Should have put this up earlier today. Speaks for itself. Newman the Great.

"This looks to be the Citizen Kane of Gen-X marital strife porn." -- HE reader James O. Incandenza wildly speculating about Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road.

Kim Voynar, late of Cinematical, has signed up with Movie City News as a writer-columnist-editor. Everything Voynar thinks, does, feels, believes in, dreams about, eats, breathes, longs for politically, wants to say and is looking to make happen is henceforth owned by MCN -- lock, stock and barrel.

"Loved you writing about Kristin Scott Thomas, I've Loved You So Long and her Best Actress shot," writes HE reader and Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling. "[But] how come there's no love for Elsa Zylberstein, a Best Supporting Actress nominee if I ever saw one? Zylberstein is quite a terrific foil to Thomas. It's through her eyes that we embrace Thomas' character and stick with her. If this soulful sibling is willing to shelter and care for her, so are we. All the doubts the audience has about Thomas, Elsa believably faces and deals with, and finally she takes us...Read More

I don't know who wrote this originally, but the spirit and the attitude are quite likable. And it makes sense to impose such terms in any Wall Street bailout deal. Thanks to HE reader Brendan for passing this along:

"Dear Wall Street,

"I'm speaking on behalf of a group called The Taxpayers of the United States. Now that we've rejected the first bailout plan, I'm sure that in the spirit of tough, free market capitalism and spirited negotiations, you'll consider our second offer. Here are some terms that we trust you'll find reasonable:

"(1) We are willing to loan you money at a...Read More

"I'm hearing schmaltzy," a guy told me this morning about Joe Wright's The Soloist. That's all you can share? I wrote back. How schmaltzy? Does it manifest right away, or does it...you know, hold off until Act Two or Three or what? I'm sensing a certain actorishness from Jamie Foxxin the trailer -- is that a problem? Don't tell me Robert Downey, Jr. isn't good in this because Downey is on a roll and can't fail.

Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married (Sony Classics, 10.3) "is endlessly sociable, with people crowding the camera as if in a documentary, yet sometimes you want that camera to draw back and watch them from a distance -- to see how they mill around in the frame rather than shifting the frame itself.

"The wedding party is the ultimate guide to Demme's benign vision: the groom is black, the bride is white, she and her bridesmaids are dressed in saris, nobody so much as mentions race, and the officiating priest is played by Demme's cousin, Father...Read More

The New Yorker's Ben Greenman has listed his five scariest movies of all time -- Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Wes Craven's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

These are all gripping portraits of inferno worlds, but big-time scary is always about triggering repressed fears with what you don't show -- with what you set loose in people's souls by implying the presence of demons.

There was a time when I thought that Wise's The Haunting ('63), which shows nothing, was perhaps the scariest...Read More

According to polling data on Yahoo Dashboard, Utah voters prefer John McCain to Barack Obama by 62.7 to 23.3. Red staters believe what they believe and their boots are dug in, but what's up with that lopsided margin? Utah's McCain support is much stronger than it is in states known for their adamant shitkicker sensibilities (Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky). Oklahoma is another fierce red state -- McCain over Obama, 61.3 to 29.3. What do these guys sprinkle on their eggs every morning?

NBC's Tom Brokaw is sounding more and more like a cautious milquetoast place-holder with an excessively deferential, go-along attitude. Good old avuncular, seen-it-all Tom, nostalgic sentimentalist and author of "The Greatest Generation." But where is the honor in lobbying to put a lid on two respected MSNBC colleagues (Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews) who have a passion for cutting through the bull, and in accomodating the disreputable liars and smoke-blowers in the McCain campaign?

Two days ago Brokaw (a) reportedly cited false disparaging poll data about Barack Obama, (b) recently conducted some shuttle diplomacy between NBC and the McCain campaign, seeking to...Read More

This high-def version of the new trailer for Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) tells you pretty much what the film is without the particulars or the last two beats. Miserable, lost and sinking in surburbia. Richard Yates, John Cheever, John Updike, etc.

I understand the whole flight-to-the-suburbs mentality of the '50s as well as the female nesting instinct, but why would Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Wheeler, a guy who says he loves Paris because "the people are alive there...unlike here," want to buy a house in Cheever Land in the first place? Is...Read More

"A filthy-rich fantasy for these cash-strapped times, Beverly Hills Chihuahua features the voices of Drew Barrymore and much of the industry's top Latino talent in a live-action talking-dog lark that should please young pups. At the same time, it peddles tacky stereotypes in thick Hispanic accents, effectively ceding whatever dignity the breed regained since the 'Yo quiero Taco Bell' campaign went off the air. One thing's for sure: The Mouse House will realize a fine balance of trade on this one." -- from Peter DeBruge's 9.29 Variety review.

"The film...Read More

The map on the Yahoo Political Dashboard has the most accessible state-by-state poll numbers, and I'm pleased, naturally, with the electoral vote projections favoring Obama over McCain, 278 to 227. But I've come to expect greater comfort and assurance from the guys at fivethirtyeight.com. They have Ohio and Virginia as lean Obama states, and an electoral vote projection of 329 to 208. Why the discrepancy? Split the two and Obama is projected to win just over 300 to McCain's 217.

Another Jamie Stuart short about the New York Film Festival has been posted on the Filmmaker website. Per custom it hasn't much to do with the Lincoln Center happenings. It's another dry surreal thing. The term that comes to mind is "Bunuelian wackjob." It contains a clip of Che director Steven Soderbergh defining what a political film is, but is mostly about strange noirish dreams in Stuart's head. I watched it the first time with my amplified speaker system attached, and couldn't hear most of the dialogue because of a bass guitar going "thwong, thwong, thwong, thwong." And what does "this one's...Read More

"After I spent 2 1/2 hours laying on a stretcher, not being able to breathe, I thought to myself -- what a waste. I've got a ton of money in the bank, I've got this hotshot job at DreamWorks and it's all meaningless. I've just been living through my ego. From that minute, I promised myself that if I managed to survive, I'd live the life I wanted to live, not the way I thought other people wanted me to live.

"And however well I end up doing as a writer, whether I just eke out a living or win a bunch...Read More

What can you say about a tough-minded, hard-nosed political drama that tells the truth, doesn't mince words or pull punches, rekindles the viral excitement of a bygone era, offers several gripping performances and leaves you with a taste of ashes in your soul?

Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek

This is the reality of The Baader Meinhof Complex -- Uli Edel's 149-minute drama about the famed German radical leftist group. I caught it last Friday night at the Aero along with L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen, The Envelope's Pete Hammond and two or three publicist pals who may...Read More

In the remarkable, deeply penetrating I've Loved You So Long (Sony Classics, 10.24) , Kristin Scott Thomas gives an immensely sad but highly sensitive and attuned performance that you just know, minutes into it, will be with you the rest of your life. She draws you in like some sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, but she never sells anything. Start to finish, she dwells in this fascinating zen-grief space that just "is." She owns it...and from the moment the film begins, owns you.

Warning to first-time viewers: Watch this YouTube...Read More

I was just depositing some cash into a Washington Mutual account an hour ago, and the atmosphere was unmistakably edgy. A long line of people, anxious looks on some of the faces, a vaguely nervous undercurrent of one form or another. Washington Mutual went under a few days ago and was bought up by JP Morgan Chase on 9.26. There was a fat guy jabbering excitedly to a friend and making no attempt to hide his anger at bank employees behind the glass who were sitting at desks and not at teller windows. The vibe was on the sullen side. No jokes,...Read More

The Envelope's Buzzmeter software is currently being overhauled and redesigned, so in the meantime The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has tallied some 2008 Oscar predictions. Nobody agrees on anything...too early for that. The contributors are O'Neil, Anthony Breznican (USA Today), Edward Douglas (Comingsoon.net), Scott Feinberg (AndTheWinnerIs, The Feinberg Files at The Envelope), Pete Hammond (The Envelope), Dave Karger (Entertainment Weekly) and myself.

"The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this," Michael Moore wrote today. "Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can...Read More

"To a certain extent, I think John gets hurt by this," said CNN contributor Ed Rollins about the failure of the bailout bill to pass the House earlier today. "He obviously, at the end of the day, said he was for it. But more important than that, he said he was the one who would bring them to the table and to a certain extent he will be viewed now as not being able to do that.

"McCain is our nominee and [congressional Republicans] will do everything they can to help him, but they are not going to go over the...Read More

One frequent reason why high-quality films are chosen as Best Picture finalists is because of the resonance and universality of their themes. And the themes that always seem to register more than others are contained in personal journey movies about growth, redemption and transformation. They say something with a measure of eloquence that people recognize as fundamentally true based on their own life experience, and if they don't jerk the audience around with too much shallow diversion or emotional manipulation, they tend to shine through -- even if they end sadly or tragically.

You will see change/grow/transform...Read More

N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply has an Oscar season piece out this morning. It mainly focuses on Paramount's intention to push The Curious Case of Benjamin Button big-time. The most interesting line comes from marketing chief Megan Colligan, who says the not quite finished slogan for the film is something along the lines of "you must live your life forward, but it can only be understood backward."

A portion of the Cieply piece raised an eyebrow. "Some publicists who specialize in Oscar campaigns," he wrote, "are privately predicting a year-end shootout between Button and Frost/Nixon, a planned December release from Universal Pictures, directed...Read More

This David Byrne/"Once in a Lifetime"-themed trailer for Oliver Stone's W. is, make no mistake, brilliant -- an award-level advertisement if I ever saw one. Is this a Tim Palin original or did an outside agency throw it together? TV junket press saw W. last weekend. Print/online showings will almost certainly be this week.

Here's last summer's trailer for Baz Luhrman's Australia (20th Century Fox, 11.26), and a newer, just-released version.

Luhrman is a fever-pitch, headstrong, first-rate director -- one of the dependable visionaries in this business. The finely crafted script tells a rousing, big-canvas, primary-colors story that's set in the World War II era. And the movie is clearly looking to deliver an eye-filling, epic-sized experience with a mostly realistic (i.e., not too much CG) brush.

The only uncertainty is whether or not the Nicole Kidman marquee factor, which hasn't been working in recent years and has...Read More

I hate it when trailers tell you everything about a movie except the final beat, so you'd think I'd be receptive to the plot vagueness in this recently posted trailer for Seven Pounds, the Will Smith movie coming out on 12.19. But it bothered me. "What's going on here?" I was saying to myself. I got the part about Smith being shattered by something he did and wanting to help others in a kind of Pay It Forward vein, but what's the shot?

You have to search around on the Seven...Read More

Production designer Ken Adam talking to the Telegraph's Horatia Harrod about the war room set he designed for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove some 45 years ago.

Edited by the 23/6 guys, and not a bad job of it.

L.A. Times reporter Steven Braun reported yesterday that "soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska" -- in 1997 -- "she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago."

Last night MTV.com guy Josh Horowitz reported that if and when Nottingham ever gets made, director Ridley Scott intends to have Russell Crowe play both the Sheirff of Nottingham and Robin Hood. Scott revealed that Crowe will be "playing both!" to MTV News during a Body of Lies junket interview over the weekend. Scott explained that Crowe's dual roles would be "a good old clever adjustment of characters. One becomes the other. It changes." This isn't just a terrible idea -- it's an embarassing one. Unless Scott was having Horowitz off.

"It's just the ultimate hustle. It's just selling an invisible product, and so if I can be Toto in The Wizard of Oz pulling back the curtain, which is how I see religion, great, that's fine, I'll do that and get off the stage. I'm not looking to be the anti-messiah." -- Religulous producer-star Bill Maher speaking to N.Y. Times writer John Leland.

Religulous producer-star Bill Maher, director Larry Charles

13 months ago Michael Cera, the 19 year-old costar of the just-opened Superbad, was suddenly the Guy of the Moment -- a cool new GenY talent who embodied a very dry, droll and witty comic mentality, which was also evident in Clark and Michael, his co-created web series. And yet today -- don't laugh -- I'm getting a feeling that Cera may be two or three steps from being over.

I'm not saying this is in the cards, and I'm not saying I don't enjoy Cera's comic sensibility -- I do. But if he is...Read More

This two-day old CNN clip has gotten around, but it has something new I missed on Friday. Jack Cafferty's rant about Sarah Palin is angry but unexceptional -- he's expressing a fairly common reaction to Palin's performance during her recent Katie Couric interview. What stands out is Cafferty's rebuke of CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer when the latter tries to explain away Palin's shoddy performance due to having had to cram in a lot of information in a short time frame.

Thanks to Jack Morrissey for passing this along. Originally posted on 6.17.08 by a young student from southeastern Kentucky, just back from football practice. The woman is his neighbor, according to the YouTube description.

Producer Scott Rudin and Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein today issued a statement that they're "in complete agreement" about releasing The Reader, the Stephen Daldry war-crimes drama, about on December 12, a decision facilitated by "a plan to extend the post-production schedule in order to give Daldry the additional time he needs to successfully complete [it]."

Kate Winslet, Stephen Daldry during filming of The Reader

The statement was prompted by a 9.23 Hollywood Reporter story by Stephen Zeitchik claiming that "a heated disagreement" between Weinstein and Rudin about distribution plans" for The Reader was underway.

The people who made Eagle Eye the weekend's #1 film with a $29.2 million haul are obviously easy lays. The ads and reviews made it crystal clear this was/is a brainless, pumped-up slapdash thriller, and they went anyway.

The $13 million-plus that Nights at Rodanthe earned for the #2 position came from the wallets of women with low (certainly flexible) standards who don't want to know from reviews and just wanted to hang with Richard Gere and Diane Lane...end of diagnosis.

The $6.5 million earned by Fireproof in 839 locations, or $7,764 per theatre, makes for a nice...Read More

"I guess it comes down to the fact that I take the escapism that movies provide very seriously, and that TV 'entertainment news' shows don't. I'm not alone on this. There are millions of us who don't necessarily think of movies as mere diversion. They can be opportunities for communion or transportation -- a profound high.

"When a special movie comes along, a theatre can feel like a church. Maybe most people see movies in less reverent terms; maybe the true believers are a minority. But if the lore of movies was just about glamour, fun...Read More

"What we learned last week is that the man who always puts his 'country first' will take the country down with him if that's what it takes to get to the White House," says N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich in today's edition.

"For all the focus on Friday night's deadlocked debate, it still can't obscure what preceded it: When John McCain gratuitously parachuted into Washington on Thursday, he didn't care if his grandstanding might precipitate an even deeper economic collapse. All he cared about was whether he might save his campaign. George Bush put more deliberation...Read More

It wouldn't have worked with undecided voters, but frustrated Barack Obama supporters like myself would have felt immensely satisfied if he'd shown a little steel last night and told John McCain to wipe that smirk off his face because... you know, there was nothing the least bit funny or amusing about what they were discussing.

I'm thinking, of course, of that delicious moment in Michael Mann's The Insider when Bruce McGill tells Wings Hauser to do just that in that Mississippi courtroom.

The best thing about Last Chance Harvey (Overture, 12.26), a mature romantic drama with Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, is the title, which seems to say it all in three words. But read the synopsis on this Movie Jungle page and tell me what it tells you. I think it sounds a little forced, a little twee. Like someone's trying to sell something.

Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson in Last Chance Harvey

In any case, The Envelope's Pete Hammond reported last night that it's coming out on 12.26 rather than 1.23 because Hoffman "is said...Read More

There isn't a lot of Paul Newman in these clips from George Roy Hill's Slap Shot -- just two locker-room pep talks -- but he and the Hanson brothers (i.e., the Carlson brothers) were beautiful in this thing. In the second clip, the riled-up referee's reaction during the playing of the national anthem is perfect -- two turn-arounds and a confrontation. "I'm listening' to the fuckin' song!" That settles it -- I'm buying the DVD later today.

I'm too lazy to have bought or rented the BBC series Life on Mars, about a present-tense cop finding himself time-transported back to 1973. But it has a relatively good rep. Which is why an American version of this series will debut on ABC on 10.9 with Jason O'Mara as the time-traveller and Harvey Keitel as his older, grizzled partner.

If you research it, indications pile up that the ABC version may turn out to be on the trite or mediocre side.

One, jokes about the...Read More

Seriously -- this guy is Ironman. And a perfect Herzog hero. First-rate Jetman footage of his flights (a high-quality mini-digital camera strapped to his helmet) would be awesome. All right, the German newscaster is what made me think of Herzog initially, but this is an idea that gets better and better the more you think about it. A great doc waiting to happen.

Update: All right, all right, maybe John McCain said "coursh" (as if "of course") rather than "horseshit." But that's only because I've been told over and over that he said "coursh" -- it's the power of suggestion. Even if I still believe in my heart that he said "horseshit."

Earlier today: Thanks to HE reader George Prager for spotting the portion of last night's debate in which McCain said "horseshit" twice. I've listened to this MSNBC clip over ten times now and there doesn't seem to be any question about it. The first "horseshit" happens at...Read More

College Humor's Palin-Disney trailer, inspired by Matt Damon, is a good moderate chuckle and way above average for this sort of effort.

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone was the first to post a report of Paul Newman's death last night, but the source seemed a wee bit dicey and I decided to wait until this morning. But just to run it down I called Newman's biographer-in-progress Shawn Levy -- he was uncertain also. And very sleepy. (And so was I.)

Now the news is confirmed. Frank Galvin, Hud Bannon, Henry Gondorff, Cool Hand Luke, Rocky Graziano, Butch Cassidy, Reggie Dunlop, Lew Harper and Eddie Felson have left the room for good. We've...Read More

I'm looking to launch HE's own Oscar handicapper feature this year. I'm thinking of calling it the HE Badass Brigade. Maybe the HE Oscar Badasses would be better. Starting on 10.15 and moving forward from then on. I'm looking to get as many filmmakers to participate as I can. Ones who don't have a dog in the hunt, I mean. Plus screenwriters, studio guys, agents...along with the usual journo-critics.

Obama came off better than McCain tonight -- he's clearly brainier and more exacting and got in some very good points and zing lines, and he sure as hell didn't let McCain get away with any of his blah-blah routine -- but he wouldn't do the street-fight thing. He wouldn't punch or kick or do the slap-down. McCain was the snarly one. The grouch, the jabber, the bulldog prick who wouldn't stop smirking and making faces and going "heh, heh, heh."

Obama reportedly did better with independent voters, but I...Read More

Wait...I've seen this supposedly newish trailer for David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 12.25). It looks better in high-def, of course. Glorious, in fact. The exquisite visual quality tells you it's a first-rate dreamscape experience. Eric Roth's screenplay is, take it from me, delicate, eloquent and quite moving. The question, of course, is will it all coagulate?

It's been one of those distracted days. Only six stories today...shameful. I have to get over to a restaurant/bar in Santa Monica called R + D Kitchen on Montana to see the debate at 6 pm, and then walk across the street to the Aero theatre for a 7:30 screening of The Baader Meinhof Complex, which got panned today by Variety.

It's no secret that the plot by German military officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the waning days of World War II failed, and that the conspirators -- including Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the character portrayed by Tom Cruise in Valkyrie -- were shot. So it's no spoiler to say that I want to see Cruise eat lead at the end of Bryan Singer's long-awaited historical thriller.

I want to see him grimace, convulse and fall to the ground. No cutaways, no panning up to gray skies over Berlin...Read More

"Does Diane Keaton owe some loan sharks a considerable amount of cash?," asks critic Brian Orndorf in his review of Smother (opening 9.26). "Are there incriminating photos of her that she's trying to keep out of circulation? I'm having trouble understanding why Keaton would, over the course of a single year, take part in both Mama's Boy and now Smother.

"Perhaps she was poisoned by merciless Asian gangsters with strict instructions to make two career-denting comedies that methodically peel away her integrity before she was allowed the sweet kiss of a life-saving antidote. Heavens,...Read More

"The presence of Kristin Scott Thomas in Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long is so powerfully distinctive," the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw notes, "that it's as if Claudel has not merely written the lead role for her, but extrapolated his film's entire narrative structure from Scott Thomas's personality.

Elsa Zylberstein, Kristin Scott-Thomas in I've Loved You So Long

"Her formidable bilingual presence, her beauty -- elegant and drawn in early middle age -- her air of hypersensitive awareness of all the tiny absurdities and indignities with which she is surrounded, coupled with a drolly lenient reticence: it...Read More

I've decided to double-post the Oscar Balloon -- it's on the main page (ten items down from the top) as well as on its own page. Somehow it got un-designed as a result of the server switchover so it has no tint or flair or anything -- it looks awful right now. (But it'll be fixed this weekend. I hope.)

I've tried to prune out the stragglers and the good-but-not-good-enoughers. Josh Brolin's lead performance in W. is the the latest surge in the Best Actor category. Unless reports come in to the contrary, experience has taught me that anything to...Read More

L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas has posted a frank, perceptive, and typically well written profile of Mickey Rourke, star of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight, 12.19), an almost-certain Best Actor nominee and by general consensus the Comeback Kid of 2008.

The timing of Foundas's article is a little unusual -- a few weeks after The Wrestler was hailed at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, and nearly three months before it'll open commercially. Obviously Foundas is foresaking the usual considerations to say to the industry, the press...Read More

Thanks to Politico's Jeffrey Ressner for passing this along...

"David Letterman is no Walter Cronkite. He's not even Ed Sullivan. But he is the face that millions of Americans see before turning in for the night. For years, John McCain has appeared on his show, even announcing his intention to run for president on the program. And to have the affable Letterman visibly boil and go on the offensive showed that, perhaps, McCain, whose campaign has stumbled since the beginning of this economic crisis, is in bigger trouble than one would think.

"Perhaps McCain won't say, 'If I've lost Letterman, I've lost middle America.' Does Letterman even say his audience is...Read More

I work pretty hard all day, extreme concentration and tension and furrowed brow, and all these guys do is sleep and do this all day.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

"If Barack Obama doesn't become the next President of the United States, I'm going to blame the Jews. I am. And I know you're saying, like, oh my god Sarah, I can't believe you're saying this! Jews are the most liberal, scrappy, Civil Rightsy people there are. Right, that's true...but you're forgetting a large group of Jews who are not that way. And they go by several aliases."

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo

Variety's Anne Thompson, one of those who declared last May that Steven Soderbergh's Che was a problem movie because it lacked story tension and movie moments, has written about how the forthcoming New York Film Festival showings may "provide a fresh opportunity for an iconic Argentine revolutionary to find new life on American shores." The two-part epic, which I saw and loved for the second time in Toronto, is now twelve minutes shorter than the version that played in Cannes.

I love hearing the dirt or reading about it in the checkout line, but I've always thought it slimey and wrong to dredge up the private lives of political candidates. The press corps was right not to pester JFK for his randiness. Jimmy Carter shouldn't have taken heat for admitting to "lust in his heart." Beating up on Bill Clinton for Monica Lewinsky was absurd -- his absolute refusal to talk plainly or honestly to Ken Starr's inquisitors was one of the moral high points of his administration.

Granted, John Edwards was an absolute fool and a scumbag to have run...Read More

In a laundry-list story about upcoming Disney projects, Variety's Marc Graser has reported that Johnny Depp has agreed to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean pic and also play Tonto in a bigscreen adaptation of The Lone Ranger, both of which will be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Johnny Depp; Jay Silverheels as Tonto in the '50s TV series The Lone Ranger

Whoa, whoa. I think we need to repeat this. Johnny Depp is going to play Tonto in a big-budget Lone Ranger movie. Meaning that...Read More

The day before yesterday L.A. Times guy Josh Friedman reported that Fireproof, a Christian drama with Kirk Cameron as a firefighter struggling to save his marriage, "has been No. 1 in advance sales on movie ticketing site Fandango.com with 31% of this week's business, albeit in a slow marketplace -- even outpacing sales for the big-budget popcorn thriller Eagle Eye, starring heartthrob Shia LaBeouf."

The Fandango numbers, he reported, are due to "grass-roots support and bulk purchases from churchgoers.

"Nobody expects Fireproof, which Samuel Goldwyn Films will open Friday...Read More

The opening four and a half minutes of Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, which I didn't see in Cannes or Toronto because I've learned to say "later" with this guy. I seem to lack the depth and the patience to get through a Reygadas film without leaning forward in my seat and covering my face with my fingers. But watch this clip and tell me it's not beautiful, primal and faintly haunting. In the vein of the opening moments of Mike Nichols' Catch 22, only much slower.

HE reader Christian Hamaker...Read More

Patience is a virtue, of course, but it rarely comes into play when an old dog is learning a new trick. Courtesy of the 23/6 guys, who posted this yesterday.

HE reader Salvador Perez wrote this morning to complain about a nearly three-week-old remark in my Toronto Film Festival review of Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I felt it was a mistake for Elizabeth Banks to be apparently wearing jeans (or a jean skirt) right after having on-camera sex with Seth Rogen. Who wears anything while shooting a sex scene in a low-rent amateur porn film, which is what the shot is? Perez said what I saw "wasn't a mistake [because] Miri was wearing a denim miniskirt that was hiked up during sex."

"Yeah, Kevin Smith pointed that...Read More

Cheers and salutations to Matthew Belinkie, who posted this video on overthinkingit.com earlier today. One shot doesn't work but otherwise it's nearly perfect. And the speed in which it was composed! Bush only spoke last night.

First Showing.net's Alex Billington posted a first-anywhere trailer for Steve McQueen's Hunger (IFC, sometime in '09) earlier today. You can tell in an instant that McQueen is a first-rate visual composer. The art of Hunger is not open to question. What is open to question (to nausea-prone middle-class guys like myself who have problems with the idea of being stuck in small prison cells with fecal matter smeared on the walls) is whether or not you want to sit and meditate and tough it out with some IRA guys in a British-run prison for the better part of two hours. Otherwise Hunger...Read More

I know this is about as lowbrow as it gets and I'm sorry for that, but this is mildly funny, largely due to the Borat-styled voicing.

I read with interest Tom O'Neil's salute to Bill Condon and Laurence Mark, the new Oscar show producers whom I know personally and like enormously. Excellent fellows, touch of class, taste buds, cool tuxedos, etc.

Do I agree with O'Neil's suggestion that Will Smith would be a great choice to host the Oscars? Uhhm...sorry but no. No offense, but to me Smith is Mr. Easy, Mr. Bucks-Up Hah-Hah. He doesn't exude anything except exuberance, perfect teeth and postivism. He lacks discrimination and is accomodating to a fault -- he'll throw his head back and laugh at anything, radiate positive energy about...Read More

"Let me take you back to 1997, and a conversation I had with Paul Schrader, author of Taxi Driver, director of Mishima and American Gigolo. He told me that after Pulp Fiction, we were leaving an existential age and entering an age of irony.

"'The existential dilemma,' he said, 'is 'should I live?' And the ironic answer is 'does it matter?' Everything in the ironic world has quotation marks around it. You don't actually kill somebody; you 'kill' them. It doesn't really matter if you put the baby in front of the runaway car because it's only a 'baby' and it's only a...Read More

An offical announcement came down late today that Cloverfield helmer Matt Reeves will re-write and direct the American adaptation of Let the Right One In, the Swedish-made tweener vampire film that I wrote about earlier today. The producers are Overture Films and the London-based Hammer Films.

The deranged smear jobs that have characterized the McCain campaign's anti-Obama ads -- misleading or shamelessly false, aimed at the dopes -- bear the stamp of Steve Schmidt, a protege of former George Bush operative Karl Rove. And Rove was a protege of the late and infamous Lee Atwater, the godfather of the right-wing culture-war smear and arguably one of the most demonic mentalities to exert a profound influence upon the American political process.

And yet Stefan Forbes' Boogie Man, a portrait of Atwater's life and career which I saw last summer at the...Read More

Ever since catching glimpses of Ken Loach's Poor Cow in flashback sequences in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, which came out nine years ago, I've been hoping to see this 1968 Loach film on DVD in this country. But it never happened. There's a new British DVD coming out next month, which of course can be ordered on Amazon UK and seen on any all-region player. But why not an NTSC version? Or a TCM airing? I've never seen it.

John McCain has reportedly made the decision not to attend Friday night's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi unless a Congressional Wall Street bailout deal has been reached by sometime earlier in the day. What a transparent sidestepping fool. What a phoney-baloney drama queen.

McCain has been dropping in the polls and knows he'll be at a rhetorical disadvantage with Obama so he's playing the role of the dedicated, pure-of-heart public servant in order to give himself a temporary out. Plus he wants to postpone the debate until Thursday, 10.2, which would of course bump the Biden-Palin debate. More prep time for Sarah!

I spoke this morning to dp Gordon Willis, a.k.a. the legendary "Prince of Darkness" whose films include the Godfather trio, Alan Pakula's All The President's Men and The Parallax View and Woody Allen's Manhattan, Annie Hall and Interiors. We spoke for 20 or 25 minutes, but I could have easily kept this master of light and shadows occupied for three or four hours.

The phoner happened in part because of my somewhat surprised, very positive response to the restored Coppola/Harris Godfather DVD. Even on a crummy DVD, which delivers about 15% of the visual data...Read More

I've been asked to pass along an invitation to local HE readers about a Barack Obama fund-raiser being held on Sunday, October 5th, at Cedering Fox's very cool home from 4 pm to 7 pm. They're looking for $250 a head but they'll take $175 if you're strapped. Good food, interesting crowd, a little dough for the right cause, a couple of speakers. I'll probably attend. It's actually being called a "Victory Fund Benefit."

It just hit me that two movies about young mortals in love with young vampires will soon be upon us -- Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight (Summit, 11.21) with Kristen Stewart having it bad for the blood-sucking Robert Pattinson, and Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In (Magnolia, 10.24), a tweener vampire romance from Sweden about a 12 year old boy (Kare Hedebrant) who falls for a female vampire (Lina Leandersson) who's also 12 -- and has in fact been 12 for a long, long time, due to her condition.

Let The Right One In's Lina Leandersson

A friend saw Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon and "wouldn't say it's bad," he said, "but I don't think it's great. Good performance from Frank Langella but otherwise, I was kinda bored." Stop right there! It's more or less the stage play, which I saw in New York and wasn't the least bit bored by. Nobody was.

"As opposed to Gus Van Sant's Milk," the friend continued, "which, according to someone trusted who saw it last week in L.A., is as phenomenal as the trailer."

Hillary Clinton sidestepped a question this morning from Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski about whether she thinks Sarah Palin could help solve the current financial crisis as vp or, God forbid, president. Did Clinton grim up and say to women voters what needs to be said about Palin once and for all? Of course not.

Clinton ran for cover and slithered away because she doesn't want to alienate the under-educated Walmart Moms who voted for her during the Democratic primaries, and whose support she'll need again if and when she runs for president in 2012. This...Read More

"I just heard a radio ad for Eagle Eye (Dreamworks, 9.26), the new Shia LaBeouf thriller. I think it's safe to steer clear of any movie containing the line, 'Somebody's hacking into the power grid!'" -- email received at 4:35 pm from HE reader Mark Smith.

An elaboration: "He's an ordinary guy, thrust into chaos. They're watching him all the time, cat-and-mouse games, he outsmarts them, shit blows up, gets the girl, fast cutting, plot holes, noise, etc." I couldn't care less if I were dead.

The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik is reporting that producers Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin are strongly disagreeing about whether to release the Weinstein Co. war-crimes drama The Reader in 2008 or wait until '09.

"Weinstein is pushing for a December release for the movie, which director Stephen Daldry is working on in post," Zeitchik writes. "The romance set in postwar Germany and based on Bernhard Schlink's novel already has buzz from strong test screenings, though there are post elements left to be completed."

"Rudin, however, has been lobbying hard for a 2009 release. The producer already has two Oscar candidates...Read More

Jamie Stuart's first in a series of four shorts on the 46th New York Film Festival is mainly about an attempted robbery. Of Stuart. In Stuart's buuilding. By a thief who's too good looking, too short and too mild-mannered to be a bad guy. It's an okay way for Stuart to begin one of his looney-tunes shorts about the NY Film Festival. Except the violent sparring in the hallway doesn't feel feel right. Too poised, not sloppy enough. And I didn't believe the stairwell fall. The sound is wrong; you need to feel the pain.

The thief...

The Disney publicity guys, a strange and guarded bunch, had an all-media screening last week for Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna. Naturally they didn't invite me. I missed it on purpose in Toronto (I was told that the 166-minute length was unjustified), and naturally assumed I'd catch up with it back here. Nope!

Disney always hedges its bets when they've got a problem movie of any kind, which Miracle clearly is. But it was also a struggle to persuade them to let me see WALL*E, and that was a...Read More

The term "No Talk Express," I mean. John McCain's handlers are obviously fearful that he may say something off-the-cuff that doesn't add up (which he does a lot), hence a press policy that boils down to "no questions," "no reporters" and "don't speak unless you're spoken to." Relations between the McCain campaign and the press are said to be in fairly bad shape. Earlier today in Strongsville, Ohio, McCain ignored questions about the bailout plan, prompting one journalist to scream out, "Has your bus become the No-Talk Express?"

One of the things journalists learn sooner or later is that if celebrities use profanity or call you names to your face during an interview, it means they like or at least respect you. Or at least that they trust you enough to take their frank words like a grown-up and not get all emotional. I've been yelled at by dozens of Hollywood people over the years, and I still have relations with the vast majority. It's the ones who never talk to you straight or let you know what's really going on in their heads -- they're the ones you need to...Read More

For the last hour I've been trying to verify and contact a small group of people who've been passing along an extremely ugly eight-year-old story about John McCain, one to the other (including some in the media) over the last eight or nine days. The story first popped up on 9.14, and just seems too extreme to be believed.

Why am I posting this then? Because it's gotten around to some extent and the cat is more or less out of the bag, and I'm not aware of anyone having said "wait a minute, hold on here." Which is what I,...Read More

Last night on Late Show with David Letterman, Bill Clinton stated some carefully phrased, positive-minded sidestep mantras about the presidential race, the economic meltdown, don't sell America short, etc. Which inspired Chris Rock, Letterman's followup guest, to ask with genuine pique what's behind Bill's inability to say the words "Barack Obama?"

In a 9.23 Huffington Post-ing, New Yorker contributor Paul Slansky wrote the following: "Given that we would never have had the odious George W. Bush in the White House in the first place if it...Read More

Following Brad Pitt's $100 grand donation to fight Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage, Steven Spielberg has has coughed up the same for the same cause. But that video of Keith Olbermann writing a check for $1600 (was it $1700?) to Alaskan charities as part of his Sarah Palin $100-per-lie fund still takes the cake.

"It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. And it is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?" -- establishment conservative George Will in a 9.23 Washington Post column called "McCain Loses His Head."

In a Film in Focus piece called "Genesis of a Poster," Andrew Percival from Mojo House, an advertising company, discusses the poster for Burn After Reading. The inspiration, he says, was the stylish design of cutting-edge movie posters of the '60s. The first example he mentions is the one-sheet for The Comedians. And yet he doesn't mention the name of the godfather of edgy movie poster design in the '50s and '60s -- i.e., Saul Bass. Why, I wonder? What's Percival's obstruction?

"I can't believe this Palin-McCain stuff," W. director Oliver Stone has told USA Today's Anthony Breznican. "I thought the other day [that they're being] made to look like anchors on a TV show in San Diego. Here's the old guy with the white hair and the young chick with the glasses, sitting side by side. 'Trust me...we're a good team.'" Shouldn't Stone have said "trust us, we're a good team?" And why did he say "Palin-McCain" rather than the other way around?

"Why are MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow so biased?," HuffPost columnist Eric Burns asked last Friday. "Because the Republicans are providing them with so much material that their bias is, at its core, a form of objectivity. They are not partisan so much as perceptive.

"I do not reveal my own choice for president when I state that, several days ago, John McCain made the most eye-popping comment I have ever heard uttered by a candidate for the White House.

"The topic was the economy. 'My friends,' he said to a gathering in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on 9.19, 'this is the...Read More

This TV trailer of Oliver Stone's W. (Lionsgate, 10.17) is the wildest yet. Brolin's performance as our current sitting president, it would appear, treads the line between realism and satire like a mountain goat. You can't tell from short cuts, but it's feeling more and more to me like a dry-but-extreme Peter Sellers performance in Lolita and Dr. Strangelove.

Josh Brolin in W.; Francis Bacon's "Pope"

It's been eight years and 9 days since the 9.13.00 opening of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, and the launching of the career of Kate Hudson, then 21 years old. Hudson's touching, vulnerable, sexy-sunny performance as Stillwater groupie Penny Lane -- not a "supporting role" but something close to that -- sealed the deal and led to a string of starring roles in lesser vehicles. And as a result of all the stinkers she's been in since -- 11 awful awfuls -- Hudson has just about killed the aura.

I think it's fair to say that the...Read More

Finally, a stand-alone trailer for Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage, 12.26). The Entertainment Tonight exclusive below, in which Mary Hart revoltingly compares the Kate-Leo pairing to Titanic, had been the only decent footage I could find previously. But even with ET mucking up the vibe, you could smell greatness in it, particularly from DiCaprio's performance.

On last Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan offered perhaps the most perceptive thought I've yet heard about the racial fears shared by the 55-and-over crowd about Barack Obama. I can't find a transcript, but he basically said that it's not Obama's latte-ness per se that turns them off, as much as the fact that he represents a shifting racial-cultural paradigm in this country.

Where almost all under-40 GenXers are completely accustomed to and cool with the day-to-day realities of a multi-cultural society and work force, Obama's ascendancy is being interpreted by the 55-and-overs as a symbolic confirmation...Read More

"I don't know how long the new Ben-and-Ben version of At The Movies will last," eFilmCritic's Eric Childress wrote three days ago. "Maybe it's still a work-in-progress that will get smoother each week, but I highly doubt it. Missing Roger and Gene and even what Roeper and Phillips and guest hosts like A.O. Scott brought to the table is only part of it. A large part, but still only part. Those shows, even up to the very end of their run, provoked discussion, encouraged banter and unforced witticism.

"Are we really going to count on Ben & Ben to introduce us...Read More

The first thing wrong with this 40th anniversary screening and celebration of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on October 12th in downtown L.A. is that it's about six months too late. The classic stoner-mystic sci-fier opened in early April 1968, and so staging a 40th anni tribute three weeks from today is like...whatever, staging one in November 2007, or six months too early. You have to be serious about dates when you're raising a glass -- you can't fuck around.

The second thing wrong is having At The Movies co-host Ben Mankiewicz co-host it....Read More

Update: This page scan is from Seattle's The Stranger, a local weekly. Original Sunday night post: I don't know where this page scan came from, and I strongly doubt that Heart's Anne and Nancy Wilson co-wrote this letter to John McCain -- the line about McCain "chomping away at [Cindy's] breasts with little yellow teeth" is the giveaway -- but they should have written it. For the five or six seconds that I thought it might be real, I was falling in love with these women like I never did in the '70s.

Dan Fierman's q & a with W. director Oliver Stone in the current GQ is really quite good. Here's the online link, but I've passed most of the transcript:

Fierman: What the hell happened with the script leak last fall? I mean, I got a copy of that script, Oliver. It took one e-mail.

Stone: That wasn't a media strategy. That was an outrageous leak by a company called Participant. One of their assistants was trying to make a few bucks, and he sold it, and then it was everywhere. There were articles everywhere destroying...Read More

Newsweek's Keith Naughton and Hilary Shenfeld have reported that along with their eight or nine residences, John and Cindy McCain own 13 vehicles. Oh, and that Barack and Michelle Obama own one.

A fairly clever SNL skit mocking John McCain's approval of one lying bullshit TV spot after another. This Politico report claims that Minnesota Senatorial candidate Al Franken helped write it, or wrote the first seed draft.

I'd forgotten that Lalo Schifrin's music for the "tar road" sequence in Cool Hand Luke, which came out on DVD on 9.9, was used by WABC's "Eyewitness News" during the '70s and '80s. Here it is on the film's soundtrack -- dialogue, shovels and all.

"John McCain's is not the resume that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression," writes N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich in the 9.21 edition. "That's why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

"McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protege. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of...Read More

By common consent, the three Obama-McCain campaign debates will be on the free-flowing and loosey-goosey side, but McCain camp advisers have refused to let Snowmoose Squareglasses debate the wily, free-associating, fork-tongued Joe Biden this way. Whoa, guys...our girl's not good enough at this stuff! Different rules!

Hence the Vice-Presidential debates, set for 10.2, will be much, much simpler with shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, and with much less opportunity for free and footloose moves, boxing, fencing and tap-dancing between Biden and Sarah Palin.

As the N.Y. Times Patrick Healy put it today, "McCain advisers said they had...Read More

On October 11th, the American Cinematheque will be showing John Huston's Moby Dick ('56) with Eugene Lourie's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms ('53) as a creatures-from-the-sea double feature. Not to trash Lourie's film, which was the first '50s flick about a radioactive prehistoric monster invading a big city (a year before Gojira opened in Japan), but this pairing feels like a kind of light-hearted mockery of Huston.

Moby Dick, after all, was a flawed but in many ways admirable example of literate, authentic, epic-scale filmmaking in the...Read More

A half-decent mashup, at best. I was calling it half-decent without reservation until I saw the name "Seth Rogan" appear on a title card. So Moviemaniac14, the guy who slapped it together, isn't much for proof-reading before posting.

A stirring discussion -- lively, blunt, rousing -- happened last night on Real Time with Bill Maher. Here's one of the better portions, which dealt with Sarah Palin. The polls have returned to pre-convention levels, but Palin "is still doing well with white women...the people that Democrats need," Maher noted, "Obama [right now] is now getting less women that John Kerry did."

Here's the opening portion, which isn't as interesting -- a discussion of the Wall Street situation of the last few days.

Some points by Naomi...Read More

Universal has said no to Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's Tintin project -- a 3D animated feature based on the Belgian comic strip -- because they don't want to spend $130 million to make it. And, as L.A. Times reporter Claudia Eller noted yesterday, "the decision has left the two powerful filmmakers scrambling to find another financial partner."

Update: Viacom has reportedly stepped into the breach, so I guess we're stuck with the damn thing.

I was going to say that anything that takes Spielberg and Jackson down a peg is a good thing in my book. I'm intrigued...Read More

You won't have to deal with Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 1.16.09) for another few months yet, but the essence of its faux-comic attitude is pretty much summed up in the "yellow sports car crashing into the stone wall" bit. It's in the trailer posted below. If you find it the least bit amusing, then maybe TBB will work for you. If you find it perplexing -- a nothing moment times infinity -- then you may share my reaction.

One of my complaints about this mostly...Read More

A just-posted TV trailer for Oliver Stone's W on Coming Soon. Stone urging YouTube enthusiasts to create a W mash-up. And Stone telling GQ that he wanted Christian Bale to play Bush before he went to Josh Brolin.

"I needed a star, and Josh Brolin was not a star. Originally I went for Christian Bale. We did some rigorous prosthetic tests and spent a lot of dough -- thousands and thousands of dollars - and then Christian said, 'I just don't feel like I can do it.' I met Josh and liked him....

Everything I've been saying all along about the under-educated white rube vote (which has been steadily disputed by the conservative trolls on HE talkback) is confirmed and then some in this just-released AP-Yahoo poll.

"Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks -- many calling them 'lazy, 'violent,' responsible for their own troubles.

"The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily...Read More

The YouTube caption says this is Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell sharing the mike at a Toby Keith concert the day before yesterday --- Thursday, 9.18.08 -- in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while filming a pic called Crazy Heart.

I don't know zip except that the director-writer is Scott Cooper, and that it's based on a 1988 Thomas Cobb novel.

The Amazon synopsis reads as follows: "Singer and guitarist Bad Blake (Bridges) was once a first-rate country-and-western star, but now he's 57, an alcoholic, a failure...Read More

This is an entire month old, I just scanned it a second ago and it's easily the funniest Photoshop piece I've seen in weeks. Easily. Big congrats to Jeremy Enke and Karl Jefferson. (Thanks to HE reader Bocephus.)

Kidman, Travolta, Stone by way of Bumblefuck.

"Brad Grey's Paramount will live or die in the next 15 months," David Poland wrote earlier today in a riff about the completion of the Dreamworks/Reliance deal, and its aftermath.

"But do keep in mind what Par is trying to ride to success. From their press release: "Star Trek by JJ Abrams, G.I. Joe by Stephen Sommers, Transformers 2 by Michael Bay, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Jon Favreau's Iron Man 2."

"Star Trek -- No Star Trek film has ever cracked $150 million worldwide. There is a good chance that this new, JJ Abrams, fun and gun...Read More

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is promoting an "Aunt Sarah's Moose Stew Countdown Raffle." The copy reads as follows: "For your chance to wash the taste of campaign lies out of your mouth with the savory Alaskan authenticity contained in a free can of Aunt Sarah's Moose Stew, click here or send a mail to Countdown@msnbc.com." It's not a goof? Respondents will actually be sent cans of something or other with the Aunt Sarah label?

At 8:23 am this morning I posted a story about Ed Harris's Appaloosa not (at the time) having any scheduled critics screening in Portland and Arizona, according to info from area critics. I updated it a few hours later after hearing from the Arizona Daily Star's Phil Villarreal that a press screening in his area had been suddenly set up today.

And then at 4:33 pm this afternoon, an e-mail was sent to Portland-area critics by Kim Pasion of Terry Hines & Associates, the local rep for Warner Bros.

"Hi All!," it began. "Please forgive me for the short notice....Read More

I've been trying to understand the root of my animal dislike of MSNBC's David Gregory. The man makes me twitch with rage. It's partly his seeming determination to make points and ask questions in his interviews that cast doubt or uncertainty upon Barack Obama, and give whatever credit he can to the John McCain side. But it's not just that, I've told myself. Some indication of essence is suggested in his features. Those beady black eyes, that goofy smile, creepy mop of gray hair, monkey mouth and monkey nose.

MSNBC commentator/host David Gregory; Maurice...

A YouTube message from William Shatner to Star Trek director JJ Abrams, posted yesterday. Shatner is good at feigning mild-mannered, but the reason he is loved is because (a) he's a metaphor for old-guy vitality and re-invention, and (b) because we've all come to believe that deep down he is a true barking loon. And in all sincerity, I worship him for that. "Namby-pamby! Now you're negotiating!"

Uli Edel's Baader Meinhof Complex, the official German entry for the Best Foreign Feature Oscar that I wrote about a few days ago, will screen a week from today at Santa Monica's Aero theatre. It'll be presented as part of New German Film Series (9.24 through 9.28) through the sponsorship of Goethe House.

What is that razor-blade thing with the mustard-colored base sitting against Jamie Stuart's (or some other guy's) cheek in this NY Film Festival video? I don't get it. I'm looking for help. Really. The slogan -- "You've never done this before...have you?" -- alludes to the nominal uniqueness of the 46th incarnation of the NYFF. (Right?) I waited all day to post this because I couldn't figure what to say.

The Defamer guys shared my reaction to the announcement about the Zurich Film Festival giving Sylvester Stallone a Life Achievement Award. They posted a day later, but that was because they were assembling five stunning Stallone clips that are hard to argue with, much less forget.

Journalist Bill Desowitz, a specialist in film restoration and digital home video, has written the following: "For what it's worth, I can see a significant difference viewing The Godfather Blu-rays (Parts I and II) on my 9-year-old, 40-inch rear-projection monitor (at 1080i). By the way, these were full-digital restorations -- there was nothing photo-chemical about them. Here's a link to my longer article on the Harris-supervised restorations. My favorite Robert Harris quote about Gordon Willis and grain that I didn't use: "Touch my grain and you'll be singing with the castrati."

Early this morning HE reader Frank Booth, commenting about the Francis Coppola/Robert Harris restoration of the Godfather films, made a good point about an irritant in the original 1972 film -- one that's been bothering me for decades and which could have been fixed, if Coppola had been so inclined.

He was speaking, of course, about the second-act beating scene in which James Caan's Sonny laughably air-punches Gianni Russo's Carlo. [See YouTube clip.] There's no missing the mistake because the shot is perfectly positioned to catch it --...Read More

During a 9.16 promotional visit to a Manhattan Best Buy store, Steven Seagal spoke to MTVs Josh Horowitz and revealed the state of his political awareness. Many people go through life tuning stuff out, but Seagal's admission is amazing.

The Times Online's Douglas Rankine has written a fanboy piece about a recent tour of George Lucas's ILM facility at San Francisco's Presidio. The idea of a presumably seasoned journalist in 2008 still being caught up in the lore of Lucasfilm/Star Wars -- feeling that tingle of excitement as he stands in front of a Yoda fountain or sips coffee in the Javva Hutt -- is close to pathetic. The Lucas brand is totally devalued outside of the under-10 crowd, and this guy is still going "Ooh, wow...pant, pant."

Four days ago, while I was off doing something else, the 23/6 guys posted this mildly funny close-captioned video:

Update: An apparent policy not to screen Ed Harris's Appaloosa (New Line/WB, 10.3) for critics in local markets is being corrected. I reported this morning that screenings hadn't been scheduled in Portland and Arizona, but I've since been told by the Arizona Daily Star's Phil Villarreal that a press screening was suddenly set up today, after my earlier story ran.

Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris in Appaloosa

Las Vegas Review Journal critic Carol Cling also told me that it's being press-screened for her territory; same message from Dan Lybarger in the Kansas City area. So either things weren't...Read More

Four days ago, in a piece titled "You Give Out Too Many Stars," Roger Ebert offered the following to partially explain his general attitude as he sits down to watch a film: "I like movies too much. I walk into the theater not in an adversarial attitude, but with hope and optimism (except for some movies, of course). I know that to get a movie made is a small miracle, that the reputations, careers and finances of the participants are on the line, and that hardly anybody sets out to make a bad movie. I do not feel comfortable posing as impossible...Read More

I can't speak with any authority about the forthcoming restored Godafther discs (being called "The Coppola Restoration" but more precisely the hands-on work of restoration guru Robert Harris) because, I'm told, the quality of the work isn't that pronounced unless you watch it on Blu-ray with a 46" or 50" Plasma or LCD flat screen.

A DVD Beaver frame capture from the Blu-ray version of the restored Godfather.

A DVD Beaver frame capture from the DVD version.

And for the umpteenth time, I don't own either of these...Read More

I'm not challenging Summit Entertainment's decision to wait until sometime in '09 to release Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which, even with its modest shortcomings, is unquestionably one of the best crafted, big-jolt action thrillers of the year. Well, actually I am. Why not open it on a modest platform basis in December and then put it out in late January or February, say?

I understand Summit's concerns. The fall and year-end periods are locked up tight in terms of theatres and heavy-duty competition. It's a scary time for indie-sized distributors right now, and...Read More

I'm sorry, but a major second-tier film festival like Zurich's offering a big career achievement award to Sylvester Stallone is an all-around diminisher -- half-comedic and half-grotesque. And Variety's Steven Gaydos trying to put a gloss on this is...well, business-as-usual for Variety, of course, but also, no disrespect, unseemly.

The number of titanic godawfuls that Stallone has given the movie world cannot be glossed over -- Rhinestone, Cliffhanger, Victory, Over The Top, Cobra, Paradise Alley, FIST, Stop of My Mom Will Shoot, Nighthawks, Staying Alive, etc. Decade in and decade out, the man's instincts and brush strokes have been crude...Read More

The first Obama-McCain debate is on Friday, 9.26, at 9 pm eastern -- eight days hence. A foreign policy focus, I'm hearing, because the Obama team didn't want to get into domestic-cultural stuff at a debate held in Mississippi. Twitter.com and current.com are trying to get everyone to post twitters during the debate. Current is promising to "broadcast as many of your debate tweets as possible right over Obama & McCain, in real time, on our live broadcast."

"The McCain camp has decided that its candidate can't win honorably, on the issues, so it has resorted to transparent and phony diversions," writes Time's Joe Klein. The resultant lies "have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind. His campaign has been a ceaseless assault on his opponent's character and policies, featuring a consistent -- and witting -- disdain for the truth.

The McCain team's "persistence in repeating demonstrably false charges is something new in presidential politics.

"Ever since [Obama's Iraq-European tour], McCain's campaign has been a series of snide and demeaning...Read More

At Ted.com, psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains "the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most."

Boiled down, Haidt's ultimate assessment -- i.e., liberals and conservatives balance each other out and that we should try and respect this scheme -- pushes aside the fact that most conservatives, to go by almost all appearances and allegiances, are heathens in the sense that many if not most of them are against conserving and preserving the sanctity of...Read More

Things are shifting in Obama's favor, poll-wise. As MSNBC's "First Read" noted this morning, "After the news of the crisis on Wall Street, McCain's 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' stumble on Monday, the slip-ups yesterday by McCain's two biggest economic surrogates and four days of sustained TV ad and email blasts by the Obama campaign and the DNC, the political worm seems to have turned a tad since the Palin bounce."

And yet the results of recent battleground polls are mixed, and the fivethirtyeight.com state-by-state count is favoring McCain.

"A tight race?," fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver...Read More

The weekend's near-certain winner, according to Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason, will be Neil LaBute's Lakeview Terrace (Sony). Given the obviously sour and malignant vibe coming off this film, interest levels can probably be attributed to the drawing power of Samuel L. Jackson's attitude schtick.

What else could it be? What could this movie seem to bring to the table that anyone would want to savor?

In the view of N.Y. Press critic Armond White, Lakeview Terrace "is tiresome largely because Jackson's Belligerent Black Man antics are so predictable. He's dug a lowdown niche; and movie after movie he keeps shoveling...Read More

"Because no one has the right to deny another their life even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn't harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8" -- Brad Pitt in a statement explaining his $100,000 contribution to the campaign to defeat Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage.

Is this music for this lyric-free in this Coke Zero ad the basic track for the Quantum of Solace main-title song? More to the point, what's the last hummable James Bond theme song anyone remembers? Nobody cares.

You think this is funny? Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 10.3), which I believe without benefit of hard data will be primarily be seen by McCain supporters and their families, is just around the corner, and it's no joke.

Sunset Strip just west of Alta Loma -- Wednesday, 9.18.08, 6:35 pm

Ditto and ditto -- 8:15 pm

Time's Michael Grunwald wrote on Monday that "race is the elephant in the room of the 2008 campaign." Which led CNN's Jack Cafferty to write the following day that "race is arguably the biggest issue in this election, and it's one that nobody's talking about. The differences between Barack Obama and John McCain couldn't be more well-defined. Obama wants to change Washington. McCain is a part of Washington and a part of the Bush legacy. Yet the polls remain close. Doesn't make sense...unless it's race."

Put these together with my "Soul of Ugly Whitey" item-and-subsequent discussion yesterday, which was initially...Read More

"But it's time to bring out the white man you've all been waiting for. This man is so white, he makes y'all look Mexican. (laughter) He spent five long years locked up in a POW camp, and returned a national hero. (applause) And fucked every white woman in America. (sustained applause) 'Cause five years--that makes you horny. And women, they luhhv to fuck war heroes. Basically, if you were white and female in 1973, you were fucked by John McCain.

"And then he married a fine rich white girl whose daddy owned a beer company (laughter, applause) And he wants to be president?...Read More

"Just a few years ago, the coming attractions were a safe haven for cinematic prudes. But this year, R-rated trailers -- known as 'red bands' on account of the red, "Restricted Audiences Only" warning that precedes them -- have become omnipresent. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, nearly 30 restricted-audience trailers have been approved so far in 2008, already matching the number accepted between 2000 and 2006.

"In surveying the recent crop of restricted trailers, it's apparent that the studios are still adjusting to the red-band universe: The aesthetics of the R-rated trailer remain...Read More

I've been caught up in some issues today. Lots of research, lots of calls. I just wrote a piece about how it's impossible to accurately assess the restored Godfather discs without a full-boat Blu-ray and 50" high-def system, which I still don't have...and then I hit the wrong button and lost the whole article. On top of which the software gremlins at Apple/iPhone came up with a iPhone update that I was stupid enough to download and try to install. The data stopped loading at the 85% mark and now the phone is unusable. I have no choice but to see a genius...Read More

"And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole 'change' thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain." -- from a 9.13 essay by Tim Wise called "Your Nation on White Privilege."

If Barack Obama does his carefully parsed cool-cat Fred Astaire zen routine when he debates John McCain -- if he plays it nice and mild-mannered and implies what he means as opposed to using simple declarative terms -- then maybe the world really is screwed and he just doesn't have the stuffing to shoot and slay when he has to.

Woody Allen "might not be the right director for Otello or Salome. But in Gianni Schicchi, a brisk farce about an Italian family desperate to circumvent a dead relative's will, Allen found a playground in which his comic talents could run riot.

"The opera is set in medieval Tuscany, but Allen moved the action up to the 1940s. Santo Loquasto's exuberant set looked like a manic fusion of palazzo and tenement, while also evoking the neo-realist look of Italian films from that era.

"Greed, vanity and cunning rule this opera, and Allen [has] found endless clever ways to expose and mock these traits."...Read More

This is not a significant thing, but on an insignificant level I thought I'd report that this Choke T-shirt is the first one I've ever received in my 15-plus years of receiving free-T-shirts that I'd consider wearing, due to the fact that it's not a schlubby low-thread-count Hanes T-shirt with a dork collar but a high-thread- count one with a semi-slim European cut. Close to astonishing, given the history. Fox Searchlight will release Choke on 10.3.

A Los Angeles-based collector of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia named Mark Bellinghaus is claiming that photographs and descriptions of various stored-away Monroe letters, jewelry and keepsakes in this month's Vanity Fair are to some extent bogus, particularly in the matter of a letter sent by W. Somerset Maugham to Monroe in January 1961.

A scan of an allegedly authentic January 1961 letter sent by W. Somerset Maugham to Marilyn Monroe.

Bellinghaus is calling the Monroe article and photo spread a "hoax," although he told me this morning that some of the materials, all of which are...Read More

If you're looking for definitive proof of how our culture (and particularly our film culture) is steadily devolving and dumbing itself down, check out the new Ben Lyons-Ben Mankiewicz version of "At The Movies", which premiered a few days ago. This is not a TV show about how good or bad the latest movies are. It's a show about the End of Civilization as some of us have known it. If the Eloi of George Pal's The Time Machine were to produce their own movie-review show, this is how it would play.

The Two Bens' views on Burn After...Read More

Being longer and whatnot, this is a much fuller taste of Scott Derrickson and Tom Rothman's The Day The Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) than the trailer that appeared a few weeks back. I'm cranked, but at the same time vaguely depressed that no one in this town seems the least bit interested in depicting the arrival of a great and powerful alien spaceship without summoning memories of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and, to a much lesser extent, Roland Emmerich's Independence Day).

Indeed, TDTESS seems to...Read More

Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex, the terrorist drama I wrote about yesterday, has been selected as Germany's candidate for the Best Foreign-Language pic Oscar. Produced and adapted by Constantin Film's Bernd Eichinger, the period drama is based on Stefan Aust's book about the New Left gang of commie-guerilla outlaws who kicked up dust from the late '60s to mid '70s.

Weary of AOL's bullshit bean-counter attitude about in-depth film coverage, critic/editor Kim Voynar has walked away from Cinematical. She's back in Seattle and weighing offers -- she'll be fine. (For purely selfish reasons I'd like to see Kim back at a regular berth as soon as possible.) But what about Cinematical's critic-commentator James Rocchi?

If this episode were to be made into a mid 1980s movie, Voynar would be played by Sally Field, the AOL bosses would be played by Ronny Cox (as he was in Robocop) and Paul Reiser (as he was in Aliens), and Rocchi would be played...Read More

My favorite dialogue clip from John Huston's Beat The Devil, lasting all of 17 seconds.

Watch this trailer for Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex and tell me it doesn't look like an exciting, tough, complex "ride" movie, and not just some dense political drama. Based on the book by Stefan Aust, it's about the infamous German terrorist group behind all kinds of bombings, killings, robberies and kidnappings in the late '60s and '70s.

Martina Gedeck in Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex

The word on the film has been iffy ever since Constantin Films and its German p.r. agency, Just Publicity, tried to threaten German and other European...Read More

20 years, six months and 15 days ago, Tim Burton's Beetlejuice opened. Great ending, more than a few great scenes, classic absurdist film. And with primitive special effects! Tim Burton was hip and happening and relatively fresh meat. Michael Keaton had been down but was now back up again in the cool role of his lifetime. And Alec Baldwin was thin and puppydog cute.

17 year-old Winona Ryder was just breaking through. Geena Davis was enjoying her last career surge (Earth Girls Are Easy and The Accidental Tourist were soon...Read More

This 23/6 "speed campaigning" piece isn't bad either -- "all your negative ads in 5 seconds."

And by the way, the lack of interest in (i.e., response to) this John McCain voicemail message is mind-blowing. It's one of the funnniest bits I've heard in weeks.

Amazon is accepting advance orders for the DVD of David Zucker's An American Carol (Vivendi, 10.3), which will hit the shelves on January 6, 2009. 83 minutes long, by the way, and presented in a Scope aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1.

For the sheer pleasure and relaxation of it, I paid $14 bills last night to see Burn After Reading at the Arclight. The 7:20 pm show, with a lot of wallah-wallah and hub-bub-bub-bah-bub following the showing of the new W trailer. (Which isn't online yet.)

And an hour or so later, right in the middle of the first delicious J.K. Simmons scene, a two year-old girl sitting in her dad's lap two seats to my left began talking and whining and squirming around. Kept it up, no ignoring it. 20 seconds later I leaned over and said, "Do you mind? Please?" The...Read More

A major character in a significant 1990s film twice quotes -- i.e., says out loud -- the following John Milton line from Paradise Lost: "Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to the light." And the film is...?

Wall Street is allegedly melting as we speak. Barack Obama has called it "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression." And yet an MSNBC analyst said this morning that one Wall Street analyst feels that this morning's 200-point Dow drop is a kind of "victory," considering what might have happened.

As this morning's N.Y. Times story reports, "Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank, is in liquidation; Merrill Lynch, the premier brokerage, has been subsumed into rival Bank of America. One of the world's largest insurance companies, American International Group, is in a dash to shore up confidence after...Read More

HD trailer for John Patrick Shanley's Doubt (Miramax, 12.12), with Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in the lead roles. The culture has been making pederast Catholic priest jokes for so long that generating curiosity about who the bad guy is in this film, what he's probably done and what will (most likely) happen in the end seems like a challenge. So it will all come down to the the craft of it, including, of course, the potential for at least two great performances.

One question: why in...Read More

Ethan and Joel Coen's Burn After Reading just barely clipped Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys this weekend, earning $19.4 million in 2,651 theaters vs. Family's $18 million on 2,070 screens. Overture's Righteous Kill, the mediocre Jon Avnet cop flick with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, came in third with $16.5 million from 3,152 screens. And Picturehouse had its best opening ever with Diane English's The Women, which made an estimated $10 million from 2,962 locations.

I'm sorry but this five-day-old John McCain voicemail message is extremely funny. Congrats again to the 23/6 guys -- inspired. I don't care that it took me five days to listen to it.

For those who didn't care to download my Danny Boyle video interview that I did last Wednesday in Toronto, here's a much faster-loading mp3 of the same discussion.

As you listen to Paul Begala talking about the campaign with Bill Maher, you may (or may not) want to consider the double standard that white-rube America is going by these days. Two or three graphs hence, I mean.

All I know is that I'm so scared about what's going on right now with the national polls that I'm afraid to look at them. I'm living in a fetal tuck position, praying that I'll wake up (or that the nation will wake up) from this ongoing devolving nightmare. We're all citizens of the DVA these days -- the Divided States of...Read More

First photo taken with the new (i.e. latest) Canon Powershot S5, bought yesterday at Samy's on Sepulveda to replace the one stolen by the animals in Toronto. A 4K memory card only cost $22 bucks, give or take -- they used to cost $50 or $60.

"The ideas this nation was founded on came from the most cosmopolitan people of their day -- the founding fathers who believed in science, who looked to Europe for wisdom and who had no use for hicks like Bush and Palin. We keep hearing about small-town values -- you know, like shooting wolves form an airplane or forcing your daughter into a doomed loveless marriage. Cities are about diversity and thought. Small-towns are about..well, crystal meth." -- excerpted from Bill Maher's "New Rules" riff from the latest Real Time show.

Warner Home Video's new How The West Was Won, which came out on Blu-ray and DVD last Tuesday, presents the 1963 Cinerama film -- the last narrative feature shot in the original three-strip, three-projector process -- as a unified, spruced-up, seam-free thing. It's now just a colorful, sharp, super-wide image -- the aspect ratio being something like 2.85 to 1.

And most DVD/Blu-ray reviewers are calling it a vast improvement over the way How The West Was Won looked on previously released discs, which had the vertical seams showing and the imperfect blending of...Read More

Another thing you're not allowed to say in this culture of p.c. confinement and denial (on top of saying on TV that the 9/11 attackers weren't cowards and saying online that Hurricane Ike was a case of the chickens coming home to roost for Houston/Galveston) is "why did he kill himself?" Go to an Irish wake and after a couple of whiskeys the friends and family of the deceased, standing off in a corner or outside on the street with a cigarette, will confide what his or her life was really like and why it ended as it did. But don't ask...Read More

A mildly funny rundown of the highlights of the just-concluded Toronto Film Festival, written by Eye Weekly's Marc Weisblott. Not a review of the films, of course, but the episodes -- Lou Lumenick's whacking of Roger Ebert, the Toronto Sun's Bruce Kirkland decrying corporate elitism, the theft of my Canon digital camera by "three young apes," etc.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton giving a joint address on Saturday Night Live. Fey has the voice and the tight lips down pretty well.

If low-information Walmart moms were inclined to read or even consider what's reported in the N.Y. Times, they might be thinking twice right now about supporting Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy. But of course, if they did read news stories of this sort they would no longer deserve the sobriquet.

Sarah Palin in 1998 -- age 34

This 9.13 expose about Palin's past political maneuvers in Alaska, written by Times reporters Jo Becker, Peter S. Goodman and Michael Powell, is rough stuff. Based on information from by 60 Alaskan governmental sources, it portrays a woman who...Read More

For the last few days I've been trying to put my finger on why Sarah Palin gives me such a bad case of the creeps. Apart from the long list of negatives and serious doubts that everyone has already brought up, that is. Then it hit me -- she's Martin Sheen's Gregg Stillson character in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone ('83).

Sarah Palin; Martin Sheen as President Gregg Stillson in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone.

And when that vision came to me I was twitching exactly like Chris Walken's Johnny Smith character. McCain dead,...Read More

In a 9.11 N.Y. Times column called "Blizzard of Lies," Paul Krugman described the central malignancy affecting MSM news reporting, which delivers perhaps the greatest lie of all: "Why do the McCain people think they can get away with [their torrent of lies]?," Krugman asks. "Well, they're probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being 'balanced' at all costs.

"You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he's wrong, it reports that 'some Democrats say' that he's wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side...Read More

In celebration of my escape from Toronto and return to Los Angeles, I'll be seeing this sucker again sometime later today for the pure misanthropic pleasure of it.

I'm only just settling into the YouTube videos of John McCain's visit to 'The View" yesterday. But I'm starting to realize that McCain got "got", in large part due to the focus and persistence of Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg's questions. They really got into things and bored in on the guy, and he clearly didn't stand up all that well.

Read Katherine Q. Seelye's account of McCain's interrogation in her N.Y. Times blog, "The Caucus. And consider this interpretation by the Young Turks Cenk Uygur: