go-for-the-big-numbers guy who wasn't into classic titles or the aesthetic particulars. You know...a kind of antithesis of a serious movie lover or a DVD special-edition connoisseur. It was Feingold who approved the issuing of that pan-and-scan DVD of Sydney Pollack 's Castle Keep a year or so ago, which resulted in Steven Spielberg and George Lucas complaining to Sony Pictures oncho Michael Lynton, who led to Feingold finally issuing a new version in the...Read More

A nicely written, cleanly structured profile of Little Children director and cowriter Todd Field, by THR columnist Anne Thompson.

Okay -- I blew my Toronto Film Festival experience by not seeing Borat. If there's a consensus among the various columnists, it's that more people connected in a dynamic, jolting, oh-my-gosh way with Sacha Baron Cohen's deranged put-on comedy (20th Century Fox, 11.3) than with any other Toronto Film Festival attraction. Fine... whatever. It guess it's something to look forward to seeing when I get back to L.A.

Toronto is the festival that presides over the death and downgrading of imperfect films. All The King's Men died here. Bobby was all but pummelled to death. Stranger than Fiction pretty much...Read More

"The Departed, which I have seen, will be the year's best American film as of it's October 6th release date," reader David Erlich has proclaimed. "It is, without a doubt, the most riveting work that any of the players -- Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson -- have been involved with in ages. That being said, the film has no chance of Oscar recognition for Best Picture, if only because of the last act."

James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo's ...So Goes The Nation, which IFC will release in October, is easily the smartest, the most perceptive and the most fair-minded reading of the 2004 Presidential election I've ever seen or considered. I saw it at Toronto's Paramount theatre last night around 8:45 pm, and came out fairly wowed. Anyone with an interest in this kind of riveting, down-to-it expose should catch it at the earliest opportunity.

The fact that Nation is a 90-minute doc and not a network TV news special is material but immaterial -- the key thing is that it explains in...Read More

As Oscar contender piece by Pete Hammond turned up on Hollywood Wiretap yesterday. I heard a couple of days ago that Hammond has been talking to somebody about writiing a running Oscar blog thing, so maybe this is the berth.

Reading it led me to a familiar conclusion, which is that the four most likely Best Picture nominees at this stage are still Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (pure mystique...nobody has seen anything), Pedro Almodovar's Volver (probably his finest flm ever, and one of the best chick flicks of all time with a serious chance of being included...Read More

Radar's Jeff Bercovici is reporting that Paramount Pictures president Brad Grey was accosted by a squad of Scientology goons during Grey's negotiations with Tom Cruise over his M:I:3 gross revenue payment deal, which Grey was determined to reduce. "According to a high-ranking media executive, Grey was walking to his car on the Paramount lot at the end of a business day and suddenly found himself surrounded by more than a dozen Scientologists, who pressured him to ease up on [Cruise], according to the source. Following a terse exchange, the visitors allowed Grey to get into his car and leave, but the...Read More

Esquire has finally put up that delicious making-of-Bobby piece on its website. The author is John Ridley's (a.k.a. "Nikki Go"), who worked on the screenplay. The intro copy calls it "a story of determination, career redemption, selflessness, and how not to make a movie."

The Envelope's Tom O'Neill invited me to sit down for a Toronto Film Festival/Oscar prediction podcast discussion...here it is.

The local Toronto word on Emilio Estevez's Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17) has been pretty bad for the last two or three days, and so I went into this morning's screening pumped and ready to scoff. But the old reverse-negative effect kicked in and I wound up not hating it too much.

Bobby Anthony Hopkins, director-writer-costar Emilio Estevez .

Much of Bobby is treacly and mediocre and some of it might make you shudder, but it's not altogether grotesque. It's reasonaby well-shot and cut, it has a few smallish moments that work, and there are some saving grace...Read More

Screen a film about a real-life character who endures some kind of prolonged, life-threatening hell only to emerge alive and healthy at the end of the trail, and you're almost certainly going to move people. Show this very same film at a public screening at the Toronto Film Festival, and when the lights come up people are going to rise to their feet and cheer with lumps in their throats and eyes rimmed with tears.

(l. to r.) Catch a Fire star Derek Luke, Focus Features honcho James Schamus, costar Tim Robbins at Lobby four days ago.

This...Read More

Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration (Warner Independent, 11.17), which I saw two or three days ago, is a low-budget ensemble satire about how Oscar-nomination fever belittles and humiliates would-be nominees (and actors in particular). I chuckled here and there (just like I chuckled at A Mighty Wind and Best in Show -- Guest's comedies never really make me quake with laughter), but Consideration feels lazy and second-tier-ish at every turn. Everything feels whimsical, smug, underdeveloped.

To laugh at satire you have to half-believe in the reality of the piece in order to suspend disbelief. But everything about this film feels strained, hokey, small-timey....Read More

I don't see what's so heinous about the L.A. Times launching a column -- "Scriptland" by Jay Fernandez -- about script reviews.

Various online columnists (Stax, Drew McWeeny, myself) have done the same thing for many years, and the Times is just looking to jump on the same boxcar. It's mildly flattering in this sense. I think that Variety was the last major print publication to take a stab at script-reviewing -- editor Peter Bart riffed about two or three back in the mid '90s, if memory serves.

My only rule is not to review a script that disappoints...Read More

Jane Fonda told an Access Hollywood interviewer that Morgan Creek honcho James Robinson was right to chastise Lindsay Lohan several weeks ago for missing work on Georgia Rule due to nocturnal running around. "It's hard after a while to party very hard and work very hard," Fonda reportedly said. Same thing goes for Toronto Film Festival journalists like myself doing the 17-hour per day frazzle. I'm sitting here in the TIFF press room trying to catch up on all the stuff I should have written on Tuesday and Wednesday but didn't due to too many screenings, an inability to write faster, insufficent hours,...Read More

Emilio Estevez's Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17) has been showing a lot in the small VIP screening rooms the last couple of days, but it will face the press on a big screen tomorrow morning at 8:45 ayem. A respected journalist saw it yesterday and was amazed, he said, that (a) it plays like a "comedy", or at least as a series of scenes that seem to be trying to elicit chuckles and/or guffaws, and that (b) the Grand Hotel scheme is a bit like "Love Boat '68". I know I wrote that earlier and all, but that's what this guy said. Yesterday, I...Read More

The Severance word continues to sink after this morning's Toronto Film Festival press screening. I'm not calling it a terrible film -- it's moderately passable, amusing at times -- but it was way overpraised a few weeks ago and it's not living up to the hype.

When I heard Severance was playing Telluride I assumed it must be up to something quite special, outrageous, uproarious...and it's not. It's definitely hipper and funnier than Eli Roth's Hostel , but otherwise it's markedly similar to that Lionsgate release. It (a) takes place in rural eastern Europe, (b) is about a group of westerners getting...Read More

Here's a 9.12 Daily Mail story about the diplomatic impact of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, 11.3).

It reads like a piece from The Onion but it's not -- it's apparently been written with total sincerity. Could it possibly be an extra-covert continuation of the film's put-on humor and/or ad campaign? I'm not 100% sure. A rigorously unhip view of Cohen's film is that it trashes Kazakhstan by depicting its citizens as primitve, borderline idiotic anti-Semites. And yet that's pretty much what it does...although the humor is...Read More

I'm sorry to deliver an ixnay on Julia Noktev's Day Night Day Night , but that's how I see this worthy but incomplete low-budgeter. It's distinctive, unsettling and fascinating in this and that way, but it just doesn't make it in the end.

The pic acquired a rep during its Telluride Film Festival exposure that it was some kind of "Bressonian" (as in Robert Bresson) or "Dreyer-like" (as in Carl Dreyer) exercise, and therefore deserving of everyone's attention and respect. (What this boils down to is a certain type of elitist buzz that some critics find intimidating --...Read More

I've finally seen all 54 minutes' worth of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's intensely absorbing The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair -- half of it at the Royal Ontario Museum a couple of days ago, and the second half via a DVD screener that was graciously provided by publicist David Magdeal.

One of the things everyone loves about the Toronto Film Festival is that you sometimes out of nowhere you find yourself watching a political documentary that's unusually smart and exceptional all around the track. The Prisoner is one of these.

It took a while to get over there and then wait around for an hour or so before finally doing it, but I had a quiet, interesting, no-pressure chat yesterday with Little Children director and co-writer Todd Field at Toronto's Hotel Intercontinental. I recorded it with an IPAQ hand-held organizer -- it's not too hard to make out the words.