The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil wrote earlier today to ask for a quote about the Best Animated Feature race as it looks now. His piece just went up, but here’s my summation in my own words: Ratatouille is the front-runner but the matter of Beowulf‘s classification is far more interesting.

I’ve seen most of the 3D Beowulf product reel that played at Comic-Con, and the digital work has convinced me that it’s the most out-there and avant-garde-ish animated stuff I’ve seen in ages — far more so than Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly, and way in front of...

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Sixteen minutes of Samuel L. Jackson talking about a few things — his role as “Champ,” a charismatic, grimy-ass derelict revealed to be a former champion boxer in Resurrecting The Champ and the real-life story behind it, the intriguing success of 1408 (in which he played a relatively small role), the respective failures of Black Snake Moan and Snakes on a Plane, and his refusal to name a favorite among the Presidential candidates because nobody’s saying anything,” or words to that effect. (Recorded at yesterday’s Resurrecting the Champ junket at the Four Seasons hotel.)

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Three factual statements: (a) Hilary Clinton has more black supporters than Barack Obama, (b) the archetypal Barack Obama voter “is a 28 year-old white woman with a Masters degree,” as Tucker Carlson said on MSNBC a few minutes ago and (c) there’s a certain portion of the electorate who will never vote for Obama because he’s black. The last statement especially. We all know this deep down, and that the no-way-in-hell voters are not just old-school Jim Crow types with shotguns racks in their pickup trucks. But no one will ever address it, least of all the Obama campaign.

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Ingmar Bergman “stopped making motion pictures in 1982, though he wrote and directed several small films for television,” writes N.Y. Post columnist John Podorhetz. “And the truth is, he quit just in time. His day had passed. After decades of declaring modern life worthless and offering only suicide as a way out of the nightmarish tangle of human existence, Bergman had nothing more to say.”

Podhoretz also says that “the critics who described Bergman as the greatest of film artists were people embarrassed by the movies. They didn’t admire the medium. They were offended by its unseriousness, by its capacity to entertain without offering anything...

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“Ingmar Bergman had an audience of one aside from himself. The one he always sang about was you. His was one symphony with slight variations — from childhood to old age. (My favorite is obviously Wild Strawberries, aging, I hope with some slight honor). The two warriors have always been life and death, who had deep respect for one another. There is no death unless there is no throbbing life; otherwise you never die because you have never lived.” — Studs Terkel as quoted on Roger Ebert‘s tribute page to Bergman.

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The closest contact I ever had with Ingmar Bergman, so to speak, was a night in 1981 or ’82 when I talked for a long while with Harriet Andersson, who had a relationship with Bergman in the ’50s and starred in various Bergman films of that general period (including Summer With Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel, Through a Glass Darkly) and later costarred in Fanny and Alexander.

There was actually a little more than talking going on. There was enough of an attraction that after 90 minutes or so Andersson suggested that we could perhaps leave the party (some invitational soiree on behalf of Swedish filmmakers that was happening in some cavernous space in Soho or Tribeca) and head uptown and… who knew?
I knew one thing: an attractive middle-aged woman (she was nudging 50 but...

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I’ve been told that a $70 million-plus haul for The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend is out of the question. I’ve been thinking that it might just happen because the word is out that it’s the best action film in many a moon — an instant genre classic — and that it’s not particularly sadistic or even brutal, and that these elements may result in heavier-than- normal patronage from teens, women and family auds. The counter-argument is that Casino Royale opened to $40.8 million and The Bourne Supremacy did $52.5 million “so there’s very little family/four-quadrant element to this, so it virtually can’t jump to those upper numbers,” as one guy put it.

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Why were films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky’s, American Pie and The Last American Virgin “both commercially and artistically successful? Because the creators drew from real-life experiences, and therefore made movies that reflected the genuine nostalgia they felt for those experiences.

“These films weren’t made from an assembly line, where a group of old men sitting around a boardroom tried to come up with ‘shockingly hilarious’ bits to stitch into a sex comedy. These films — well, except perhaps for Porky’s — had sincere characters and solid story construction upon which to hang the naughty bits.”
So says a rant by The Rec Show’s “Ray” about a

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Which director working today is the ultimate anti-Antonioni? A filmmaker who not only expresses an overwhelming indifference to the “haunting nothingness” element woven into the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, but whose films seem to be strenuously arguing with this — films that seem to say over and over that there’s no such thing as spiritual ennui or alienation, and that each and every particle of each and every moment in our lives is filled with vibrancy and connectivity. Or should I ask if there’s any filmmaker at all out there who seems to be at least aware of this age-old current? Or has “nothingness” become so prevalent that alluding to it in any way, shape or form would be regarded by audiences as a big “duhhh”?

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When I wrote my Ingmar Bergman obit yesterday morning, I called him “one of the four or five greatest film directors of the 20th Century.” And now Michelangelo Antonioni, the director of such drop-dead classics as L’Avventura, Blow-Up, L’Eclisse,

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Agreed — Josh Hartnett gives an exceptional, above-average performance in Resurrecting The Champ (Yari Film Group, 8.24). He plays an ambitious sports writer…I don’t want to get into this just yet. (Tomorrow, the next day…it’s a good film and all in good time.) What I asked Hartnett about instead was an earlier performance — the best he’s ever given, if you ask me — in a movie that very few people saw called Mozart and the Whale.

Resurrecting the Champ star Josh Hartnett in 12th floor suite in the Four Seasons hotel — Monday, 7.30.07, 3:40 pm

I didn’t actually see it myself. I saw a sweetened-up version...

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Will Elizabeth Guider, a smart Variety veteran, being named editor of The Hollywood Reporter (effectively replacing the departed Cynthia Littleton) make any difference in the fortunes of the second trade? This sorta feels like a status-quo, within-the-perimeter move. Not bold or radical enough to keep Reporter revenues from…I was going to say “sliding even further in this, a declining marketplace for print.” Put it this way: does anyone think the Guider hire is likely to improve matters? Not in the view of Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke, who filed this story late Monday morning.

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To judge by his lean appearance, Robert De Niro was several years younger when he filmed this promo spot on behalf of the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s for some kind of profile of the festival that was destined to appear “Tuesday on Fox,” as De Niro says. The funny…no, hilarious part comes when the off-camera director asks him to sell it “with a little more energy” and De Niro goes, “I’m sorry but that was energetic….you don’t know what you’re talking about…sorry…I’m not selling cars, okay?” (Posted recently or six months ago — don’t know the story — on GorillaMask.net.)

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An excerpt from a Dick Cavett interview with Ingmar Bergman on a show that originally aired August 2, 1971. Key quote: “It is absolutely impossible for me to work with a producer who would try to tell me what to do. If he tries, I would ask him to go to hell.” Here’s a second excerpt with Persona costar Bibi Andersson taking part.

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Judd Apatow and Greg Mottola‘s Superbad, easily the sharpest and funniest teen-sex comedy in ages, has an issue of concern. New tracking is in and it’s not doing all that well — 26, 25 and 1. For a film that’s opening in two and a half weeks — Friday, 8.17 — that’s not awful (things can change) but the marketers have to start scrambling. The film clearly sells itself, so Sony should sneak it this weekend. The trailer plays nicely, but it doesn’t really convey how above-par exceptional this film is.
The Bourne Ultimatum, opening this weekend, is running at 91, 56 and 28 — figure a three-day tally in the $70 to $80 million range. Bratz is 46, 13 and somewhere between 0 and 1. El Cantante is at 46, 16 and 3. Hot Rod — 62, 25 and 2...

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The rule-of-three once again applies: French actor Michel Serrault, best known for his role as Zaza in La Cage aux Folles, has died of cancer at age 79.

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A South Park episode I happened to catch last night called “Make Love, Not Warcraft” was laugh-out-loud funny and flat-out brilliant. The site says it’s been nominated for a primetime Emmy, which is no surprise. This is one of the most perceptive and subversive takes on the psychology and emotional babycake lives of hard-core gamers I’ve ever seen. I don’t laugh out loud all that much, but I did last night.

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This 1964 Bruce Lee interview (which I happened upon this morning on nerve.com) is worth watching for Lee’s expression when he mentions that he majored in philosophy in college. He hesitates for a brief instant before admitting this, and his eyes flick to the side just after.

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Tom Snyder cracks have been de rigeur since the ’70s when Dan Aykroyd began spoofing him on SNL, but Snyder — who died yesterday from lukemia at age 71 — always had my absolute respect for a single interview he did with Sterling Hayden in, I think, 1977 or thereabouts.
That interview, which ought to be on You Tube or at least on DVD, felt to me like one of the greatest TV chats I’d ever seen because it was so nakedly confessional. I knew Hayden slightly in the late ’70s to early ’80s — he was my first movie-star interview (i.e., on the set of Frank Pierson‘s King of the Gypsies) and he lived in my hometown of Wilton, Connecticut — and so I recognized to some extent how candid he was being with Snyder. I especially remember Hayden saying on that...

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That hooded, black-robed figure with the stern expression and almost Kabuki-white face paid a visit to Ingmar Bergman‘s home on the island of Faro last weekend (or certainly within the last few days). I like to think he would have been polite about it and knocked on the front door, but one way or the other he sat by the bed and took the one of the four or five greatest film directors of the 20th Century by the hand, and that was more or less that — a final transition and fade to black.

The man was a genius, a God…a deliverer of pure, chilly clarity in a muddled and equivocating world. His work was astounding, penetrating, devastating. Ingmar Bergman made me feel better about being an occasional misanthrope and down- head and a sometime depressive than any other artist I’ve ever...

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In this 9.29 L.A. Times essay, critic Kenneth Turan seems to be writing about Once from a slightly different angle — i.e., how come it took so long for this exquisite little film to get picked up? — than the one I went with yesterday, which was basically “how come more Average Joes haven’t paid to see it?” But he gets around to saying the exact same thing at the conclusion.

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“After watching Evan Almighty, I noticed that the exiting audience — pale, wan and harrowed — were collectively singing the post-movie equivalent of the lamentations of Jeremiah, emitting cries not unlike those of the sorely tested Job or the benighted citizens of plague-fatigued Egypt, and generally cursing His Holy Name with every obscenity in the biblical lexicon.
“All the Big Questions popped rapidly into my mind: ‘Why does God inflict Bad Movies on Good People?’ and more pertinently, ‘How can we know for certain that God is good if he permitted this piece of dung to reach our screens?’
“Certainly Evan Almighty (‘a laugh-drought of biblical proportions,’ one critic called it) performed a breathtaking miracle by making Steve Carell unfunny, but the film should have believers and nonbelievers alike down on their knees...

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Edward Norton participated in a Hulk dog-and-pony show in front of 6500 Comic-Conners yesterday along with costar Liv Tyler, Hulk director Louis Leterrier, and producers Avi Arad and Gale Anne Hurd. It had to have felt a little forced. Norton simply isn’t part of the tribe — doesn’t talk geek, look geek….the genes and the attendant belief systems simply weren’t passed along by his parents — and no amount of good-sport promo whoring can change that fact. (Original reporting by MTV.com’s Larry Carroll.)

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“And heah, out of the oven…the chicken and the peahs….very nice…sort of a French thing….a little pepper on the top….400 degrees…one hour….these peahs are very nice, very tasty…they’ve gotten kinda candied …pehrfect with the chicken…they go very well togetheah.” — Christopher Walken cooking what looks like a delicious upright chicken along with six or eight sweetened pears. Walken’s a serious foodie, but it’s hard to watch this video without wondering when the punchline’s coming, even though you realize there probably won’t be one. And you’d be right.

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We’ve all chewed on the notion of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and maybe Neal Moritz co-writing a Green Hornet movie in which Rogen will play the title role as well as his alter ego, the “debonair newspaper publisher” Britt Reid. But what can be made of this report from Coming Soon’s Edward Douglas about a Comic-Con Superbad q & a in which Rogen “stated very clearly that the movie is ‘not a comedy, it’s an action movie.’”

Is there anyone in the world who believes Rogen & Co. won’t be tweaking the material for at least some laughs? Playing it straight doesn’t seem to be Rogen’s repertoire, or am I missing something? And who, for that matter, is going to buy him as any kind of butt-kicker? With that beer, nachos and chili-dog physique of his?

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I watched the Bee Movie footage at the Cannes Film Festival, I listened to Jerry Seinfeld do a funny riff about it, and it all seemed fine. I said on the day of the Cannes thing that “I’m half into it…I like ‘silly’ if the movie really goes for it whole-hog.” But this one-sheet is just…what is it? It’s dull and smug like cereal-box art. It seems afraid to say or do anything that might define the movie in some specific attitudinal way, and thereby persuade some of us to actually sit up and take notice.

Poster art copied from comingsoon.net

I recounted the Bee plot last May: “Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld) is a...

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A hundred years hence, film historians will look back at the epic-quest CG fantasy fanboy-adventure genre (Arthurian comic-book fables, other-worldly milieus, mind-blowing visuals, Joseph Campbell-esque heroes in their 20s, constant insinuations and threats from all-powerful reptilian villians, relentless physical combat or sword-fight scenes, gah-gah finales) and be absolutely agog that tens of millions went to these films over and over again for decades (geek culture has sprayed shorts over these films since Star Wars opened 30 years ago) without making a peep about how oppressively similar they were from year to year, decade to decade.

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There’s a funny caption that needs to go with this photo, which accompanies Michael Cieply‘s readable but slightly ho-hum Comic-Con story in the 7.27 N.Y. Times. Who would’ve thought when Jabba the Hut first appeared in Return of the Jedi 24 years ago that he would gradually become an icon of…naahh, not today.

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The high-def trailer for Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamamount, 10.26). It’s a working-through-tragedy story about the best friend of a dead guy — a dad who had a wife and two or three kids — slowly edging into intimacy of one form or another (perhaps not sexual) with his widow. One viewing and you can tell that Benicio del Toro (i.e., the best friend) is giving one of his most appealing performances — his most accessible since Traffic. Halle Berry is the widow; David Duchovny is the deceased ex.

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