I was told that earlier this week that the review date for Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21) would be Tuesday, 9.4 -- a curious guideline that didn't take into account the imminent unveiling at the Venice Film Festival. The bottom line is that Variety's Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt went with reviews earlier today -- a euphoric rave and a sneering pan, respectively.

I'm too travel-whipped to tap out an opinion -- it's 11:05 pm and I'm fading fast -- but...Read More

Woke at 5 this morning, Toronto plane took off at 7:05, arrived around 2:25 pm, unloaded and unpacked, walked down Bloor and then south from Bloor and Spadina down to Chinatown in search of a SIM card for my European-purchased cell phone (which took a while), discovered to my frustration that European-purchased cell phone bands don't work in Canada, bought a cheapie cell with a SIM card so I'd have something to work with, sat down for some Chinese, walked around some, walked the dog, etc. Tomorrow is another day.

Bloor Street line -- Friday, 8.31.07, 8:55...

GreenCine Daily's summation of Venice Film Festival reactions to Brian DePalma's Redacted -- three yays (from the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett, the Telegraph's David Grittten and Alternet's Adam Howard) and one nay (from Variety's Derek Elley) -- obviously raises the want-to-see for Toronto Film Festival folk.

At issue is not just the film itself but the long-awaited redemption of DePalma, which many are very keen to see happen. I'm even including myself in this group, despite my having been cold on DePalma for many, many years. I had written him off,...Read More

The differences betwen Robert Koehler's Variety review of Paul Haggis's In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14 and 9.21) and my own opinion thing-dingie, which I ran last month, aren't as profound as they may seem.

The only serious divide is Koehler feeling it's "too self-serious to work as a straight-ahead whodunit and too lacking in imagination to realize its art-film aspirations" while I believe it exemplifies the kind of films that never seem to be doing all that much, but then gradually sneak up on you, laying groundwork and planting seeds and...Read More

To actual Wall Street traders, Gordon Gekko -- the suspender-wearing shark played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone's Wall Street -- has always been a hero. "That's his appeal," says Ed Pressman, producer of a Stephen Schiff-penned sequel called Money Never Sleeps. "Gekko is larger than life. His appetites are large. The audience enjoys a vicarious pleasure of seeing a world they would never be part of. In a funny way Wall Street was like The Godfather -- in that the real mob began dressing and behaving like characters in the movie. After Wall Street people started wearing suspenders [braces], like Michael."

James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma will have a nationwide sneak on Sunday night. The Lionsgate marketers are encouraged by the numbers (they out-pointedShoot 'Em Up in today's tracking) but they obviously want to bump things up before next Friday's (9.7) opening, and they're convinced they've got a word-of-mouther.

"This is the lamest Telluride Film Festival I've ever been to," a guy told me a few minutes ago from the streets of this beautiful Colorado mountain town. "It's gorgeous up here if you can stand the altitude -- it's 9500 feet above sea level -- but where's the excitement? Where are the Oscar contenders? Where is No Country for Old Men? Where is Atonement? Where is Elah? Where is The Assassination of Jesse James? Where's Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, the Sydney Lumet film? It's really esoteric. Is this something to do with the tastes of Gary Meyer? They're going to...Read More

Uh-oh....Variety's Derek Elley is pissing all over Ang Lee's Lust, Caution from the Venice Film Festival. (You can trust Elley on this one -- no ethnic or nationalistic loyalities in play.) The Elley quote being heard 'round the world is a real stinger: "Too much caution and too little lust squeeze much of the dramatic juice out of...a 2 and 1/2 -hour period drama that's a long haul for relatively few returns.

"Adapted from a short story by the late Eileen Chang, tale of a patriotic student -- who's willing bait in a plot to assassinate a high-up Chinese collaborator in...Read More

Here's an mp3 of the "Puttin' on the Ritz" number from the Young Frankenstein musical, presumably recorded in Seattle. At first it sounds exactly like the the same bit 1974 Mel Brooks film, then it expands all to hell. I don't mean in a bad way -- I mean extensively.

A major disagreement is shaping up over The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21), and it'll break wide open next Tuesday morning (9.4), which is when the trades and certain web columnists will be running their reviews. (Me included.) I'm a friend of this film -- a big one. Two journalists I've spoken to this morning (one of them being CHUD's Devin Faraci) feel the same way. But I've also heard that a certain guy hates it. This strikes me as somewhere between deranged and blasphemous by the standards of the Church of the Good Movie Lover....Read More

The slate for the 34th Telluride Film Festival (Friday, 8.31 through Monday, 9.3) has been announced, and while there are many smart and stirring selections made by men of good taste, there are also no major pulse-quickeners or mind-blowers. It's basically a bunch of Cannes stuff along with a few Toronto '07 selections.

The idiosyncratic standouts for myself (if I were attending, that is) are a Norman Lloyd documentary (Matthew Sussman's Who Is Norman Lloyd?, a look at Lloyd's 70 years as an actor-producer-writer) and a digitally remastered version of Richard Lester's Help!

The only thing that could save Telluride '07...Read More

Halloween is tracking at 83, 40 and 17, which makes it a candidate for $20 million this weekend, maybe a bit more. Balls of Fury is running 73, 35 and 10....a likely $7 or $8 million, certainly not more than $10 million. Kevin Bacon's Death Sentence is looking low -- 40, 31 and 2.

3:10 to Yuma has improved -- 43, 32 and 5. And this is an urban sample, which is significant in that westerns always play better in shit-kicker territories. Shoot Em Up -- the other big actioner opening on 9.7. -- is now lagging behind Yuma with 38, 32...Read More

Balls of Fury (Rogue, 8.19) opened yesterday on 2810 screens and took in $1,700,000 -- that's $605 a print. If there was any real heat on this film it would have done about double this. Plus it going to start losing to Rob Zombie's Halloween on Friday.

Wall Street Journal reporter Thaddeus Herrick wrote yesterday (8.29) that "some" in the real-estate industry "believe that real-estate swashbuckler Sam Zell, who is in the process of buying the Tribune Co. (i.e, owner of the L.A. Times), could sell its properties, including the Los Angeles Times building." Zell declined to comment for the piece, and "most real-estate experts acknowledge that the value of the Tribune Co.'s real estate is minimal compared with the company's overall assets," Herrick reported.

If I were Zell I would go all Genghis Khan on the L.A. Times. No one half-complicit...Read More

A four-story building was blown up and incinerated in Chicago today -- at around 2 pm, or about six hours ago -- for a scene in Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight, the latest Batman movie that's been shooting in and around Chicago for the last few months. The demolition/ implosion/explosion happened at the old Brach's Candy Factory in western Chicago. The building, vacant for several years, was dressed to look like "Gotham General Hospital," blah, blah.

There is nothing in the world more boring that big explosions in action movies, but the live video footage taken today -- here's one...Read More

Paul Willner has written a nicely descriptive L.A. Times piece about a special screening of William Friedkin's Cruising (1980) that was held Monday night at San Francisco's Castro theatre. The screening was a promotion for a Cruising deluxe-edition DVD that Warner Home Video is bringing out out on 9.18.07.

Cruising director William Friedkin

This once-controversial film was despised and protested against by hip Manhattan gays back in the day. They were angry that the film's hunt-for-a-serial-killer story not only used the world of downtown Manhattan gay bars (and the anonymous sex that was routine...Read More

Derek Elley is one of Variety's finest critics -- a guy who knows his stuff all around the race track and the rodeo -- but he's also a British citizen who's probably susceptible to feelings of national pride, and so you can't fully trust his rave review of Joe Wright's Atonement, which was shown at the opening-night attraction at the Venice Film Festival just a few hours ago.

Knightley, McAvoy in Joe Wrights' Atonement (Focus Features, 12.25)

I feel, in other words, that the British film industry has been a nearly moribund thing for...Read More

In the wake of yesterday's (8.28) Variety story about Owen Wilson dropping out of Ben Stiller's now-rolling Tropic Thunder, MTV.com's Josh Horowitz is exploring to what extent Wilson's reported attempted suicide will affect his other projects. Josh asked me for some comments this morning and wound up using a couple of them, but here's the unexpurgated chat as it unfolded 90 minutes ago.

Wilson agonistes

MTV question: Does this incident jeopardize Wilson's standing as a leading man?

HE answer: Owen is far too complex and interesting and whimsical to be a leading man. He's a flaky...Read More

To hear it from a just-out Us magazine story, the jackal in the recent-druggy-downfall-of-Owen Wilson saga is none other than British attitude-humorist Steve Coogan, the 24 Hour Party People and Around the World in Eighty Daysstar and costar of Night at the Museum. The story says that Wilson's troubles are due in part to "Owen hanging out [with] the wrong people again," and that "at least two sources blame Coogan," who's described as "the party boy rehab veteran."

"I went through it with Steve," Courtney Love has told Us about her relationship with Coogan, which ended...Read More

75% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang hates, hates, hates Balls of Fury. Let's all get together and sledgehammer this one to death before it gets rolling. The Metacritic rating is 42% positive, but that 's because of three critics who give it a thumbs-up -- the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Andy Spletzer, the N.Y. Daily News' Elizabeth Weitzman and the Hollywood Reporter's Shari Linden. (They're entitled -- there's no one "right" way to regard a film -- but henceforth they're going to be watched for further irregularities.)

It would be cruel to hope for Dan Fogler's film career to be stopped...Read More

DVD Journal, the anonymously-written DVD-connoisseur website that launched in August 1997, has closed up shop. I read the nameless editor's statement (posted yesterday) about what's going on, only he doesn't really say anything. There's an acknowledgement that the DVD market share is going down and that this may have something to do with ad revenues or the moon's orbit or whatever, but he definitely has trouble with the concept of just spitting it out. Real men put their cards on the table. If anyone really knows why these guys are dimming the lights, please advise.

The Brave One director Neil Jordan captures Jodie Foster in such a way as to "accentuate her petite stature, her lithe frame, her thin arms constantly bared from the shoulders. When [Foster's character] walks the streets at night or strides purposefully onto a subway platform, she seems to be descending, wraith-like, into the abyss; yet her ferocity can also give way, without warning, to vulnerability and panic, especially when events begin to spiral out of her control.

"Even at her most ruthless, Foster never cedes her grip on the viewer's concern -- but then, neither did Charles Bronson in Death Wish. Jordan...Read More

So there's this 8.26 New Zealand Herald piece about Peter Jackson's Crossing the Line, a 15-minute World War I movie that was shot last April in just a few days. Fine -- soldiers in a trench, guys yelling orders, fixed bayonets, biplanes, machine guns...."yaaahhhh!"

But the article doesn't make clear what it is exactly that makes Jim Jannard's "Red One" -- used by Jackson for his short -- all that unique. Red One's big selling point is that it has an advanced sensor chip, called a...Read More

I sat down for lunch yesterday with Shoot 'Em Up director-writer Michael Davis, and the restaurant -- the Boulevard Lounge at the Beverly Wilshire hotel -- was so clattery and wallah-wallah that my Olympus digital recorder was overwhelmed. (I'm constitutionally incapable of buying one of those clip-mikes that discriminates against ambient noise.) But at least I got a free lunch out of it, and a chance to talk again with Davis -- a genuinely nice guy, and a Steven Spielberg look-alike if I ever saw one -- about the whole up-and-down.

Shoot Em Up director-writer Michael Davis at...

Variety columnist and reporter Anne Thompson broke a bone in her foot last weekend and subsequently won't make the trek to either the Telluride or Toronto film festivals.

"The exhibition situation has changed far more dramatically than the audience or the films themselves," ThinkFilm's Mark Urman has told Village Voice reporter Anthony Kaufman. "Manhattan is scandalously under-screened, and the rate at which theaters playing specialty films are renovated and created is far behind the rate they've been dying. I've had films thrown out of theaters making $8,000 to $9,000 in a weekend...and that's heartbreaking." As Kaufman reports, $8 to $9 grand "is a sizable gross, in line with Hairspray's stellar opening-weekend per-theater average. "

Presumably someone out there has a recent draft of Mikko Alanne's script of Pinkville, which director Oliver Stone will make into a film sometime early next year for United Artists. It seems like an astute move for Stone to not only revisit his own Vietnam combat experience as well as the turf of Platoon, his greatest screen triumph, but to also reflect on the Iraq War experience by looking back at another time when U.S. troops were frequently seen as the bad guys when it came to dealings with civilians.

I realize that Pinkville will not be...Read More

Variety's Tatiana Siegel has reported that four Owen Wilson movies -- one now being filmed, one due to shoot in January, and two others pending release -- have obviously been affected by last Sunday's suicide attempt by the 38 year-old actor, and particularly by news reports about same.

Wilson was expected to show up in Hawaii to start work on DreamWorks' Tropic Thunder, which costars Ben Stiller, Bill Hader and Jack Black, and then shoot a comedy in January with Jennifer Aniston called Marley & Me. Studio spokespersons didn't say anything about anything when Siegel asked if Wilson would still...Read More

Two more sets of advance Toronto Film Festival Canadian-journo press screenings have been cancelled by Alliance Atlantis, the distributor that cancelled advance screenings last week of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. Screenings of Ang Lee's highly anticipated Lust, Caution have been deep-sixed along with early-bird showings of Kevin Macdonald's My Enemy's Enemy. The excuse, as before, is "print availability." There's a chance that Lust, Caution showings might be rescheduled for Wednesday, 9.5, but this sounds "awfully iffy" to one local guy.

"This is the [highest] number of high-profile cancellations I can recall for the pre-TIFF screenings," he comments. "Are studio trying to...Read More

I was reminded after seeing the B'way revival of Sweeney Todd last year (the one with Patti Lupone as Mrs. Lovett) what a great uptown show it is -- great Lupone, magnificent staging, a beautiful Stephen Sondheim score, sad-tragic theme. And then I asked myself, how would this musical play with Helena Bonham Carter in the Lovett role (which was first created by a magnificent Angela Lansbury) in a feverishly Tim Burton -ized film adaptation? (I'm being told Bonham-Carter does her own singing, which sounds problematic.)

Sweeney Todd is a very high-end thing full of operatic passion,...Read More

All the big film festivals are front-loaded. The first five or six days always seem to comprise 85% or 90% of the ballgame. Not to complain and par for the course, but the first weekend of the Toronto Film Festival -- Friday, 9.7 to Sunday, 9.9 -- is fairly jammed with parties. Saturday stands out with three big 'uns happening almost simultaneously. A No Country for Old Men dinner party and the annual Sony Pictures Classics party at Michelle's Brasserie starting at 8 pm, and then the doors opening for a Fox Searchlight party for Juno, The Savages and Under The Same...Read More

"In real life people step over homeless people, and they're certainly not going to pay ten bucks to see a movie about one." -- An actor who shall be nameless explaining why Resurrecting The Champ, about a sports writer (Josh Hartnett) who writes a big story about having discovered a former champion boxer from the 1950s (Samuel L. Jackson) who's since become a scuzzy homeless bum with a "whinny" voice, died last weekend at the box-office.

"Hollywood is not just running out of new ideas -- it's running out of old ideas." Who said this? Obviously applies to the here-and-now. Can't find the source online.

The interesting thing isn't Keanu Reeves being cast as "Klaatu," a sophisticated, well-spoken alien who brings a dire warning to everyone on earth in a "re-imagining" of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. The interesting thing is Variety's Michael Fleming reporting that producer Erwin Stoff and 20th Century Fox are envisioning a series of Reeves /Klaatu films -- i.e., a "tentpole" opportunity.

Keanu Reeves, Michael Rennie

From Michael Rennie to Keanu Reeves -- a clear-cut example of cultural devolution. Klaatu barada whoa.

Reeves "committed over the weekend to play Klaatu, a humanoid...Read More

I never write about personal stuff unless it's an occasion for a snarky joke, or unless an actor's dependency issue has been revealed in such a way that it's become a big unavoidable news story (like the pull-overs involving Mel Gibson or Lindsay Lohan, say). But this time I'm feeling something else -- a tremendous sadness over a near-tragedy, and a kind of anger about the usual Hollywood response to such things, which is to brush it under the carpet.

I'm a Libertarian in the sense that I think people are fully entitled to do anything they want to their bodies without prosecution...Read More

There's an 8.26 David Halbfinger N.Y. Times piece that searches for meaning in two noteworthy rage-and-revenge movies -- Neil Jordan's The Brave One (Warner Bros., 9.14) and James Wan's Death Sentence (Fox Atomic, 8.31) with Jodie Foster and Kevin Bacon, respectively -- as well as the less prominent Descent, which starred Rosario Dawson, and a British revenge movie called Outlaw, which starred Sean Bean.

The piece asks whether audiences today might be ready for a new wave of cathartic, rough justice at the movies. Halbfinger quotes original "Death Wish" author Brian Garfield as saying...Read More

Writing in an 8.26 N.Y. Times piece about Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, which will show at the Venice and Toronto film festivals before opening on 9.28, Dennis Lim has reported that the film, which is in Mandarin, "runs two and a half hours." He also says that the sex scenes between Tony Leung and Tang Wei, which resulted in an NC-17 rating judgment a few days ago, are "notably revealing and acrobatic."

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." -- W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming."

Another looking-back-on-Bonnie and Clyde-40-years-later piece? This one being from London (i.e., the Guardian's Philip French), it reminds me of Warren Beattys' story of a London freakout he experienced with this film, and how it all began with his wanting the Bonnie and Clyde gunfire to have a cannon-roar sound like the guns in Shane, and how he asked that film's director, George Stevens, how to achieve this.

Flash forward to the the film's late-1967 premiere in London (at a prime theatre in Leicester Square), and Beatty noticing that the gunfire sounded soft and muffled.

Enraged,...Read More

I tried finding out what the real Owen Wilson situation might be from sources after I heard the reports around 9:15 pm, but I started too late in the evening. When Joe Leydon called to ask what I knew (not knowing himself what had or hadn't happened), my first reaction was "oh, God." I'm very sorry if it's true, and may the worst of it (whatever "it" might be) be over. A little recovery, and then on to Darjeeling Limited press duties, making Justice League, etc. Life isn't perfect but you have to live it anyway.

Gustin Nash's 125-page screenplay based on C.D. Payne's Youth in Revolt. The film will star Michael Cera (the wry, moralistic, level-headed thin guy with the I'm-only-partially-here personality in Superbad -- I'm explaining because he's not a household name) as "Nick Twist" when it goes before the camera sometime...I don't know when it's going before the cameras.

The drive and industriousness in getting hold of this script is equally matched by my laziness in having failed to read it despite it being on my dining-room table for neary two weeks

Shaky-cam Bourne vomiting has been brought up by Roger Ebert by way of a letter forwarded by David Bordwell ("the most respected film academic," Ebert says) that was posted on movies.com a while back by "sfjockdawg," to wit:

"We went to see The Bourne Ultimatum on the IMAX in San Francisco. Near the end, when Webb is having the flashback to when he [was] forced to show his commitment to the project, the lady next to me spontaneously unleashes a huge amount of vomit all over my leg and all over the floor in front...Read More

True story, no names, happened a few years ago: A big-name actor is being driven out to a location shoot in a rural area with a producer, a p.a. and someone else. The actor has a styrofoam cup with steaming black coffee in his hand. The producer, sitting next to the actor in the back seat, reminds that they'll be driving on a dirt road filled with big potholes, and that he needs to put a plastic top on the cup or else.

The actor says nothing, but it would be putting it mildly to describe...Read More

We're approaching the four-year anniversary of the final collapse of the Matrix theology that came with the 10.27.03 release of The Matrix Revolutions. Too bad it's not the fifth anniversary or I could tap out a stock-taking piece. It was a pretty amazing meltdown; hard to believe it all happened the way it did.

Are the second and third Matrix films still the most despised and discredited franchise films ever made? Is there anyone in the world except for the 300 or 400 remaining Wachowski geeks out there who's even watched Matrix Reloaded or Matrix Revolutions on...Read More

You'd have to be a damn fool journalist to walk into a room with Tommy Lee Jones without knowing that he doesn't suffer fools. He just doesn't like to piss around, or so I've been told. He'll talk professional fundamentals -- work, focus, creative decisions he's made -- but he feels that politics is personal, and that personal stuff is too personal for words. Jones sometimes looks like he's studying you, and half the time like you've just asked something pretty dumb. I was a little intimidated, to be honest.

In The Valley of Elah star Tommy...

Charles Mudede, a dispenser of tight, clean sentences and un-minced thoughts, has written a short unambiguous piece for The Stranger, "Seattle's only newspaper," about what a misanthropic hard-case Stanley Kubrick was.

"Kubrick hated humans," Mudede begins. "This hate for his own kind is the ground upon which his cinema stands. As is made apparent by 2001: A Space Odyssey, his contempt was deep.

"It went from the elegant surface of our space-faring civilization down, down, down to the bottom of our natures, the muck and mud of our animal instincts, our ape bodies, our...Read More

In an 8.26 N.Y. Times essay about Norman Mailer's Maidstone, Gerald Howard reports that the legendary film critic Pauline Kael once called Mailer's Wild 90 "the worst movie that I've ever stayed to see all the way through." Thus, Kael implied, she'd walked out on other bad movies with at least some regularity. (I remember reading a long time ago about her walking out on Raise the Titanic, muttering "life is too short.") There will be those who will say "no, this does not bestow a respectable distinction to walking out on stinkers as a general practice," and that is their...Read More

"There may be an underlying notion of Hollywood as a tool of a cultural imperialism that, however murkily, reflects the actual imperialism of U.S. foreign policy. Follow that logic far enough and Hollywood flicks aren't just dopey time-killers -- but sermons straight from the bully pulpit." -- from an 8.24 Guardian piece by Danny Leigh titled "Is Hollywood America?"

A barbed, X-Acto knife review of Justin Theroux's Dedication (Weinstein Co., expanding 9.14) came yesterday from N.Y. Times reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis, with a brilliant opening graph that touches on the relatively new movie-plot phenomenon of genetically impaired low-tide males winding up for no earthly reason with hotties who would never give them a second glance in real life.

Billy Crudup, Mandy Moore in Justin Theroux's Dedication

"That weird exhalation you hear at the multiplex these days is the sound of female characters settling for less than they deserve," Catasoulis writes. "Following on the wildly...Read More

The apparent promise of Tony Award-winning actor Dan Fogler playing another dregs-of-the-gene-pool guy in Good Luck, Chuck certainly gives pause. Particularly on the heels of what appears (to judge by the trailer) to be a relentlessly slovenly Fogler performance in the reportedly "awful" Balls of Fury. And yet there's an intriguing role on the horizon -- Fogler as a young Alfred Hitchcock in a comedic thriller called Number 13.

I was wrong in predicting a north-of-$20 million figure for Superbad's second weekend, although it's still far and away the weekend's Big Kahuna. The Greg Mottola-Judd Apatow-Seth Rogen-Jonah Hill-Michael Cera-Christopher Mintz-Passe comedy did about $5,675,000 million yesterday and with a projected $18,735,000 Sunday-night cume (Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is predicting $15.5 million) for an estimated 53% and a ten-day total of just under $70 million. It will pass $100 million within two weeks.

The Bourne Ultimatum will be second with $12,088,000, and Rush Hour 3 will come in third with $11,195,000. Mr. Bean's Holiday -- the #1 newbie -- will come in...Read More

A Lexus SUV driven by producer-director John Singleton struck and killed a female jaywalker late Thursday night, according to a news report posted at 11:40 pm Friday night. No drugs or alcohol involved, said Jason Lee, a police spokesperson. The accident happened in L.A.'s Jefferson Park neighborhood. The victim, Constance Hall, was 57 years old.

A ten-minute tribute reel in honor of Daniel Day Lewis's film career -- a reel that will include unseen footage from Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.25) -- will, I'm hearing from a good source, be shown at the Telluride Film Festival the weekend after next. This info contradicts another source who's heard that a 40-minute Blood reel will play there, and still another claiming that Blood will screen in its entirety.

"They were talking about [showing a portion of the film] for a Daniel Day Lewis tribute, I know that, but the festival was begging for the...Read More

A slightly more engrossing, more detailed trailer for Ridley Scott's American Gangster (Universal, 11.2) than the one I ran on 8.11. The previous one was pretty much all about Denzel Washington's heroin dealer character -- this new one gives more dialogue clips to DW nemesis Russell Crowe. The period crime film will begin to screen for elite media just after everyone gets back from Toronto.

"If you want to see a lot of people naked, see this film," a producer friend said this afternon about Robert Benton's Feast of Love (MGM, 9.28). I've managed to miss this so far (42 West has only invited me to Manhattan screenings). But honestly? Nudity always raises interest levels. Any guy, straight or gay, who tells you it doesn't is a liar.

Morgan Freeman, Gregg Kinnear

The actors who don't take their clothes off in this relationship dramedy are Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Fred Ward and, the producer said, Selma Balir. (She's apparently wrong about...Read More

The spirit of any Wes Anderson film can be found in his choice of pop-music tracks, and the relentlessly insipid USA Today columnist Whitney Matheson (a.k.a. "Pop Candy") has listed some of the tracks in The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29), and the emphasis is definitely on...the Kinks!

The three Kinks tunes are "This Time Tomorrow," "Strangers" and "Powerman." There's also the Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire," Joe Dassin's "Champs Elysees" and Peter Sarstedt's "Where Do You Go to (My Lovely)." Anderson "also throws in several classical tracks, like Debussy's Clair De Lune and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A, Op....Read More

Rod Lurie's Resurrecting The Champ (Yari Film Group, opening today) is a well acted, throughly decent film that is reasonably absorbing as an adult drama and interesting in an atmospheric newsroom sense. I'm a solid fan of Alan Alda and Peter Coyote's performances as a newspaper editor and a boxing world veteran, and I'm fairly okay with Josh Hartnett's performance as a somewhat immature journalist who can't be bothered to double- or triple-check his facts before running with a big story.

The plot is about Hartnett having found a scuzzy old homeless guy (Samuel L....Read More

"I saw The Bourne Ultimatum. I liked the first one the best but the third one is second-best. I like entertainment. Cinema can say many things. There's nothing wrong with a great Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes you're [into] it like crazy while it's going and when you leave it sort of pops and evaporates." -- David Lynch speaking to MTV.com's Josh Horowitz. Yeah, we know that tune except Bourne didn't pop and evaporate because I didn't want it to. So I went back and saw it twice more.

For a recent meeting in Manila with Phillipine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo at the Presidential palace, Quentin Tarantino wore "a traditional Filipino formal shirt called Barong Tagalog but [ also] wore sandals," says an 8.16 report in The West. "He was handed size 13 black leather shoes because sandals and rubber shoes are not allowed inside the palace during presidential ceremonies, a staff of the National Commission on Culture and Arts said."

What kind of an elitist swaggering attitude do you have to have to figure it's cool to wear sandals to a meeting with a...Read More

"Sailing to Byzantium," the William Butler Yeats poem from which Cormac McCarthy derived the title of "No Country for Old Men." Yates, not Yeets.

Every now and then I stop what I'm doing and say a small prayer of thanks that Barry Sonnenfeld appears to be working mostly on the tube these days and is no longer making awful CGI-pestilence movies like Men in Black and Wild Wild West or grotesque family slapstick comedies like RV. Or is taking a breather from these, at the very least.

Barry Sonnenfeld extolling the virtues of the Blackberry 8830 World Edition on page 114 of the new Esquire

This morning I was reading a piece Sonnenfeld has written for the latest issue of...Read More

Anne Thompson reports that the No Country for Old Men red-band trailer will be "live beginning Friday. " You have to click on the "exclusive red-band trailer" link on the film's website, but it didn't work for me after six or seven tries on two different browsers. Wait -- a reader has finally located a ready-to-go trailer with no sign-ins. It's brilliant -- a much better trailer than the previous G-rated one.

Thompson says that it's necessary to see the red-band trailer "so that audiences can see why the mean SOB played...Read More

"Because The Nanny Diaries is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Scarlett Johansson's Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor. With her heavy-lidded eyes and plump lips, Johansson may smolder invitingly in certain roles, but The Nanny Diaries is the latest in a string of films that suggest that this somnolent actress confuses sullen attitudinizing with acting." -- from Stephen Holden's 8.24 N.Y. Times review.

Critics who've seen Joe Wright's Atonement (Focus Features, 12.7) have reacted with breathless superlatives," according to the Daily Telegraph's amiable and usually accommodating David Gritten, "and its showing at the Venice Film Festival and subsequent release will almost certainly catapult Wright into the ranks of world-class film directors."

Keira Knightley, James McAvoy in Atonement

Oh, yeah? I've heard some reactions also and no one's said anything about viewers doing cartwheels in the lobby. What I've heard is "pretty good," "not at all bad" and "has at least one really good extended tracking shot."

One...Read More

What is the deal with Hollywood Wiretap? The front-page layout has been whacked for two days now, and when you write editor Tom Tapp to ask what's up the e-mail bounces right back. HE has gone through brief shutdowns and weirdnesses over the last three years, but never for two days straight....c'mon. Update: Hollywood Wiretap was finally up and looking like its old self as of 10:30 pm this evening.

"I think this will resonate," Resurrecting The Champ director- writer Rod Lurie has told the Pasadena Weekly's Carl Kozlowski. "I think the movie is about a group of people, journalists, who police themselves like no other profession. No other group is as vigilant about maintaining its honor and that's what I like. Journalists do mea culpas all the time."

Lurie "thinks" his film is about self-policing journalists? What happened here is that sometimes people say "I think" when they really mean "this is how it is." The prob- lem came with the editing of the...Read More

It's still a toss-up between The Nannie Dairies (67, 30, 12) and War (56, 39 and 8) for the #1 newbie slot this weekend. Mr. Bean's Holiday (72,27, 7)...modest, under$10 million. Rod Lurie 's Resurrecting the Champ is at 67, 25 and 2. The overall winner will be Superbad with a three-day tally of somewhere north of $20 million.

I asked a Focus Features publicist earlier today to explain exactly what had prompted the MPAA's ratings board to give Ang Lee's Lust, Caution an NC-17 rating. The official statement blamed "some explicit sexuality" but what was the actual depicted offense or offenses? The publicist declined to be specific but used terms like "hot," "fucking sexy," "aggressively sexual" and the like. He also sent over a statement from Focus honcho and Lust, Caution co-writer James Schamus that said Focus Features "accepts the MPAA's NC-17 rating without protest."

Described in certain circles as "an erotic espionage drama,"...Read More

I've already expressed my concerns and suspicions about The Heartbreak Kid (Dreamamount, 10.5), the Ben Stiller-Farrelly brothers comedy that appears to have had problems (i.e., issues of estrangement, respectful disagreements) with Elaine May's 1972 original and thereby gone its own way.

Whoooo...gloomy Toronto, darkness and shadows, such long faces, etc. What does it say about our times and our culture that a big-deal film festival is in such a downer mood? One of the most despairing movies being screened at Toronto is a real drink-from-the-dregs, life-can- definitely-suck story about post-traumatic stress syndrome, currents of futility and rage in young people, middle-aged alcoholism, a guy walking around with hooks instead of hands, economic hurt, infidelity, etc. Why can't there be more in the way of positive portraits?

The fall and rise of Tom Cruise over the past two years, as recalled by N.Y. Daily News reporter John Clark. This article is basically saying that the let-him-have-it media pile-on that made Cruise into a target beginning with Oprah-couch in May '05 pretty much peaked last summer and is now on the wane.

I've made a preliminary list of 55 films worth seeing at the Toronto Film Festival (9.6 to 9.15). I've relied upon the usual criteria -- (a) decent, good or strong advance buzz/reviews or (b) a film having been directed by a someone whose past work I respect (and who isn't considered to be somewhat over the hill), or at least by someone whose output can be called "interesting" enough so that you can't blow off his/her latest without feeling a bit guilty.

I've have seen 11 of these prior to the festival. The rest I've only heard...Read More

If this story about Martin Scorsese abandoning plans to direct Frankie Machine turns out to be true, my heart will survive the disappointment. The Paramount project, based on Don Winslow's "The Winter of Frankie Machine," is about an aging hit man (to have been played by Robert De Niro) who's hounded out of a respectable retirement as the target of a hit himself.

As I wrote last June 22nd, "I really can't stand the idea of watching another movie about another hit man. I'm hit-manned out, although this one sounds more like a meditation on old age and the end of...Read More

I spoke yesterday with Jeff Garlin, the director, writer and star of I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (IFC First Take), which finally opens limited on 9.5.07. "Finally" because fans of this film -- an agreeably witty and poignant character comedy in the general vein of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty -- have been waiting to see it in theatres since it played and scored at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, about 16 months ago.

After catching it a couple of months later at at the L.A. Film Festival I called Garlins' film "a...Read More

I don't know why Paul Haggis' In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14) wound up using almost half the cast of Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (Miramax, 11.9), but these films are certainly joined at the hip in this sense.

Elah has Tommy Lee Jones in the lead role and Josh Brolin in supporting, and this situation is reversed in Old Men. (Jones' supporting role --- a small-town sheriff -- is far more pivotal than Brolin's character is in Elah. You could argue that Jones' guy is central to Old Men -- the soul of...Read More

This new high-def trailer for Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light (Paramount, early 2008) is a much more layered and engaging piece than the now-removed Spanish-market trailer that I posted a week or so ago.

The difference with the new trailer is the obvious indication that the doc, which is about the Rolling Stones playing at Manhattan's Beacon Theatre in the fall of '06, is at least partly about the backstage political maneuverings before and during the filming, and that Scorsese is "in" the film as himself, "playing" the exacting and sometimes confused director.

Here's a sourpuss reaction from Chicago...Read More

Whatever the final qualitative truth of the matter, Alliance Atlantis, the Canadian distributor of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, is stirring suspicion among Toronto journalists that this impressionistic Bob Dylan dreamscape film is some kind of "problem case," to hear it from a guy up there.

"Three advance TIFF screenings [of I'm Not There] have just been cancelled by Alliance Atlantis owing to 'print availability,'" he reports, "which as you know is often code for, 'We're afraid to have critics see it early.'"

The first cancelled screening was due to happen tomorrow, 8.24, at 2 pm at the Cumberland Theatre....Read More

The old teaser for Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21) -- the one that's been out since roughly September 2006 -- had, at best, a marginal impact. It gave you a taste of what Casey Affleck's Ford might be like -- his dorky, vaguely malevolent obsessiveness -- and little else. But the new trailer is a huge compositional turn-on. As in, like, whoa....

Finally, the...Read More

Whatever DVDs might be coming out on a given Tuesday, you can almost always count on N.Y. Times columnist Dave Kehr writing about the discs most likely to be bought, rented or at least respected by elite cineastes ...the most esoteric, the most artistically correct, the most venerated in the Dan Talbot or Jonas Mekas sense of the term.

Kehr rarely steps into the rancid swamp of popular taste, not even to put it down. He always writes about the art film DVD from Criterion or Anchor Bay that needs the press. Good fellow, heart in the right place, a...

It's too early to get into James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) which has a lot of good things going for it and will probably, I'm guessing, be widely liked, but if this film was an interactive video game with plastic pistols, I would have spent my whole time firing at Ben Foster's nutball bad guy. I wanted him dead -- morte -- as soon as he came on-screen. I almost mean Foster himself rather than the villain he plays.

Okay, that's putting a bit harshly. Foster is "good" as Russell Crowe's loyal lieutenant --...Read More

All we need is one more movie about people who run businesses that specialize in murder-scene cleaning and we'll have ourselves an Entertainment Weekly News + Notes story. Right now we've got only two -- Renny Harlin's Cleaner (Sony Pictures, opening later this year), a drama about a murder-scene scrubber (Samuel L. Jackson) who unknowingly participates in a cover-up at a job, and Christine Jeffs and Megan Holley's Sunshine Cleaners, an apparent dramedy about two sisters (Emily Blunt, Amy Adams) running a biohazard removal/crime scene clean-up service in New Mexico.

How is it that these ideas always pop up at the...Read More

Just as there are certain high-powered male directors (Michael Mann, Oliver Stone, Paul Verhoeven) who've been accused of not writing fleshed-out female characters -- objectifying women by portraying them as sassy hotties, madonna-whores or out-and-out vipers -- there are female directors and writers who also prefer opposite-gender fantasy characters, and so they write these sensitive-wimp males for women's-market movies like The Nanny Diaries, The Jane Austen Book Club, Friends with Money, The Holiday, etc.

I'm saying that "chick-movie guys" are romanticized bullshit projections of men that certain female filmmakers would like to meet and fall in love with in real life. Males...Read More

The Toronto Film Festival synopsis of Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm, 12.7.07) strongly implies that it's a Washington, D.C. version of Schrader's American Gigolo. What follows is a beat-by-beat comparison of the Walker synopsis alongside one for Gigolo.

Walker #1: "A contemporary drama set in Washington, D.C., The Walker centers around Carter Page (Woody Harrelson), a well-heeled and popular gay socialite who serves as confidant, companion, and card partner to some of the capitol's leading ladies."

Gigolo #1: "A once-contemporay drama set in Beverly Hills of 1978, American Gigolo centers around Julian Kaye (Richard Gere), a...Read More

As I am one of those who gets Shoot 'Em Up for what it is -- a comic satire of John Woo-influenced urban action films that doesn't just send up genre conventions but gleefully urinates on these over-the-top films and their fans -- I'm naturally cool with a related website called Bullet-Proof Baby that sells (or pretends to sell) violence-anticipating baby accessories -- bullet-proof carriages, shields, helmets and whatnot.

Wait for some priggish parent or ethical stuffed shirt (a person who thinks like Variety's Peter Debruge, who called the film "vile" and "shamelessly...Read More

A final and definitive list of the 349 films showing at this year's Toronto Film Festival was issued today, and the festival issued a press release highlighting the latest additions. I'll try and assemble a final list of films I need to see sum-up later today -- over 35? 40 or more? -- and see how many of these films I'm going to be forced to miss due to time constraints.

Some of today's new-addition standouts are Michael Moore's Captain Mike Across America (more on this later), Jonathan Demme's Man From Plains (about Jimmy Carter), Vadim Perlman's In Boom (specifics aren't coming...Read More

As he began to make 3:10 to Yuma, director James Mangold "felt that the western had been hurt by a couple of things," he tells MTV.com's Josh Horowitz. "One is the over historical epic-ization of the western. The western was never about historical accuracy or teaching a history lesson, not the great ones anyway. They were about character.

"To my taste, one of the mistakes in westerns I'd seen was this ponderous sweeping Remington painting kind of Western with the big sweeping strings where suddenly I felt it was more about someone getting lost in...Read More

Nikki Finke reported yesterday that Paramount/DreamWorks' recent decision to sever ties with Blu-ray and go with HD-DVD for their high-def titles was basically driven by "cash grabs" -- $50 million to Paramount and $100 million to DreamWorks for "promotional consideration."

I thought Blu-ray had basically won the format war, especially with the Playstation 3 advantage it's had with gamers in recent months. It's still ahead in terms of either exclusive or bipolar studio support (Disney, Fox, Warner, Sony, Lionsgate and MGM). Now Paramount has joined Universal in being exclusively HD-DVD. And the consumers who half-care about this situation are throwing up their...Read More

In a thoughtful, well-composed but slightly obsequious Reeler piece about his recent experience as a N.Y. Film Festival juror, L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas quotes Thierry Fremaux, the artistic honcho of the Cannes Film Festival, for a concise explanation of what festival programming is basically about. "The point of this job is not to say 'I like' or 'I don't like,'" Fremaux says. "My job is to say, 'Do we have to screen this film or not?' Maybe I don't like a film, but I think I have to show it. Maybe I like a film, but I'm not sure that we...Read More

Gambling is an addiction -- a high-dive fever trip that people with wired, aggressive natures enjoy because (and I'm not trying to be facile or judgmental about this) it offers a brief respite from the dutiful, methodical, nose-to-the-grindstone rigors that are necessary in order to lead a life defined by at least some degree of honor, dignity, consistency, responsibility and consideration for others. Gambling is, I've always believed, about tempting disaster and flirting with self-destruction. It can take you down as surely as alcohol or cocaine or debt or anger. But there's still something about it that I like.

The willingness or at...Read More

"He is everyone, he is no one." The trailer for Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (Weinstein Co., 11.21) is up at IGN, although you'll have to watch a U.S. Army recruitment ad first. Here's a non-Army recruitment version. "All I can do is be me. Whoever that is."

This is last week's news, but are you going to tell me that Time's layout editor didn't say to himself (or herself), "Hey, devil horns! Nobody can prove malice on our part -- we can just say they're paranoid -- and it'll sort of fun to piss off the religious-right nut fringe."

Postnote: HE reader "SaveFarris" pointed out a while ago that Time did this before to Bill Clinton, with a link to prove it.

There are a few straight-from-the-shoulder statements, one or two feints and some very careful posturings in John Anderson's 8.21 N.Y. Times piece about Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. But it's all in the service of a good cause, which is to modify the thinking of those who are going, "Wow, I'm Not There is opening at the Film Forum? Isn't that almost the same as opening it at the Nuart?

Some highlights: (a) Harvey Weinstein's decision to open this mystery-of-Bob Dylan film in only two Manhattan theatres -- Film Forum and some other venue...Read More

"In my twenties, I hung out at a Boston dive bar with another young film critic (let's call him, oh, Onan Gliberperson) drinking pint after pint of Bass Ale and playing Donkey Kong well into the night." -- from David Edelstein's review of of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters in the current New York magazine.

Of all the films described in Entertainment Weekly's Fall Preview issue, only one made me go "uh-oh" -- Zac Helm's Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (20th Century Fox, 11.16). It's that look on Dustin Hoffman's face, mainly. On top of a guarded feeling I've had about Helm since seeing Stranger Than Fiction, which he wrote, last year. Obviously not aimed at guys like myself, but is anyone up for another Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-type deal? Natalie Portman mitigates somewhat.

It's a little unusual that Roger Spottiswoode's Shake Hands With the Devil, a drama about Lt. General Romeo Dallaire's horrific saga as a commander of UNAMIR, the U.N. peacekeeping force, during the 1994 Rwandan massacre, is using the same title as Peter Raymont's exact- same-subject documentary, which played at Sundance '05 and made its way around festivals and select theatrical bookings later that year.

It'll also be the second time that Dallaire's Rwandan experience has been portrayed in a feature -- Nick Nolte's character in Tony George's Hotel Rwanda was based on him. Both the doc and the Spottiswoode film...Read More

I missed this Nikki Finke update earlier today: Superbad finished the weekend with $33 million, not $31.2 million or $31.4 million (per Josh Friedman and Len Klady, respectively), for the weekend. An "exceptional hold," down only about 2% from Saturday, etc.

Superbad is now a strong candidate to earn $100 million. It's a safe bet to earn a little north of $10 million between today and Thursday, and with all the so-so movies debuting next weekend it could do another $22 to $23 million (perhaps a bit higher), which would give it a cume as high as $67 or $68...Read More

"And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and that he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he'd be there. And then I woke up." An older man's description of a dream about his deceased father, spoken at the end of a very good film (one I'm not going to name) that has stayed with me for weeks and weeks, and which sinks in deeper every time I think of it.

"If Alfred Hitchcock's tombstone bore the word 'suspense,' what would we engrave on Michelangelo Antonioni's? 'Alienation,' probably, yet that is a word forever applied to the films, not spoken within them. You may disagree with his vision of the sexes fighting to make connections that endure, as opposed to mere spasms of desire ('avventura' means not just an adventure but a fling), but there is no denying the sharp, concrete form in which that vision was set.

"And so the paradoxes accrue: sex solves nothing for Antonioni, yet somehow his films, blending tactility with froideur, remain...Read More

Of the forthcoming 8.24 openers, Philip G. Atwell's War (Lionsgate), the Jet Li-Jason Statham martial-arts thriller, and Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's The Nanny Diaries (Weinstein Co.) are tracking the best. War has better awareness and definite interest, and will probably be the #1 newbie. And the 9.7 duke-out between 3:10 to Yuma and Shoot 'Em Up is still neck and neck, with the latter enjoying a very slight edge.

The new bells-and-whistles website for Paul Haggis's In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.14) went up today, along with a new one-sheet. The copy line says, "Sometimes finding the truth is easier than facing it."

The 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley came and went last Thursday without much stir on this end. And for good reason -- the metaphor of his film career is more than a little painful to contemplate. For a guy who began making movies with the dream of emulating the pathos of James Dean, Presley's celluloid history is probably the saddest in motion picture history.

He made 27 stinkers in a row after Don Siegel's Flaming Star, his last reasonably decent programmer. I was going to say something about the three...Read More

In Matt Zoller Seitz's N.Y. Times review of The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (which I still haven't seen), he reports that "New Line has commissioned ]director Seth] Gordon to remake this story with actors." And Gordon has told MTV.com that he'd like to see Johnny Depp play the doc's real- life bad guy Billy Mitchell.

This brings to mind an observation by Variety's Ronnie Scheib that "Hollywood may find it difficult to cast two big-name stars willing to play it as broadly as the real-life hero and villain of this tale. Nor would many self-respecting scriptwriters...Read More

Two days ago AICN's Drew McWeeny/Moriarty posted a reader pan of Jonathan Hensleigh's Welcome to the Jungle, a Blair Witch-y kids-vs-cannibals shocker that I saw and favorably reviewed last November. As kids-in-peril movies go, it struck me as an unusually spooky, unnerving, cut-above thing -- an experience that "creeped me out in a way I'm not likely to forget."

I therefore don't get why it's going straight to video -- Movies Unlimited and Amazon are posting an 11.13.07 release.

I was particularly aroused by "the raw non-staginess of it, the realistic atmosphere, the non-actorish acting, the hand-held photography,...Read More

Last Friday Times Online critic Cosmo Landesman hit on a political aspect in The Bourne Ultimatum (having opened in England that day) that I don't remember any U.S. critic saying quite as concisely -- Matt Damon's Jason Bourne is the ultimate left-thinking super-baddie, "the John Rambo of the liberal intelligentsia."

Ultimatum "is a great and liberating [occasion] for liberal-kind," Landesman observes. "For them, spy heroes have always been suspect: Bond was too much of a sexist, [Arnold] Schwarzenegger (True Lies) too right-wing and Vin Diesel (xXx) too dumb. But Bourne allows liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage...Read More

The French-subtitled trailer for Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream (Weinstein Co., 11.30) was YouTube posted on 8.18. The British-based drama costars Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as two brothers in a financial bind who both fall for a femme fatale (Haley Atwell), who steers them into a criminal scheme. If Tom Wilkinson doesn't play their dad then he's playing their uncle. Pic "has been said to be in a darker vein, similar to Match Point," according to one published report. The curtain goes up at the Venice and Toronto film festivals next month.