On Movies Online

NEW BLOG PLATFORM!

2009-07-09T04:43:00.000-07:00

"On Movies Online" has moved over to philly.com's blogging platform, so please click here to read the latest, greatest blog posts from yours truly.

"Up," up and away

2009-07-07T05:32:00.000-07:00

"Pixar's Up increased its tally to $264.8 million in 38 days. It flew past The Incredibles to become the second highest-grossing Pixar movie." -- Brandon Gray, Box Office Mojo, July 6, 2009

A few weeks before Up opened in theaters on May 29, the Times’ ran a story in its Business pages about how shareholders were irked at Disney – and Pixar – because there was no way a movie with a septuagenarian hero, a grumpy widower voiced by Ed Asner, was going to do the kind of box office that previous Pixar titles like Cars and The Incredibles did.
The demographics were all wrong. Kids won’t want to see it. Twentysomethings? They’ll stay away in droves. Toys? What toys?
If Up was even a modest success, it wasn’t going to do the shareholders any good.
So there's the Box Office Mojo report, and the Variety headline from last week: “Up Figures to See Incredible Sights,” with a forecast that not only will Pixar’s Up pass The Incredibles in business, it might even get to Finding Nemo numbers -- the CG animation studio’s top money maker at $340 million. Like its protagonist and his balloon-buoyed domicile, Up continues to ascend.
“I wasn’t sure whether I should be offended or gratified by that article,” Pete Docter, Up’s director and co-writer, said, referring to the Times piece, in an interview a few days before the (yes) mega-hit’s release. “Because they sort of went out of they way to say, well, all signs point to this being a really great film, but we have this issue with the marketability. And I guess I can understand that if you’ve not seen the film.
“When you just pitch it — you know, it’s a 78-year-old man who floats his house — you’d say, `What!?’ But our job has always been the same, and it’s very clear: Don’t worry about marketing. We never approach the films from, `What’s going to appeal to the 8-to-12 year-old-set, blah blah blah.’ We just make movies that speak to us as an audience, knowing that we want to reach everybody else. And (Disney chairman) Bob Iger and (Disney-Pixar animation chief John Lassiter have both said, `Just make great films, that’s your job. And if it happens to work out well with marketing and toys and whatever else, then, great.’ But you know if you put the cart before the horse that way, if you try to just sell toys, I think you know where that goes.
“Our job is just to make sure that the audience feels the movie and is entertained by it, and everything else will fall into place.
“You know, even Toy Story, I remember getting a memo from some marketing folks saying we don’t see the marketing potential in this film!.. I think I still have that somewhere.”

J.J. Abrams talks Trek

2009-05-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

J.J. Abrams is on the phone, heading back to L.A. from a round of TV interviews in New York (Charlie Rose, a very funny turn on Stephen Colbert), just a day before his $150 million Star Trek reinvention blasts into orbit. Here's more of what he had to say -- stuff that didn't get into Sunday's On Movies column.

Q: You've said that you were never a huge Star Trek fan. Once you were onboard to direct the film, though, did you go back and look at episodes, some of the other films?

Abrams: Oh sure, I watched a bunch.... I needed to do my homework. But what I didn’t want to do was become like a student of Star Trek, whereby the preexisting series, whether it be television or film, would overly impact or influence what I wanted to do. I felt that the fun of approaching it anew was being able to not be constrained by the rhythms and the style of what came before, and yet I needed to know enough about it to be able to connect it. So it’s a strange thing, it’s almost like I wanted to have the movie be influenced by it, but I didn’t want to be influenced by it.... At a certain point I felt like if I delve too much into the minutae of what they did, and became too connected to it, that I would end up losing my advantage -- I didn’t want to become too much of a fan that I would suddenly be making the movie out of the desire to be consistent, as opposed to out of the desire to do something that felt relevant. Obviously the fundamental building blocks of this movie were literal connections to what had come before. So it wasn’t as if we desperately needed to find a way to make this feel more like Star Trek. We had Kirk and Spock, we had the fundamentals — so that was a point of departure in terms of the pacing, rhtyhm and tone of the thing.

Q: Can you talk about the ideas behind casting a bit? Did you have anyone in mind, going in?

Abrams: I had never met any of the main actors before with the exception of John Cho and Simon Pegg. And Eric Bana I actually had met as well, and he was someone I wanted to work with for a long time and felt very lucky that we got. But the only person who I knew needed to be in the movie was Nimoy, and if he had said no we would have been completely screwed.
As for Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, our Kirk and Spock... well, we were re-casting these iconic characters, and we had to find actors that would take the inspiration of those original actors but not do an impersonation of them. That was critical. On the one hand, there was more pressure than I had ever felt before, in terms of casting, because clearly there was a certain level of expectation and familiarity that some of the audience had. And then on the other hand, it was like any project: you’re desperately looking for the actor who will own it, where it won’t even be a discussion, it will just be obvious.… And Chris and Zachary, well, that's what happened.

Q: Star Trek's vision of the future is nowhere near as dark, gloomy, apocalyptic, as most of the sci-fi that's out there now. Was that one of the things that appealed to you about taking this on?

Abrams: Very much so. I felt that as I worked on the story with the writers and producers and then when I finally read the script, it felt optimistic, it felt refreshing, it felt fun. And I think that there have been so many movies in recent years — and many of which I’ve really enjoyed — that have depicted a cynical and grim and unpleasant future. And again, I’ve been a fan of so many of them. But there was something about this that just felt distinctly hopeful.... That there was something extraordinary, and extraordinarily good, coming down the pike was something that felt — that I realized I was hungry for. It was one of the things that really compelled me to direct the movie.... And a hopeful, optimistic future is never a bad thing to get a glimpse of.

Q: Speaking of hope and optimism, what do you make of the comparisons in the media beween Spock and Obama? The calm, unemotional, rational, logical mind?

Abrams: I’ve heard and read people making that connection. But I think it’s less about any one character, for me -- it’s less about Spock and more about [Gene] Roddenberry. It’s more about the world of Trek. Spock is a wonderful and a kind of cool, complex character, but he’s sort of half of the yin-yang of Kirk and Spock. I think that the beauty of both of these characters is that it’s not until they come together that they can accomplish almost anything. So, for me, it’s not about, you know, "elect Spock," or "elect Kirk." For me it’s the ideal that you don’t want logic without the gut instinct, and you don’t want gut instinct without the ability to understand the conditions, the strategy, the enemy you’re up against.
And the idea of having a president in office who is a hopeful, optimistic one seems like more a byproduct of people being hungry for that kind of hope. I can just say that it was the same hunger that fueled our making his movie, starting three years ago.

Q: So Kirk and Spock, not quite Biden and Obama?

Abrams: I’ll leave that to someone else to make the call.

In a Dream, at the Bourse

2009-04-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

Filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar and the subjects of his powerful, award-wining doc In a Dream , Isaiah and Julia Zagar, will be on hand to field comments and questions this opening weekend, April 17, 18 and 19, at the Ritz At the Bourse. Look for them Friday and Saturday at the 7:20pm and 9:35pm shows, and on Sunday at 5:10pm and 7:20pm.

Also, an important clarification in my article on Jeremiah Zagar. In a description of the family events that unfold in the film, I write about Ezekiel Zagar, Jeremiah's brother, and say that he "is in and out of rehab." That is to say that he checked into a detox program and then checked out of it successfully. I in no way meant to imply that he was in a revolving door situation.

Jason and Paul, the bromance begins

2009-03-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Jason Segel and Paul Rudd had known each other for a while -- they're in a couple of scenes together in Knocked Up -- but it wasn't until the pair were in Hawaii shooting the Segel-scripted Forgetting Sarah Marshall that they truly bonded.
It's a bond that serves them well in I Love You, Man, which is, after all, about male bonding.

"That was a rare experience," says Segel about making Forgetting Sarah Marshall. "We filmed at the same hotel where we stayed. It was a very insulated environment. We’d film during the day and then at night we would all just convene at the pool bar, and Paul and I became really good friends there. I think when we got the opportunity to do a buddy movie together it just seemed right.

"We really are familiar with each other's moods, and we both love comedy... we’re students of comedy, you know. Like he and I will sit around and quote Monty Python or the Mighty Boosh. We learned each other’s moves, which makes it very easy to play off of each other."

"Pilgrim's" progress

2009-03-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

Mark Webber, whose directing debut Explicit Ills just opened here, is off to Toronto to start work on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World -- the Edgar Wright-directed adaptation of the Bryan Lee O'Malley graphic novels about a rock-and-roll dude who has to kick into kung fu mode in order to defeat a gang of evil ex-boyfriends of the girl he loves. Michael Cera stars as Pilgrim, and Webber's character, one of Scott's bandmates, is called Stephen Stills.

"I am like SO excited, it’s such a cool project," says Webber. "Edgar Wright is the Man. Shaun of the Dead is like one of my favorite movies of the last five years, the way he was able to blend these different genres together was fascinating to me.... He's the master of the action comedy pop drama."

As for playing Stills, "I'm not literally the guy from Crosby, Stills & Nash," Webber chuckles. "There’s also a character named Young Neil. That’s what's really awesome about the books is that there are all these little inside jokes and this funny commentary on hipsters....

"So me and Michael Cera are in this rock band together, trying to get gigs and play these big shows, and in the process he has to get into these crazy kung fu battles with this girl’s evil ex-boyfriends. It’s wild, man."

Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans and Johnny Simmons also star, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Death Proof, Live Free or Die Hard) as Ramona V. Flowers, the girlfriend with the seven maniacal exes.

3-D blows chunks – right at ya!

2009-03-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Went to an advanced screening of Monsters vs. Aliens at the Bridge Wednesday night and I lasted oh, I dunno, 15 minutes. Trouble with the 3-D projection system rendered the screen images blurry, as everybody sat there in the dark with those dorky Real D glasses on…. Things were fixed momentarily (on screen: a dweeb playing with one of those rubber balls tied to a racket things, and the ball seemingly bounces out right at your nose). But then the screen went fuzzy and double-lined again.

The other problem with 3-D: the tinted glasses makes the screen image darker than it should be, so even a bright, vibrant DreamWorks ’toon loses its luster.

Eventually, the projectionist fixed things, I’m told, but I had already quit the theater – more convinced than ever that 3-D is just another lame gimmick, despite what Jeffrey Katzenberg has to say.

Philadelphia -- 15th best moviemaking city

2009-02-24T12:44:00.000-08:00

MovieMaker magazine has come out with its annual list of the top U.S. metropoli to go -- and live -- if you want to make movies. Top three (out of 25) this year: Chicago, Atlanta and New York, in that order.
So, whither Philadelphia?
Well, down there in the middle, at 15, right between Portland (OR), and Sedona (AZ).

Here's what the mag says:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Recent Filmography: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Marley & Me, The Lovely Bones Key Incentive: 25% transferable tax credit • Truth be told, Philadelphia has long been one of our most touted production destinations—as much for the dedication of its film office and excitement of its local moviemakers as for the top-quality projects that have been
shot here.

The City of Brotherly Love was also one of the first moviemaking destinations to show some love to the environment, kicking off a series of green initiatives to reduce the amount of waste created by the area’s heavy moviemaking foot traffic. With monthly green events, including cocktail receptions, sustainable moviemaking workshops and awards luncheons, the city is doing its part to keep the world a better place—and its local moviemakers busy.

In 2007, the state enacted the Pennsylvania Film Production Tax Credit, a $75 million fund from which transferable tax credits of up to 25 percent are made available to qualified productions. However, in December 2008, the Greater Philadelphia Film Office found itself rallying to save the credit, after state representative Ron Marsico aired his disappointment at the governor’s continuance of the program, stating that “Film tax credits are bad tax policy, especially in a tight budget year, and an irresponsible priority for the sake of a photo-op of a political leader and a Hollywood star or starlet.” True to form, Sharon Pinkenson, the film office’s executive director, and her staff launched an all-out assault on their opponents, encouraging moviemakers, business owners, film school students and film fans to petition their legislators and make sure the credit continued.

One person touting the merits of the city is Mayor Michael Nutter, who claims that Philadelphia “has the best in production talent to meet your requirements as well as the support of our experienced film office staff and a film-friendly operations department. We understand your challenges and pledge our support and ask that you allow us the opportunity to show you just how much we have to offer.”

Philadelphia CineFest it is!

2009-02-17T11:58:00.001-08:00

It's official: Philadelphia's annual spring film festival has a new name -- Philadelphia CineFest -- and now has its opening night and closing night titles locked in. Running from Thursday, March 26, through Monday, April 6, the CineFest -- steered by longtime Philadelphia Film Festival artistic director Ray Murray and his crew -- will show over 200 films from 39 countries, bring in busloads and trainloads of stars and filmmakers, and take over at least four Philadelphia screen venues.

Opening night, to be held at the Prince, is (500) Days of Summer, a hit at January's Sundance fest starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel , in what's been dubbed an "anti-romantic comedy." Closing the fest twelve days and nights later is Lymelife , a 1970s family drama with Culkin siblings Kieran and Rory, along with Emma Roberts, Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton, Cynthia Nixon and Jill Hennessy.

CineFest came into being thanks (or no thanks) to a litigious rift with the non-profit Philadelphia Film Society that oversees the Philadelphia Film Festival. The Film Society plans to launch its own fest under that name. Society executive director Andrew Greenblatt says there will be a PFF in 2009.

In the meantime, Philadelphia CineFest will bring back the thematic categories long familiar to veteran fest-goers, including American Independents, World Cinema, Danger After Dark, Latino Cinema, Muslim Cinema, and new programs on black cinema, French cinema and international comedies.

Full festival details, dates, ticket options and other information will be forthcoming. Check on the CineFest site.

Slumdog controversy

2009-02-06T07:22:00.000-08:00

Here's the complete statement from Danny Boyle and Fox Searchlight in repsonse to the controversy being stirred up about the alleged exploitation of the movie's young stars. It's worth a read:

"SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE" FILMMAKERS AND DISTRIBUTORS REFUTE RECENT ALLEGATIONS

FILMMAKERS STATEMENT:

From the moment that we hired them and long before the press became interested in this story, we have paid painstaking and considered attention to how Azhar and Rubina's involvement in the film could be of lasting benefit to them over and above the payment they received for their work.

The children had never attended school, and in consultation with their parents we agreed that this would be our priority. Since June 2008 and at our expense, both kids have been attending school and they are flourishing under the tutelage of their dedicated and committed teachers. Financial resources have been made available for their education until they are 18. We were delighted to see them progressing well when we visited their school and met with their teachers last week.

In addition to their educational requirements, a fund is in place to meet their basic living costs, health care and any other emergencies. Furthermore, as an incentive for them to continue to attend school a substantial lump sum will be released to each child when they complete their studies. Taking into account all of the children's circumstances we believe that this is the right course of action.

Since putting in place these arrangements more than 12 months ago we have never sought to publicize them, and we are doing so now only in response to the questions raised recently in the press. We trust that the matter can now be put to bed, and we would request that the media respect the children's privacy at this formative time in their lives.

- - Danny Boyle and Christian Colson

DISTRIBUTORS STATEMENT:

The welfare of Azhar and Rubina has always been a top priority for everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire. A plan has been in place for over 12 months to ensure that their experience working on Slumdog Millionaire would be of long term benefit. For 30 days work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary. Last year after completing filming, they were enrolled in school for the first time and a fund was established for their future welfare, which they will receive if they are still in school when they turn 18. Due to the exposure and potential jeopardy created by the unwarranted press attention, we are looking into additional measures to protect Azhar and Rubina and their families. We are extremely proud of this film, and proud of the way our child actors have been treated.

- - Fox Searchlight Pictures, Fox Star Studios, Pathe International

Tintin cast! Billions of blue blistering barnacles!

2009-01-27T11:46:00.000-08:00

Steven Spielberg and gang have announced the leads for The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, the first of a planned trilogy of 3-D motion-capture pics based on the beloved Herge comics.

Tintin, boy reporter and sporter of slick mini-Mohawked blond locks, will be played by Jamie Bell, of Billy Elliot fame (and of Mister Foe no-fame-whatsoever, though this dark, twisted little Scottish indie deserves to be seen). And 007 himself, Daniel Craig, will play fabled pirate of yore, Red Rackham. Bell and Craig can be found together right now in the Holocaust drama, Defiance.

Peter Jackson is in line to direct the second Tintin installment. Jackson's LOTR cast mate, Andy Serkis, is reportedly set as Tintin's gruff, boozing best friend, Captain Haddock.

To keep track of all the latest Tintin developments -- film and otherwise -- click on the official Herge site.

Oscar snubs

2009-01-22T12:04:00.000-08:00

Academy Award nominations always have their disappointments -- the wouldas, shouldas and couldas that went un-uttered when the names are read off in the wee hours of the Beverly Hills morn. The folks and films not making the cut this year include Clint Eastwood, touted for a best actor slot for his grumpy racist war veteran retiree in Gran Torino; Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt's true love in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (had she been nominated, The CC of BB would have tied Titanic's record 14 noms); The Dark Knight, which many thought would eke out a best picture nod; and actresses Kristin Scott Thomas (I've Loved You So Long) and Michelle Williams (Wendy and Lucy).

I would've voted for Ms. Scott Thomas and Williams over Angelina Jolie for sure, and probably over Kate Winslet, too, though I'm glad she was recognized for her work in The Reader rather than the tragic housewife she plays in Mad Men, I mean, Revolutionary Road.

OSCARS '09

2009-01-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

Although The Curious Case of Benjamin Button dominated with 13 nominations (one shy of Titanic's record), the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked kindly on some great little indies when the nominations came down this A.M..

Richard Jenkins as a worn-out academic who rediscovers some joy and love in his life thanks to a pair of illegal immigrants, recognized in the best actor field for The Visitor.

And Melissa Leo, a hardbitten upstate New York trailer mom who falls into smuggling illegal aliens (hey, it's a trend!) in Frozen River. The little-seen film set in upstate New York might hopefully get a re-release in theaters now. Its writer/director, Courtney Hunt, also received a original screenplay nomination, putting her in the company of Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, Martin McDonough's In Bruges, Dustin Lance Black's Milk and the Pixar gang's Wall-E.

And I'm still feeling good about the Maximum City momentum of Slumdog Millionaire, although it would have been nice to see leading dude Dev Patel greeted with a nod. But ten nominations, including best picture, best director and adapted screenplay. Good day for India, good day for the indies!

Rule Britannia, and Britannia rules at the Golden Globes

2009-01-12T12:46:00.000-08:00

The Brits -- and the Commonwealthers -- have always done well when it comes time for the Golden Globes and the Oscars. After all, the thesping tradition goes back to Shakespeare and before across ye olde Pond. But the 2009 Golden Globe awards were dominated by the Union Jack and its Down Under brethren more so than recent years. Of the six movie acting winners Sunday night, only one -- Mickey Rourke -- is American. Kate Winslet (supporting actress), Kate Winslet (actress/drama) and Sally Hawkins (actress/comedy) are English, of course. Colin Farrell (actor/comedy) hails from Ireland, and the late Heath Ledger from Australia.

And although the night's big best picture winner, Slumdog Millionaire, is set in Mumbai,India, its director is Britain's Danny Boyle, its winning screenwriter Anglo Simon Beaufoy..

On the TV front, it wasn't quite so limey-lopsided, although Globe glommers Tom Wilkinson (supporting actor/miniseries), Gabriel Byrne (actor/miniseries) and Anna Paquin (actress/miniseries) are, respectively, English, Irish and a Canadian-born New Zealander.

Mickey Rourke, wrestling with his past

2009-01-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

Mickey Rourke won the acting Golden Globe on Sunday night for his gut-wrenching turn in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler , and Rourke's got a good shot -- if he doesn't blow it with any more Sean Penn/Milk bad-mouthing -- of repeating his shaky march to the stage when the Oscars roll around in February. It was clear from the reception he received at the Globes' Moet-fueled lovefest in Beverly Hills that his peers still appreciate the guy, and appreciate his story: a self-destructive, drug-ravaged dude making his triumphant career comeback. (Variety reports that Rourke's in line to play the heavy opposite Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man 2.)

So, here are some pithy ruminations from my Toronto interview with the Rourkester:

About committing to the role of The Wrestler -- like really commiting to it, body and soul:

"I mean, I’d rather go all of the way and fall on my ass than go half way and wish I could have done it better. What’s the point? Life is too short for mediocrity, to play it safe. Hey, we’re only here for a cup of coffee. Why not hang your balls over the fence?"

About asking the Boss to contribute a song for the title track (for which Springsteen won the best song Golden Globe):

"I wrote Bruce Springsteen a letter because of how I felt about him. Bruce was in the middle of a tour, he had lost two members of his band this year. He had a lot on his plate. He went out of his way to write a song called `The Wrestler.' He did it for me as a special favor. It’s a beautiful song. And I’m so proud of it. I love it so much.
"You know, you meet a lot of famous people, talented people, and he’s one of the really, really good souls. Wherever we go, he’s going to go to the best place after this lifetime. And I’ll probably hang out in purgatory for a few centuries. I’ll be in purgatory, Bruce is going to Heaven. And Darren, he’s going to Hell."

About being a former pro boxer. Didn't Rourke have contempt for the fakeness of professional wrestling? Isn't there a general feeling in the boxing community that wrestling blows?

"Yes, yes there is. And I didn’t have any respect for wrestling. Because, man, what we do in boxing, we go in there and really hurt each other. These guys are dancing and everything is choreographed and everything is pre-orchestrated.
"But what I did gain a respect for is it’s like a ballet, it’s choreographed, and yet the sacrifice to their bodies works for the audience, there’s an adrenalyne rush and you really end up getting hurt. In my first two months I had three MRIs... I gained a respect for this as a sport, as entertainment sport. Because you do have to be an athlete... There are some guys, Shawn Michaels, Ray Mysterio, Ricky Steamboat — they're extremely gifted as athletes. I was just ignorant to it, but boy, now I know.
"Man, when a guy who weighs 250 throws you across the ring and you land on your back, your teeth rattle. I got veterbrae damage and neck damage from the boxing, and every vertebrae, every tooth in your mouth, the real ones and the fake ones, they’re all — they all rattle, you know what I mean? All the old broken bones hurt again."

The absolute worst!

2008-12-24T07:13:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, I posted my five-worst-films-of-2008 list in the On Movies column: Australia, The Love Guru, My Blueberry Nights, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Strangers.

Several readers jogged my memory, though. (It's easy, and perhaps necessary, to block these painful experiences out!) So, I'm amending the list with a couple more:

The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan's stupefying "thriller" about an eco-disaster that befalls Philadelphia couple Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel and a whole mess of the rest of the planet...

... And 88 Minutes, the serial killer dud with an over-the-top Al Pacino gassing on for way longer than the title promised.

Kate times two

2008-12-24T06:52:00.000-08:00

Kate Winslet -- in theaters with Revolutionary Road and The Reader -- says that even with fifteen years or more of experience in front of the camera, the work doesn't get any easier. But she does feel like she's getting a little more sure of herself trying things out for her director -- well, sometimes.

"It’s about confidence, growing confidence," says Winslet, nominated for best actress (Rev Road) and supporting actress (Reader) Golden Globes. "I have found myself in moments where I think, I’ve got an idea here but what if it’s awful? Will people think I’m stupid if I say this? Are they going to think I have the wrong handle on the character?

"It takes a lot of courage to speak up sometimes. And also sometimes knowing that maybe what I feel is the right thing, and what somebody else’s opinion might be could throw me off."

Winslet says she felt that pressure on The Reader, directed by Stephen Daldry. And she felt that pressure on Revolutionary Road, never mind that it was being steered by her husband, Sam Mendes.

"Even though I would say I’d share 90 percent of the same view with Stephen on how to approach the character, there was the 10 percent that I absolutely kept for myself. And I realized that’s the way I am with all my films….

"Even though I was married to the director on Revolutionary Road, there were things that I absolutely kept to myself."

Slumdog evolutions

2008-12-02T05:53:00.000-08:00

There's a rare co-director credit on Slumdog Millionaire that not only attests to filmmaker Danny Boyle's generosity, but to the invaluable assistance given to him on his exuberant rags-to-riches romantic epic by his Indian casting director, Loveleen Tandan.

"When we started, the script was originally in English, the whole script, and it wasn’t working," Boyle recalls. "We had these 7-year-olds, and they just couldn’t handle the English, and the only ones who could were middle-class kids who were very different, obviously, from all the slum kids.… And Loveleen said, `If you really want to make this work you’ve got to do it in Hindi,' and we all laughed, including her, because we’d raised the money and we had a deal and you’ve made agreements about how thick the accents will be and all this -- all the things that the distributors worry about.

"But we tried it anyway, and she was right.… So I rang up the studio and told them that the first third of the film was now going to be in Hindi, and a very difficult conversation was had. But again, it’s a good decision, and when you make good decisions, good things follow. Like the subtitles became exciting, because we thought lets try to make them interesting.... And because people get access to the realism of the kids, they just don’t care about the subtitles. Nobody comes out of the film saying well, `What about the subtitles?' They go, `Wow, those kids were good!'"

Boyle says that Tandan, who's now looking for a project of her own to helm, steered the young actors that play the hero Jamal, his brother, Salim, and the beautiful orphan girl Latika as children and teens. She would give them direction, explain plot points and serve as a liaison between Boyle and the novice Mumbai thespians. She also directed second unit and was integral to the production on many other levels, he says.

Structured as a series of seamless flashbacks -- with the 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel) being interrogated by the cops, suspected of cheating on the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? -- the film turns around the children's often frightening, violent, poverty-marred experiences. It's a heady mix of humor and hardship, romance and roiling adventure -- and it's easily one of the best pictures of 2009, an underdog that looks likely to be facing off against four more-pedigreed titles when the Oscar nominations are announced in January.

The real Kristin Scott Thomas?

2008-11-14T09:10:00.000-08:00

In I've Loved You So Long, Kristin Scott Thomas gives one of the strongest, deepest, darkest performances of her career. The English actress has lived in France for 28 of her 48 years, and she's appeared in more than a few French films, but Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long -- in which Scott Thomas plays a woman just out of prison, trying to assimilate back into the real world -- is easily her finest.

That said, she was pretty great in a supporting role in another Gallic title, this summer's sleeper art house thriller, Tell No One. (It just passed $6.2 million in US domestic box office, making it the highest grossing foreign language film of the year.) Playing a restaurateur friend of the on-the-run pediatrician-turned-action-hero Francois Cluzet, Scott Thomas comes off as tough, witty, and, yes, gay.

"I did that really because I wanted to stay in France that summer and this sweet guy, [director] Guillaume Canet, asked me to do it," she says, on the phone from New York. "And I really wanted to work with Francois Cluzet, because I had worked with him 20 years ago and I loved it. So I said yes — and I had no idea that it was going to be this phenomenal success. Extraordinary!"

And as for her character, the lesbian restaurant owner Helene: "It's so funny because people have said, `Oh, we’ve never seen you like this,' but you know what, I’m more like that character, and she’s more like me, than any of the others -- all those frosty aristocrats that you see.

"Helene's much more like me… apart from one aspect, which would probably be the most titillating," she adds, laughing. "But no, I’m not."

Happy-Go-Lucky: a Mike Leigh joint.

2008-10-16T11:38:00.001-07:00

Britain's Independent recently called him a "miserabilist," or maybe he called himself that. But Mike Leigh -- the U.K. filmmaker of such dark, dire stories as Naked, Vera Drake, All or Nothing, heck, there was even one called Bleak Moments -- begs to differ.

"There are people that talk about my films as being pessimistic, which I think is nonsense," the 65-year-old London-based director says. That perception may have something to do with why Leigh has gone and made Happy-Go-Lucky, a character piece starring Sally Hawkins as a relentlessly chirpy, resilient London schoolteacher. "There are some people who talk about this as though Happy-Go-Lucky was actually, literally, a description of the film, which it isn’t. It’s far more complex than that. It has its dark sides to it.... But when you walk away from this, dark is not what you feel. You walk away from Naked and something else hangs you for sure.

"Any half-decent novelist, or dramatist, or filmmaker, or whatever, should think that if you’re dealing with the real world and the real issue of life and living -- which is what I think I do — one wants to contribute a whole range of work to a picture of humanity. It’s very obvious."

Hollywood's new bad guy? The banking industry, of course!

2008-09-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Check out the trailer for The International, the Clive Owen/Naomi Watts globe-hopping thriller coming in February 2009. No more Russians or Arabs or al Qaeda villains, thank you very much. Hollywood's new bad guy: the international banking system -- all those unregulated greedheads at the heart of the current financial crisis! Go get 'em, Clive!

Link to trailer:
http://www.everybodypays.com/

Kisses, and Viggo in the lobby

2008-09-09T03:22:00.000-07:00

TIFF '08, Monday, Day Five:

Start the day with Kisses, a wee Irish thing from Lance Daly about a pre-teen boy and girl, neighbors in grim housing on the outskirts of Dublin, who flee their effed-up families and make for the city, where they spend a day and night of bliss and horror. The two kids, Kelly O'Neill and Shane Curry (11 and 12, respectively, when they made the film), are brilliant, and the spirit (and a couple of songs) of Bob Dylan hangs over the tale -- with some bloke named Stephen Rea in a cameo as a Dylan impersonator. The accents are thick as soda bread, and like Ken Loach's Kes and Andrea Arnold's Red Road, subtitles would be a good idea if this gets a U.S. distributor -- which it should. It's the second best love story I've seen at the festival, after Slumdog Millionaire (if we're keeping score).

Also catch Management, a Sidney Kimmel-produced indie starring Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn. A quirky romance about a motel night manager and a traveling saleslady, Management's at its best when Zahn's character's stalker-like obsession takes the plot down unexpected roads: a Zen monastery, a parachute splashdown into Woody Harrelson's swimming pool.

Talk to Wong Kar Wai for Ashes of Time Redux, his reclaimed, restored, 1994 martial arts meditation on memory. The great Hong Kong director traveled Asia, dove into warehouses in San Francisco's and New York's Chinatowns, looking for prints of his old movie, which had been cut, chopped, butchered and lost. Putting it back together again took years.

There's a grand piano off to one side of the lobby of the Sutton Place, TIFF press and industry HQ, and for a while midday yesterday Viggo Mortensen was sitting there in a red T-shirt and jeans, letting anybody who approached sit alongside him on the piano bench, obligingly posing for snaps.

The less said about Richard Eyre's adultery melodrama, The Other Man, the better. With Kinsey couple Laura Linney and Liam Neeson -- and Antonio Banderas in the title role. Oy!

Tomorrow, Tuesday, last day for me (the fest continues through Saturday): interviews set with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Charlie Kaufman (for Synedoche, New York) and The Wrestler himself, Mr. Mickey Rourke.

Keira talks, Spike talks, Josh Brolin walks...

2008-09-08T02:17:00.000-07:00

... down Bloor Street and nobody pays attention (Josh Brolin, No Country For Old Men, soon to be seen as the Prez in Oliver Stone's W -- come on people, pay attention!)

Anyway, Sunday, Day 4 of TIFF '08, a marathon interview day, running from the Park Hyatt to the Four Seasons to the Intercontinental (not much of a run -- they're all within a block of each other). First off: John Malkovich, cradling a coffee cup early in the a.m., a far cry from the wild, desperate, drunk and just-fired CIA guy he plays in the Coens' Burn After Reading. He talks about that, of course, and about life in Boston (where he and fam have been living since they moved back from France four years ago), about the two other films he as at this year's fest (Disgrace and Afterwards) and how being the producer of a little thing called Juno hasn't made it any easier for his production company -- Mr. Mudd -- to get projects off the ground.

Keira Knightley, the trapped soul of The Duchess, is in a room at the Four Seasons, her door guarded by personal security guy, personal attendant, publicists, a fellow with an umbrella. Once inside, though, it's just her and her snazzy outfit (Chanel? Target Couture?), bright and beaming, talking about The Duchess, of course, and about how her mum has these deep existential discussions with her in French and how Charlotte Rampling, who plays her mum in the film, has been a hero since Keira was a wee thing. Even before Bend It Like Beckham, Ms. Knightley had a photo of Rampling on her bedroom wall -- the one from The Night Porter, no less! Also chat with Saul Dibb, The Duchess director, who sent his prospective leading lady the script wrapped in three big ostrich feathers -- after he explained to his wife, also named Keira, that doing so was strictly a professional gesture.

Spike Lee's wearing an Obama T-shirt and proud that he sneaked a bunch of references to The Bicycle Thief and other Italian neo-realist classics into his big World War II movie, Miracle At St. Anna. The story of four African-American soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in a Tuscan village, Lee's movie balances weighty issues -- racial, historical, cultural -- and works hard to find the right balance between realistic depiction of atrocities of war and the kind of romanticized old school Hollywood rendering of combat. Next up for the New York filmmaker, he hopes: a pic about the L.A. riots. He and Denzel and Clive Owen are also talking about Inside Man 2.

Bill Maher is holding court at Signatures, one of the eateries in the Intercontinental (a hotel that's almost impossible to gain entry to, thanks -- and no thanks -- to the cellphone camera-clicking fans and papparazzi ringing the entrance). He talks about Religulous, of course, his doc debunking religion, and about Sarah Palin and how Americans got stupider as they moved west from the 13 colonies. (Manifest Destiny begat a nation of morons, essentially.) There were Christian protestors at the premiere the night before, but they were "Canadian protestors," he reports. "They were very polite."

(Celeb watch: Waiting in the lobby for my time with Mr. Maher, I keenly observed the comings and goings of Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Atom Egoyan and Anton Yelchin .)

Finally get to see a movie: The Wrestler, fresh from its grand prize win at the Venice festival, screening at the glorious old Elgin Theater on Yonge Street. Mickey Rourke plays a professional wrestling legend whose glory days are long gone, living in a New Jersey trailer park, hanging out at a strip club (where Marisa Tomei does lap dances) and hawking autographs and photos of himself at fan meets. It's a scarily good performance from the legendary Rourke, and Darren Aronofsky introduces his movie to the attendant throng by saying that one of the big deals of his teendom was the Rourke classic Angel Heart. Rourke lumbers out before the lights go down to wave at the crowd. He might be waving at an Oscar nomination in a couple of months.

"Millionaire" Oscar-bound - TIFF, Day 3

2008-09-07T02:22:00.000-07:00

You hope for it to happen, and then, finally, it does: a movie that rocks you to the core, inspires, delights, shocks, compels, surprises. That's what Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire did Saturday morning at the press and industry screening at the Varsity: two separate rounds of applause at the end. The film, left an orphan -- like its main character -- when Warner Independent folded, and now to be released by Fox Searchlight in November, tells the story of an Indian street urchin who grows up and gets on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? -- and improbably, amazingly, keeps answering the questions correctly.

Like a Bollywood Dickens tale, directed by Brit Boyle with the same flash and panache he brought to Trainspotting and 28 Days Later (but on a far bigger scale), Slumdog is a love story, a look at a culture of vast wealth and brutal poverty, and a keen take on a country that's at "the center of the world" in the 21st century. Dev Patel stars as the grown-up hero, Jamil, a gofer who serves tea -- a "chai wallah" -- to the phone workers in a Mombai call center. Two amazing kid actors play him during the hard, scary years of Jamil's youth, as his destiny leads him, his brother, and the beautiful, feisty orphaned girl Latika from one adventure to the next. Oscars, here they come.

Talked to Jonathan Demme and Anne Hathaway (for Rachel Getting Married), in a big round corner booth at the Empire, a closed bar on Cumberland. The red velvet upholstery was riddled with little holes. I conjectured they were cigarette burns, Hathaway said they were from stiletto heels --dancers gone wild. Demme, who'd been there for hours doing interviews with his star, took a look around, startled, and said, "Oh, we're in a bar!?" Hathaway, Agent 99 in Get Smart, the princess in The Princess Diaries, pulls off something altogether different, and darker, in Rachel Getting Married, a verite portrait of a family celebrating a wedding, and still reeling from a profound loss.

Also saw a wicked little black Irish comedy, A Film With Me In It, which shares a dark comic sensibility with the work of Martin McDonough and offers a self-satirizing cameo from Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan.... Interviewed Ed Harris for his loping, likable, Viggo Mortensen co-starring western, Appaloosa.... Saw Amos Gatai's Plus tard, tu comprendras (One Day You'll Understand), which I understood but didn't really get: Jeanne Moreau, Dominique Blanc, Hippolyte Girardot and Emmanuelle Devos as a family in Paris in the late 1980s, still haunted by the Nazi occupation of France and its tragic impact on their Jewish forebears.

TIFF '08, Day 2 - Lost sons, lost daughters, lost dogs

2008-09-06T03:20:00.000-07:00

Have already seen the Coen Brothers' screwball Burn After Reading, so go to 9am screening of Last Stop 174, Bruno Barreto's tough, gritty, grim tale of two kids who share similar names, and who run drugs and rob citizens in the anarchistic crazy-quilt shantytown on the hills of Rio. Yup, another Brazilian bummer about children with guns, about missing fathers, about moral compasses spinning out of control, about poverty, power and powerlessness. The final shot: a mother and one of the two Sandros standing over a grave.

Next up: Still Walking, Hirokazu Koreeda’s quiet, observant portrait of three generations of a family in Japan: the retired, grumpy physician and his faithful but sniping wife, their daughter and her doofus husband and two children, and the second son and his wife (a widow remarried), with her son. Lots of walking and talking, and the rigorous, everyday rituals of the Japanese. The aching loss of the elder couple’s first, favored son – a drowning – hangs over everything. One of the final shots: standing over a grave.

See The Duchess at the super-fancy screening room (leather sofas, side tables with lamps, butlers with cigars – OK, maybe not) at the new Hazelton Hotel, which seems to have supplanted the Four Seasons down the block as the top spot for fans to gawk, scream and try for autographs, while Toronto bike cops pretend to check the crowd but are really checking out the "talent" breezing in and out ringed by flacks. Keira Knightley is fitted in an amazing array of 18th century Euro-noble couture in this based-on-the-true-story of Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire. Ralph Fiennes is drolly despicable as the stuffy, randy Duke, and Hayley Atwell hangs in there as the woman who becomes his mistress -- and kind of becomes the Duchess’ too. Slated to talk to Ms. Knightley and director Saul Dibb on Sunday.

Head down Yonge Street to the new, gigantic AMC Yonge Dundas 24, across the street from a huge plaza where a TIFF concert stage is set up and a band’s getting ready to rock. (And where a guy is standing in the street, in the midst of cars, cyclists and pedestrians, pissing into a grate as if he was all alone in the middle of the woods.) It’s a little jarring to see a modest, blown-up-to-35mm indie that will end up at the Ritz Bourse when it gets to Philly debuting in a cavernous, multi-tiered, giant-screen theater totally sold out, and that’s the deal here: 700 TIFF-goers packed in to see Kelly Reichardt’s heartbreaking Wendy and Lucy. Reichardt made the sublime Old Joy, and this is another shambling Pacific Northwest tale, but a sadder one: Michelle Williams as a neo-hobo, sleeping in her car, shoplifting for food, with only her golden brown mutt, Lucy, for company. Williams is amazing, totally convincing, as Wendy’s world falls apart: her car breaks down and she loses her dog, stuck in a small, busted-down Oregon town. No standing-over-a-grave final shot, but, jeez, I need a good comedy.

TIFF 2008 - Day 1, Thursday, Sept. 4

2008-09-05T03:09:00.000-07:00

Pity the poor Torontonian who just wants to get from work to home, or buy a pair of Classic Fits at the Gap -- the one at the corner of Bay and Bloor. Every street in this posh Yorkville district seems to be under construction, there are giant holes in the ground and steel skeletons going up every other block to make way for new lux condos, swankier hotels, sleeker boutiques (no recession in this part of town!). And down on King Street, the Bell Lightbox is erecting -- future headquarters and screen venue for the Toronto International Film Festival.

In the meantime, TIFF '08 goes on with Press & Industry events, news conferences and Reese Witherspoon lookalikes (pretty sure it wasn't really her) at the Sutton Place Hotel. Day One of the Toronto International Film Festival: Italian journos scurrying to get their accreditation, film buyers from Britain, festival programmers from San Francisco, Japanese entertainment reporters, studio execs, publicists, directors, everyone fried a bit from the travel getting here, and everyone running to the Varsity complex, where a dozen screens are turned over to the credentialed throng from 8:30 in the morning til the cows come home.

First screening was RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie's remake of the last Guy Ritchie movie --English thugs and mob types playing cross and doublecross, shooting guns and lookin' cool while the camera whirls and dives and flashes fast-forward around colorful corners of London Town. 300 hunk Gerard Butler (soon to be shooting a new movie in Philly) stars, and Thandie Newton looks lovely, and Tom Wilkinson goes slumming, playing an old-school, no-class gangster. Engaging for a while, but then, well, you can't help but start wondering if Mr. Madonna has no other tricks up his sleeve.

Then L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours), Olivier Assayas' very grown-up and ultimately very moving look at a family coming to terms with the death of their septugenarian matriarch (an elegant and beautiful Edith Scob). Assayas (Irma Vep, Clean), ends his movie (which stars Juliette Binoche and Charles Berliner)with thwacking hip-hop, bouncy French rock and a cover of an old Incredible String Band hippie-ditty -- not where you expect the film to go, and it works.

Luckily (or not), I've already seen Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais as a New York dentist who can see dead people -- like Greg Kinnear, for instance. Reportedly there was a major snafu with the digital projection early on, and suddenly the English comedy star was walking in front of green screens, interacting with people that really weren't there. Ghostly!

And as triple-crossing con artist pictures go, The Brothers Bloom, with Adrian Brody and Mark Ruffalo as scamming siblings and Rachel Weisz as their mark (or is she?), goes from charming to UNBELIEVABLY ANNOYING in less time than it takes to buy a sandwich at the Varsity concession stand. (Not long -- they're efficient here in Canada.)With quirky '60s pop songs thrown on the soundtrack a la Wes Anderson, and moments of inspired eccentricity and whimsy (a cat with one leg walking on crutches, a montage of Weisz's character's mastery of "hobbies" -- including juggling power saws on a unicycle), The Brothers Bloom aims to please in oddball ways, and then you start hating these guys and their globe-hopping stunts.... Did I say UNBELIEVABLY ANNOYING?

Buzz for Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum and the Turkish pic Three Monkeys, and in the theater before Rian (Brick)Johnson's The Brothers Bloom got off to a late start, wags waggin' about who's going to be cast in the movie about a highschooler who gets pregnant by her boyfriend, decides to have the child, and Mom gets nominated to be Vice President. It's Juno Goes to Washington.

Downey delivers in blackface

2008-08-25T05:19:00.000-07:00

"It was tricky and there was trepidation," Robert Downey Jr. said in an interview a few weeks ago about the idea of playing a guy in blackface in Tropic Thunder. But as the Ben Stiller war movie parody continues to rack up the big bucks (two Number One weekends in a row -- $66 million in just ten days of release), the idea of a white American actor playing a white Australian movie star playing an African-American Army grunt who quotes from The Jeffersons -- well, it hasn't even caused a stir.

(As for the "Simple Jack" controversy -- Stiller's politically incorrect portrait of a mentally challenged character -- even that hasn't put a dent in the box office.)

"I think the glory of it is that as evidenced by the reaction, the power balance has shifted enough," says Downey. "I feel like it’s just a sign — you know, everyone can see the signs of how far we have to go with racism and sexism and all that stuff, but to me the fact that this could come out and that enough time has passed in the post-Jolson era to make something like this viable. And I think it was really DreamWorks and Ben who knew that this was something that -- you know, the wounds weren’t quite so fresh, and there wasn’t such a recent surge of injustice going on that we couldn’t have some fun here.

"And here’s the thing, too. When people see the movie from end to end, the last thing they ever comment on when it’s over is me, my role. The movie has so many other things in it that are way more crazy and creepy than the idea of an Australian playing an African-American. It literally does not even make the Top Ten. That’s how nuts this movie is."

Or as Downey's Iron Man director Jon Favreau put it, when he heard about what his buddy was up to in Tropic Thunder: "Although I don’t think racism is funny, I think it’s funny to make fun of racism, and to explore it... We’re all of a generation that grew up not in the shadow of ignorance when it comes to that. So I think that more things should be on the table, and that there’s room for humor in every area."

"What if the mom comes on to me?"

2008-07-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

The credits say Step Brothers was written by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, but talk to McKay -- who directed the goofball dysfunctional family comedy about two grown guys (Ferrell and John C. Reilly) still living at home with their parents -- and he'll tell you that practically every scene was improvised.

"There was a load of improv on this one, way more than any film we’ve ever done. But it was built to hold that," McKay says. "The weird thing is, we'd go through our script, we'd rewrite it like 15 times and we'd do three read-throughs, so by the time we hit the stage that script was tight. But, man, the stuff we find out in the improv is always so good, so I would usually do three or four as written, and then do four or five improvs.

"There were days when the actors would come in exhausted and say, `Really? We’ve got to make up whole scenes?'

"`Yes you do, lets go.'

"We shot an obscene amount of footage on this movie. The DVD is going to be packed with material. It's the most improv I’ve ever done on any project I’ve ever worked on, including the show I did at Second City, which was based on improv."

Berg on "Hancock," and, yes, on "Dune"

2008-07-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

Peter Berg had to go a couple of rounds with the MPAA's ratings board to win a PG-13 rating for Hancock --the Will Smith super (anti-) hero blockbuster.

"They hate sexual intercourse," says the director. "They hate sex, and they hate the word f---. It’s really that simple."

There's also the issue of "general intensity," a catch-all category that had Berg trimming seconds from the movie's final hospital room scene. An opening sequence in which Smith's Hancock tries to kill himself was also excised -- "just very dark," says Berg. "And there’s a lovemaking scene with Hancock and a groupie which I thought was pretty hilarious. That will be on the DVD."

Berg, who went from acting (The Last Seduction, TV's Chicago Hope) to directing (Very Bad Things, a bachelor party nightmare, was his first), has a bunch of things in the works. Right up there is a new version of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic, Dune. The same desert planet epic was adapted for the screen back in the Eighties: David Lynch directed, and Kyle MacLachlan , Virginia Madsen starred and a giant sand worm starred.

"We’re looking for writers right now," Berg reports. "That’s probably a couple of years off in the distance, but, yeah, I definitely want to do my interpretation."

And what of the Lynch Dune?

"I thought it was intresting, and I think it left the door open for some interpretation. My experience with Dune, reading the book in highschool, is [it's] kind of a more muscular adventure tale than I think has been realized onscreen. Something a little rougher and a little more muscular. And I think our worm’s going to be a bit more ferocious."

Berg is also doing a new TV series with Ron Moore, the creator of Battlestar Galactica, called Virtuality, that starts shooting next month.

"And then I think I might do a movie called Lone Survivor, a kind of Black Hawk Down-style film about a gunfight that the Navy Seals get into in Afghanistan."

Pitch meeting

2008-06-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

Defying the filmmaking rule that you don't talk about upcoming projects until you're actually on set and the cameras are rolling, Steve Conrad -- writer and director of the new John C. Reilly/Seann William Scott workplace comedy, The Promotion -- laid out the plot details of his probably-going-to-happen next pic, with Jack Black committed to star. It's called The Expanding Mailman. Here goes:

"Essentially, The Expanding Mailman is about a graduate student of astrophysics at MIT and while he’s on lunch break he’s staring at a sunflower.... Something about the geometry of the sunflower face allows him to glimpse the mathematical expression that explains the origins of the universe. So he’s discovered, essentially, why we’re here, in math, and he’s so overcome by it that he bursts into this very famous professor’s lecture hall, and interupts the lecture.

"And in his enthusiasm to share this revelation he grabs the professor very roughly and starts screaming this theory — just out of sheer glee. But the professor thinks he’s being assaulted and calls campus security and they sedate the student, and he wakes up the next morning in a straitjacket having barely retained this very long theory in his head, and escapes into the town to try to find a pen so he can write it down.

"He gets kicked out of school and he is having a credit withheld, and so he becomes a mailman, and the story starts 15 years later where he’s been a mailman for 15 years and he’s haunted by having at one point understood Everything and now he just can’t remember. And then the real movie starts… a big, crazy adventure."

Conrad, whose script credits include The Weatherman and The Pursuit of Happyness, will direct. He hopes.

"People tell you not to talk about them until they’re real. But they’re never real, so you have to just pretend that you’re making it. Next thing you know, someone shows up with a camera."

"I thought you might be worried about the security of your..."

2008-05-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Great first trailer for Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading, the Oscar-winning freres' screwball spy caper, starring George Clooney, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and Brad Pitt -- the latter wearing some weird blond streaked 'do. Check it out here.

I Shot the Sheriff, But I Didn't Shoot No Marley Doc

2008-05-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Never mind the big news that Martin Scorsese will be making the authorized Bob Marley documentary slated for a February 6, 2010 release -- which would have been the reggae superstar's 65th birthday. Scorsese, whose Rolling Stones concert doc, Shine a Light, is at the Franklin Institute, and who has committed to making a George Harrison doc, too, has bowed from the Bob doc because of scheduling conflicts. (Scorsese is in the throes of Shutter Island, from a Dennis Lehane novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer and Michelle Williams, right now.)

Anyway, no Marty, no cry. Jonathan Demme has been picked to replace Scorsese on the Marley bio, and in many ways he's better suited for the project. Demme has a history of music pics, from the groundbreaking Talking Heads title, Stop Making Sense, to the Robyn Hitchcock concert pic Storefront Hitchcock to catching Neil Young in Heart of Gold. Demme, who is in the process of editing a new Neil Young concert film, has directed a bunch of music videos (Bruce Springsteen, New Order, The Pretenders) and has shown fine, and eclectic, musical tastes in the soundtracks to his fiction features.

"I am thrilled and humbled by this extraordinary opportunity to participate in fashioning a motion picture that can serve as a worthy vessel for the spiritual and musical brilliance of Bob Marley," Demme said in a statement.

Iron Man 2 -- and 3? Downey talks!

2008-05-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

Caught on the phone in Paris the week before Iron Man exploded on screens with a worldwide opening weekend take of $200 million-plus, Robert Downey Jr. was already talking about sequels, about the kick he got playing the playboy industrialist superhero in the titanium flying suit.

"It's really weird, it’s very strange how engaging it is, and Jon [Favreau, the director] and I find ourselves sitting around dreaming up storylines for making a couple more of these," Downey says. (And this is before Marvel Entertainment announced that there would, indeed, be an Iron Man sequel.) "And you see the pitfalls, too, you see what historically happens: Usually, the first one’s the best one, the second one goes `bigger,' and the third one falls apart.

"So, that, to me, would be the real Zen of it -- it would be to actually make three movies that stood up on their own."

Downey the New Depp?

2008-05-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

Jon Favreau, the actor (Swingers, Daredevil) and increasingly successful director (Elf, Zathura and now the whopping Iron Man), had this to say about casting Robert Downey Jr. in the role of billionaire arms manufacturer Tony Stark, aka Marvel Comics' heavy metal superhero dude.

"Iron Man was always a very important figure in the Marvel universe, and to have Robert play him really brought dimension and character to the role. As a filmmaker, quite honestly, it relieved me because I knew that Robert would elevate the project, and his involvement ended up attracting a very, very good cast."

That would include, of course, Jeff Bridges, shorn of locks and sporting a beard, Terrence Howard, looking fit in Air Force officer's uniform and Gwyneth Paltrow, as Stark's girl Friday, the all-business Pepper Potts.

Favreau had only met Downey once at a premiere before they started the Iron Man discussions, but "I knew his body of work, of course." However, "it wasn’t until we sat down and I saw how good a shape he was in and how healthy he looked and how enthusiastic he was that I realized that he was entering into a phase of his life where it would be really wonderful to collaborate with him.

"He was really ready to play this guy, and I thought that he could bring a certain depth to the role and a level of interest, publically. The way I presented it to Marvel [Studios] was this could be like when they cast Johnny Depp in Pirates.”

So look out for Iron Man II. Favreau and Depp -- I mean, Downey -- are already plotting sequel scenarios.

Festival wrap

2008-04-17T12:23:00.001-07:00

The 17th Philadelphia Film Festival wrapped up its 13-day-and-night run on Tuesday, April 15, with attendance figures just a tad below last year's 66,000 -- not bad considering the festival was shorter by a day and downscaled by several venues, too. And this is certainly not bad: a record 85 sold out screenings.

And yes, a select few of the 246 films from 49 countries at PFF-17 came away with prizes. Juried awards went to Pieter Kuijpers’ Nothing to Lose (best feature); Greg Kohs’ Song Sung Blue (best doc); Jeremiah Zagar’s In a Dream (best first film); Rahmin Bahrani (best director, for Chop Shop); Luke Eberl’s Choose Connor (best American independent); Fumihiko Sori’s Vexille (animated feature), and Armand Demuynck’s “Breakout” (animated short).

Audience awards were doled to Ann Calamia’s Universal Signs (feature); Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro’s Body of War (doc), and Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (best Danger After Dark entry).

The Festival of Independents’ Award winners were Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade (feature) (photo of stars Greg Lyons and Jennifer Welsh above); Benjamin Herold’s First Person (documentary); Jena Serbu’s “Figure Study #7” (narrative); Dan Pinto’s "Hedgehug” (animation), and Lindsay Kovnat’s "AYND” (experimental).

Additionally, In a Dream nabbed the DIVE Technical Achievement Award, First Person’s Herold took the SCION First Time Director Award and Daniel Barnz, director of Phoebe in Wonderland, received the Archie Award, a juried kudo pesented in honor of the late Philadelphia cineaste and scholar Archie Perlmutter.

Charlton Heston (RIP) on "Touch of Evil"

2008-04-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

In an interview nearly fifteen years ago (yikes!), Charlton Heston reflected back on his career, on playing such epic figures as Moses , Michelangelo, John the Baptist and Buffalo Bill. But Heston - who passed away Saturday, April 6, at the age of 84 -- said during the 1993 phone chat that, "my most important contribution to motion pictures" was off-camera. That is, persuading Universal Pictures to let Orson Welles direct a little noir thriller called Touch of Evil.
The 1958 classic, which stars Welles (as a corrupt U.S. cop), Heston (as a dogged Mexican G-man) and Janet Leigh (as his American bride), was without a director when Universal gave the picture the green light. It was Heston who mentioned that Welles, who hadn't helmed a successful picture in years, be given the job. The producers' initial reaction was one of gaping silence, "as though I had suggested that my mother direct the film," Heston recalled.
Touch of Evil, which also boasts a cameo by Marlene Dietrich , is "an extraordinarily interesting film," said Heston. "I think Cahiers du Cinema had the right take on it. They wrote - oh my gosh, 20 years ago - that Touch of Evil is not a great film, but it's the best B-movie ever made. And that's about right.
"I'm very proud to have been in it, and I'm very proud to have played a significant part - well, the crucial part - in having Orson direct it."

"In a Dream" On a Winning Streak

2008-04-07T07:38:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah Zagar's beautiful, disturbing In a Dream, a documentary about his dad, the Philadelphia artist and muralist Isaiah Zagar, sold out its three Philadelphia Film Festival showings, so a fourth one has been added for Monday, April 14, 7 p.m. as part of the "Festival Favorites" series. The screening will take place at the Ritz East. (See www.phillyfests.com for details.)
Meanwhile, In a Dream has just taken home its second big festival prize: the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival which wrapped up Sunday, April 6, in Durham, N.C. In a Dream won the Emerging Visions Audience Award at last month's SXSW Film Fest.

Paternity and Maternity Suits... Hollywood.

2008-04-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

Three 2008 movies -- Definitely, Maybe, the smart rom-com starring Ryan Reynolds that's still in a few theaters, Chaos Theory, the not-so-smart rom-com starring Ryan Reynolds opening April 11, and Mamma Mia!, the Meryl Streep-does-Abba adaptation of the smash Broadway musical, coming in July (and not starring Ryan Reynolds) -- share eerily similar plot-lines.

In Definitely, Maybe, Reynolds recounts his amorous past to his cute-as-a-button daughter, changing the names of his three girlfriends, as his little girl tries to guess which one turned out to be her mother.

In Chaos Theory, it seems that Reynolds' character, married to Emily Mortimer with a cute-as-a-button daughter, may not be the biological father of same, after all. The real dad could have been best buddy Stuart Townsend.

And in Mamma Mia!, a young bride-to-be (Amanda Seyfried) discovers her mother's (Streep's) old diary and its entries describing intimate liaisons with three men. The daughter figues that one of the three has to be her dad, and invites the gentlemen to her wedding -- without letting Mom know. The suspected pops are played by Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård.

Sapporo cinema, Ghibli magic

2008-03-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

Went to Japan for two weeks, for the first time, and in addition to visiting many temples and shrines and shops selling INCREDIBLY CUTE STUFF, went to the movies, too. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited had just opened, and so we took the train into the bustling snow-covered Hokkaido city of Sapporo (home of the beer), and headed for a multiplex 5 or 6 stories up atop a big vertical mall. This wasn't the most luxe of the Japanese cinemas, but it was still miles beyond most U.S. theaters, and while the ticket prices are steep (1800 yen, just under $18!), the concession stands were cheap, and in addition to popcorn and wasabe-spiked soy beans, they sell toys, tchotchkes, souvenirs and posters from the various titles onscreen. Flyers for upcoming pictures were also to be had, for free.

Also visited the Ghibli Museum, in Mitaka, a suburb of Tokyo. Situated in a park at the end of a canal, this is genius animator Hayao Miyazaki's whimsical complex of buildings celebrating My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Laputa: Castle In the Sky , Princess Mononoke , his Oscar-winning Spirited Away and the rest of his daunting canon of work. With a small movie theater (playing short subjects by Miyazaki that have never made their way to moviehouses or DVD), a sunlit and super-cool cafe (fruit sandwiches, anyone?) and a maze of rooms that includes a giant replica of the cat bus from Totoro. Also: an artfully messy re-creation of Miyazaki's office and studios, a room for special exhibitions (currently: a Russian storybook version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears), a gift shop (of course), a room devoted to the history of, and techniques in animation, and a rooftop garden dominated by a towering sculpture of the android robot from Castle In the Sky. The place was aswarm with schoolkids and families reveling in the magic images and icons of the animation master.

Far and Away

2008-02-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

"On Movies Online" is taking a few weeks off to explore far-flung lands. Look for new entries in mid-March.

Divining the Oscars

2008-01-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

With the American Society of Cinematographers, the Directors Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild having all recently bestowed their honors, the favorites among the nominees for the 80th Academy Awards are taking shape. Robert Elswit, nominated once before (for the beautiful black-and-white Good Night, and Good Luck) was recognized by his cinematographic colleagues ("Hey, I know you!") for his extraordinary work in There Will Be Blood, and that gives him an edge in the category.

No Country For Old Men's Joel and Ethan Coen won out over fellow nominees Paul Thomas Anderson, Tony Gilroy, Sean Penn, and Julian Schnabel, on Saturday, Jan. 26, nabbing best director(s) kudos from the DGA. That makes the Brothers Coen the odds-on favorites for the Academy Award: Since the DGA began prizing its directors in 1949, only six of its choices have failed to go on to Oscar wins. (DGA trivia note: the last time the Guild honored two men as best feature-film directors was 1961, when the winners were Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story.

As for the four acting slots, Sunday, Jan. 27th's SAG Awards went to Ruby Dee (supporting actress, American Gangster), Javier Bardem (supporting actor, No Country For Old Men), Julie Christie (lead actress, Away From Her) and Daniel Day-Lewis (lead actor, There Will Be Blood). If you're doing an office Oscar pool, you could do worse than follow the SAG line.

DISCOVERING "OIL!"

2008-01-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

It was the early double-0s, Paul Thomas Anderson was in London, living the ex-pat life, feeling a bit homesick when he saw a hefty little volume beckoning from the shelves of a bookstore.

"There were these huge red letters with exclamation marks, saying OIL!, you couldn't miss it from a mile away amid a million other books," recalls the director, who bought the book -- Upton Sinclair's 1926 novel -- read it, and a few years later turned it into the astounding There Will Be Blood. Starring the astounding Daniel Day-Lewis.

"`What the hell is that? That looks good.' And this was six or seven years ago and I dare say everybody was kind of curious what the hell oil was exactly. What is this stuff? Why do we like it so much?'

"You know, when you’re home the only thing you want to do is get out of there, and then when you’re thousands of miles from home all you want to do is be back home. So to pick up a book and be reading about my backyard, was really warming. But to be reading a story that took place in the 20s and saying `Jeez, this all seems so familiar, the insanity that people had over this black, goopy stuff. You think, we’ve come a long way haven’t we?"

Zeroville, Must Read

2007-12-14T12:20:00.000-08:00

A strange, trippy, absolutely un-put-downable novel, Steve Erickson's Zeroville is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in movies and movie history. The tale of an idiot savant cineaste ("cineautistic" is how he's described) who wanders west from Philly to the bright lights and backlots of Hollywood, Zeroville abounds with references to pictures known and forgotten, revered and obscure: First off, Vikar Jerome, the hero, has a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, from A Place In the Sun, etched on his shaven head. (Ignorami in the book -- plural for ignoramus, right? -- mistake the movie duo for James Dean and Natalie Wood .)

Bunuel, Bogart, Antonioni, De Palma, Gary Cooper, Godard, the softcore Emmanuelle
series, Wim Wenders, Bergman, Altman, Chandler, Mallick, Pam Grier, Houston, Hawks, Bresson, Sturges, Joan Crawford, Eastwood, D.W. Griffith, The Battle of Algiers, The Shining, Elephant Man, Disney's Pinocchio, Mosumura, Black Narcissus, In a Lonely Place.... The films, the stars, the directors swirl around in the consciousness of the disturbed but brilliant Vikar, as Erickson leads the reader on a journey through the dark, glitzy L.A. universe, from the late-'60s on.

On top of being simply a great read, Erickson's deconstruction of the editing of George Stevens' A Place In the Sun, has to be some of the best analysis of filmmaking and film theory ever put to print. Zeroville, By Steve Erickson (Europa Editions, $14.95).

NOAH AT THE WEDDING

2007-11-20T12:14:00.000-08:00

"To me, it didn't seem that much of a leap," says Noah Baumbach, about casting Jack Black -- the farcical doofus of Tenacious D and Nacho Libre -- opposite Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh in the crackling serio-comic family study, the great, unsettling, Margot At the Wedding.

"I understand how people, obviously, with Jack, bring certain expectations," says writer-director Baumbach, who nonetheless sensed that Black was his man to play Malcolm, a deadbeat quasi-songwriter who's engaged to marry Leigh's character, Pauline. And who almost immediately rubs Kidman's Margot -- Pauline's somewhat estranged sister -- the wrong way.

"He was the first person I thought of, in a way," says Baumbach. "I had met him — he had gotten in touch with me after The Squid and the Whale. We had lunch, he, Mike White and I had lunch. I just really liked him, there was a real sweetness about him that I connected to. And so when I was thinking about Malcolm, I wanted somebody who was funny and from Margot’s perspective could seem like not up to par, but at the same time that within this resigned, somewhat irritable quality that Malcolm has, that he would bring this gentleness to the role. And Jack was great. I love his performance."

Gaining Control

2007-10-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

So there was Sam Riley, waiting his turn to audition for the role of Joy Division's frontman, Ian Curtis, while another actor was inside a glassed-in office, doing his audition with director Anton Corbijn, and doing the crazy, robotic, arm-waving dance that was a Curtis trademark.
“I saw this other guy auditioning, and I saw him go past the window doing the dance while I was waiting," recalls Riley. "I was hoping they wouldn’t ask me to do that, I hadn’t mastered that yet, and so I went down to the bathroom and started doing it in the mirror.”

Then it was Riley’s turn.

“I went upstairs, did some scenes, and then Anton said, ‘Can I see you move?’ and I said ‘OK, do you want me to sing?’ ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, can I have some music?’ They strapped an iPod to my arm and played ‘Transmission,’ and then I started doing the thing around the room while two producers and Anton are sitting there stroking their chins. And then Anton said, ‘You haven’t got your feet right, and I said, ‘Well, you can’t really see his feet on the video footage I’ve watched.’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s something like this,’ so by the end of it, me and the big friendly giant were doing this crazy dance around the room — a little room in a church in Manchester. It was really bizare.”

Riley, of course, won the role in the terrific Control -- Corbijn called him a few weeks after their audition dance duet. It was Riley's 26th birthday.

Gilroy Was Here (Again)

2007-10-08T10:35:00.001-07:00

More from my interview with Tony Gilroy, the writer and first-time director of the most-excellent Michael Clayton. In limited release last weekend, the George Clooney legal thriller glommed strong reviews and made one of the best limited bows of the year, per Variety ($704,000 at 15 theaters -- a $46,903 per screen average). It opens everywhere Friday, Oct. 12.

The legal universe of Michael Clayton is so keenly observed, the inner workings of its giant New York corporate firm seem just right. And Gilroy wrote The Devil's Advocate, a different, over-the-top thing (with a hambone Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves), also set in the world of law. Did Gilroy ever consider being a lawyer?

"No, I’m not a college graduate. I think I would have been a really good prosecutor, but no.... Any idea that I ever had that I would want to be a lawyer, or would encourage anybody to be a lawyer, has been disabused — not by the morality of it, or anything like that, but by the lifestyle. It’s so not glamorous. It’s such a grind. The whole associate game.... When you’re selling hours of your life. I wouldn’t want my children to be corporate lawyers."

Gilroy, 51 now, dropped out of Boston University thirty years ago, and then kicked around the city. "I lived in Boston playing guitar with various bands, trying to get a record deal. A few of the bands may be remembered, but nothing broke out of the local scene....

"I worked for a lot of singer/songwriters, doing sessions, and then I started writing music for myself. I moved to New York, and got really involved in writing lyrics. It’s weird to say, but at 24, 25, I was burned out [on music].… But I really liked writing. I worked on a novel and a lot of short stories, read a lot of serious fiction.… There were a lot of derivitive Raymond Carver stories that I had no business writing....

"Then I thought I would `slum it,' I would make some dough and write a screenplay. And I spent five years tending bar and writing scripts, trying to figure out how to do it. It was much more difficult than I thought."

Gilroy, whose first produced script was the 1992 D.B. Sweeney/Moira Kelly ice-skating romance The Cutting Edge, describes the "natural progression" of a screenwriter's career:

"First you want to get someone to read your stuff," he says, "then you want to get an agent, then you want to get paid to write something, then you’re desperate to get something made, then you want to get something made that’s good, and then you want to get something made that’s good that makes money, and then you want to direct. Your greed keeps going on."

The things that Gilroy got made that were both good and made him a lot of money are his three Bourne movies -- The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. The success of the first, trouble-plagued Bourne took Gilroy -- and, he says, Universal -- totally by surprise.

"If I ever thought there was going to be a sequel, I never would have killed Clive Owen and Chris Cooper -- two of the finest actors, two great characters -- I never would have killed them! When the movie was a succcess, they turned around and said, `We might want to do this again,' and I thought Oh god, you can’t use the books, the books are useless -- we hadn’t used the book the first time. And I thought, well the two people that I need are dead.
No one ever anticipated… We were just blown away."

And will there be a fourth Bourne?

"Look, Universal is owned by General Electric. Bourne is an asset. I’m sure there will be a corporate appetite to do it. I haven’t had any conversations with anybody about it, but it’s inevitable that there will be an appetite."

And will Gilroy, who's prepping his second directing effort(a romantic comedy), be onboard if Bourne is born again?

"I seriously doubt it," he says.

Sean Penn On Directing, On Directors, On Actors Trying to Direct

2007-09-26T05:44:00.000-07:00

Into the Wild opens Friday, September 28, at the Ritz Five and Showcase At the Ritz Center in Voorhees, NJ. It's beautiful, sad, funny -- an elegaic open-road odyssey about a college kid, Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who takes off on a vagabond journey across America, winding up in the Alaskan outback.

Here's director Sean Penn talking about a few of the directors he's worked with, directors who have influenced his approach to filmmaking:

"Terry Malick, Clint Eastwood and Alejandro González Iñárritu probably all were influential in terms of the process. You know, Terry Malick’s movies, from a young age, reminded me of how I see life, and so I would say that in the visual scheme of things that we resonated … in the family of Terry, of course, that would for me be quite a nice family to be a part of. Or aspire to be part of.... Terry might have shown me that it was legal in film to tie the fabric of the story together in a way that I had responed to in his movies. [His movies] represented the way that I dreamed, in a sense."

Here's Penn on the stigma of being a movie star who wants to direct (doesn't everybody?), after acknowledging that Into the Wild is on a scale, and scope, that his first three films never got near.

"Some of that represents the way the business works. The very first film I tried to get done as a director had a huge scope to it. But you’re viewed as an actor who wants to direct movies, and then you’re a kid, with a leather jacket on and a cigatette in your mouth, and they can’t quite conceive that you may know how to tell a story….

"And then, after that, you kind of self-limit, you approach projects that are on a scope of something you might be able to get done. Finally you say `F--- that. It’s not their fault that they don’t trust you. Why don’t you commit to this f---ing thing and tell the story that you want to tell, the way you want to tell it?' And what happens then is that you get more support."

TIFF07, Day 5.

2007-09-11T04:36:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 10. Not sure how folks stick it out for the whole run of the festival. After just four days of non-stop movies – about war, heartbreak, the ugly things people do to one another, about love, about movies themselves – I’m beginning to feel a little psychic bruising. Not to mention physical bruising – jostling crowds, long lines, feet stepped on by folks whispering apologetically as they make for the restroom midway through a film…. well, never mind.

But then you see something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and none of those petty complaints matter. In fact, you feel shameful even thinking of such minor discomfort and inconvenience. An adapatation, in French, from the Brooklyn-born artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel, of the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, this film is revelatory, crushingly sad and also a testament to the will and infinite possibility of the human mind. Bauby, the gadabout editor of the fashion mag Elle, suffered a massive stroke that left him paralyzed head to toe – the only thing he could move was one eye, one eyelid. With the help of a devoted team of physical and speech therapists, Bauby learned how to “speak” through that eye, blinking when someone called out the letter he needed to spell a word, then the next letter, and then stringing one word after another, in order to communicate – and in order to write. Schnabel shoots, in turns, from Bauby’s POV (with his perfectly lucid, cynical, desperate thoughts and unheeded retorts to the queries of nurses, doctors, lovers, friends) and from the perspective of those working with, or visiting him. Mathieu Amalric plays “Bobo” – seen in flashbacks as the successful Parisian publishing exec flanked by fashion models, a father of three, a devoted son to an infirm old man (Max Von Sydow) – providing the voice-over narrative and, for much of the movie, the lumpen form of a quadripelegic. If all this sounds unendurably hard to watch, it’s not: visually it’s dazzling, playful, full of sublime collages of images, color and light. And some of it is very funny. Dark funny, but funny. The sound of weeping was audible in the theater as Diving Bell moved along…. And if there are gripes about the fact that all the women in the film – the nurses, the mistresses, the therapists – are too beautiful to be real, well, remember, Bauby’s whole world was about beauty, and so too Schnabel’s (have you seen pictures of his wife, Olatz?) Cut the guys some slack.

Next: Margot At the Wedding, from writer/director Noah Baumbach, of The Squid and the Whale. Nicole Kidman is a screwed-up, passive-aggressive, somewhat well-known New York (and New Yorker-published) fiction writer who brings her young teenage son along to attend the backyard marriage of her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) at the ramshackle beachfront family home. Full of cutting comedy, bitter sniping, absurd tragedy, dysfunctional relationships, and boasting a performance from Jack Black that ISN’T annoying and full of shtick (a first!), Margot doesn't hang together like Squid, but Kidman and Leigh are amazing together. And so’s the kid who play’s Margot’s son – Zane Pais. Like Baumbach’s first picture, this one shows a real affinity for the painful plight of adolescents dealing with the follies and cruelties of adults. And did I say it was funny? Dark funny, but funny.

Interview James McAvoy, who plays the star-crossed Robbie Turner in the Oscar-bound adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 1930s and 1940s period piece, Atonement. He’s in a room at the Park Hyatt, guarded by the Focus Features publicists, and he’s got boxes of cold-medicine and pitchers of orange juice laid out on the coffee table. (Uh-oh, remember to wash hands as soon as interview’s over.) McAvoy, who went from playing a traitorous fawn in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to a young doc who befriends Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and had Starter for 10 out earlier this year, is a Glaswegian, and his accent is thick and burry. He talks about his pre-acting jobs as a teenager (one: at a confectionary baker’s, putting icing on cakes); he talks about having tested opposite Keira Knightley way-back for another role which he didn’t get (he won’t say which film) and then testing opposite her again for Atonement. He talks about the amazing 5-minute-long uncut steadicam shot, set on the beaches of Dunkirk during World War II, that comes midway through the Joe Wright-directed film. Since Atonement, McAvoy's done an action film in Chicago and Prague with the madman Russian director of Nightwatch and Daywatch , Timur Bekmambetov. It's called Wanted, with Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman.

Then it’s down to what’s now called the Scotiabank Theater, but used to be the Paramount, a block-long, sky-high megaplex in the middle of Toronto’s entertainment district….. Extremely odd to see a French film – a Catherine Breillat French film, Une Vielle Maitresse, full of unclothed, copulating bodies – on a screen that’s bigger than anything in the Philadelphia market, in a theater that’s absolutely packed. Think Transformers at the King of Prussia 'plex and then some: that's about the scale this pic, which will be coming to the Ritzes, is being experienced on. This is a public screening: festivalgoers munching on popcorn before Asia Argento, playing a nutjob Spanish sexpot in 19th century Paris, strips down to seduce the young Brando-looking rake in this peculiar study of jealousy, desire and fussy manners. Breillat suffered a stroke before she shot Maitresse, and she needs assistance to walk to the stage, and to hold "le micro” as she introduces the film to the appreciative crowd. Not everyone's so appreciative by the time it’s over, but that’s another story.

TIFF07, Day 4

2007-09-10T04:23:00.000-07:00

Sunday, Sepember 9. Have to see Elizabeth: The Golden Age for a scheduled interview with Geoffrey Rush (Sir Francis Walsingham), and after waiting on a long, winding, wholly unnecessary line (the new TIFF “Priority Press” system blows – especially if you’re NOT priority press), get in and get to see this grand-looking sequel to the Cate Blanchett Oscar hit. Grand-looking, but full of kerplunkingly lame speeches and dopey lovemaking montages. The love is being made by Clive Owen (Sir Walter Raleigh) and Abbie Cornish (the Queen’s first lady in waiting), as Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, aches inside, longing to love the dashing plunderer of the New World but not being able to do so. Something about a war with Spain and having to decapitate Mary, Queen of Scots. (That’s Samantha Morton, not looking anything like Ian Curtis’ wife in the Joy Division movie, Control.)

Catch the first 15 minutes of an Austrian-German futuristic existential thing that I’ll never have to review because it will never get U.S. distribution so I don’t feel guilty about cutting out on it. Silent Resident it’s called, and it’s set in a self-contained, Big Brother-maintained housing complex where the drone-like residents are prone to jumping off their balconies in fits of umlauts and angst.

Down Bay Street to the Sutton Place, where TIFF has a splendid Internet room for press and industry, with about 40 flat-screen Macs and folks taking a break from deal-making and film watching to check their respective German, French, Japanese and Swedish G-mail accounts. I go up the stairs 5 flights (forget the elevators here) and talk to Amir Bar-Lev, the director of My Kid Could Paint That, about (then-) 4-year-old Marla Olmstead, a preschooler whose abstract canvases started selling in the five-figure price range. The subject of a brief media hoopla, and a 60 Minutes debunking, Marla and her folks remain something of a mystery – intentionally, and intelligently so -- in Bar-Lev’s fascinating doc. The Sony Pictures Classics’ release isn’t simply an investigation into the authenticity of Marla’s work (did her dad actually do them, or coach her?), but a thought-provoking look at the world of abstract art, the relationship between a reporter and his/her subject, and, just for the heck of it, the nature of truth.

Really good film from Man Push Cart’s Ramin Bahrani. This one’s called Chop Shop and is likewise set in New York: in Queens, in the shadow of Shea Stadium, in a squalid block or two of dubious auto body repair businesses. It’s about an enterprising 12-year-old kid (Alejandro Polanco), parentless and homeless, and his 16-year-old sister (Isamar Gonzales) and how they get by, working, thieving, dreaming of owning their own food truck. The press and industry crowd stays throughout, and offers much-deserved applause as the credits roll.

Then it’s Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, a psychedelicized musical with a Beatles songbook and a colorful, choreographed cartwheel flashback to the tumultuous late 1960s, when Vietnam and the Martin Luther King killing and hippie kids dropping acid and cops beating on protestors – when all that happened. And when Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr gave us Sergeant Pepper. I have to write the review pretty much as soon as I get back to Philly on Wednesday. Won’t be easy. I am not the walrus.

Then it’s dinner with some NY and Philadelphia folks. And then it’s decision time: Lars and the Real Girl, or Atonement?

TIFF07, Day 3

2007-09-09T09:26:00.000-07:00

Saturday, September 8 Weird not getting up, getting coffee, and going straight to the Varsity or Cumberland for an 8:30am first screening of the day, but I have back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back interviews from 10:30 to 5pm or so, so no movies for me, just movie stars. First up, Juliette Binoche, talking about Disengagement and Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge, and about the other 20 movies she seems to have made in the last year. Well, a few less than that, but impressive number, including new Eric Zonca(The Dreamlife of Angels guy) and the Steve Carell/Peter Hedges studio filck, Dan In Real Life.

From the Sutton Place Hotel to the Four Seasons, where, on the sidewalk, a crowd of celeb-gawkers stand well-behaved behind barricades, hoping to spot stars (Clooney! Pitt! Affleck! Charlize!) as they de-limo into the lobby. The lesser-known Affleck, Casey, is first up: he’s Robert Ford, the assassin, in Andrew Dominick’s Days of Heaven-ish The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Brad Pitt is the legendary outlaw, and it’s a slow-moving, poetic, beautifully shot affair. Affleck is easygoing, smart, and the conversation is OK, considering he’s been at this for days, and that the army of studio publicists managing print and TV media for three pictures (Assassination, The Brave One and Michael Clayton), come and go, speaking into their walkies, thumbing their Blackberries. Two whole floors of press junket ridiculousness.

Time for quick lunch, then back to the same hotel where I ride up in the elevator with tall, chiseled-mug French actor Vincent Cassel, recently the villain in a couple of Hollywood thrillers, and here for David Cronenberg’s super, bloody, Russian mobsters in London pic, Eastern Promises. The doors open onto a floor of Warner Bros. flackery, with Ben Affleck standing idly in the hall (waiting for his brother, I guess). (Ben’s Mrs., Jennifer Garner, is in town too, with the much-buzzed teen pregnancy comedy comedy, Juno) Tilda Swinton, who plays a coldblooded coporate lawyer in Tony Gilroy’s jaw-droppingly good Michael Clayton, welcomes me into her suite, drolly saying adieu to her little coterie of bright-eyed, brainy-looking pals – a troop of fellow Brits dressed in chic hippie garb, a kind of Incredible String Band-look, by way of Fashion Week. Swinton, tall and regal, is dauntingly smart, articulate, amusing. I ask her if she could tell that Michael Clayton was something special as she was doing it. She could, and she cites a few others where she had a similar feeling (Orlando, The Deep End). She happily announces that she’s skipping out on Film Festival business tonight to catch Bjork, in concert on some nearby Lake Ontario island.

Next: Sean Penn, kicked back at the Park Hyatt, sporting sharp black shoes, a sharp black suit, open-collared white shirt, a muss of hair, a pencil mustache – and an air of satisfaction (but not smugness) at having produced a pretty great movie: Into the Wild, Penn’s scripted and directed adaptation of the Jon Krakauer non-fiction bestseller. Emile Hirsch stars as Chris McCandless, the college kid who quits town, cuts himself off from family and friends, and hoboes it across America, ending up alone, living in an abandoned school bus in the Alaskan outback. It’s an epic road movie, an odyssey of self-discovery and spiritual and earthly musings, and it’s heartbreaking, beautiful and full of rich performances (Hal Holbrook, Catherine Keener, Kristen Stewart). I ask Penn, who’s made three smaller pics since he took up directing in the early 90s, if he showed Into the Wild to directors he knows, and has worked with, to get feedback as he was editing. He had: here’s his list of mentors and pals: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Paul Thomas Anderson, Clint Eastwood.

Then it’s downstairs and upstairs to another floor for a talk with Hirsch, who Penn discovered in the L.A. skateboarding thing Lords of Dogtown, and who is friendly and funny and chomping on granola bars as he discusses losing 40 pounds over the course of the project, kayaking river rapids, and clambering up big hills with 80-something Holbrook and throwing up from the hike and the heights of it – not Holbrook throwing up, he was fine. Hirsch did the vomiting. The 22-year-old California kid segued from Penn’s old-school Into the Wild to the Wachowski Brothers new-fangled Speed Racer, which Hirsch says is “all green screen” – just him and a car and a Christina Ricci and a few other folks walking around a Berlin studio, with super-cool digital landscapes to be filled in later. Total contrast is style and substance and movie-making philosophy. Hirsch couldn’t be happier.

Finally get to see a movie: Takeski “Beat" Kitano’s Glory to the Filmmaker,a totally goofy meditation on moviemaking and movie genres by the deadpan Japanese director/star. Spoofing his own work in gangster pics, and his countrymen’s fondness for sappy love stories and Ninja action pieces, Kitano wanders from genre spoof to genre spoof accompanied by a life-size papier-mache likeness of himself. By the time this strange and funny thing is over, there have been totally surreal space movie sequences, pop-eyed animation, rock and rollers with huge prosthetic phalluses, cosmic explosions, Japanese Jerry Lewis-like slapstick, and a girl and her mother journeying through time, space and a Sumo wrestling restaurant brawl in the company of goose and giraffe hand-puppets.

Lets call it a night.

TIFF07, Day 2

2007-09-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

Friday, September 7.It’s 6:30am, and the barrista at Starbucks, a nice Torontonian in her 50s, sees my TIFF press pass and wants to know what I thought of The Brave One. She was at the opening night gala premiere, and says Jodie Foster’s a sure thing for another Oscar. Later, on line for the public screening of Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge, two women chat about their plans for the weekend, pull out a stack of tickets for the coming week’s selections and exchange views on the work of Im Kwon-tack, the Korean director. Then they’re on to Edward Norton, who’s shooting The Hulk around Dundas, nearby. Torontonians know movies the way Philadelphians know sports – no wonder actors and filmmakers love coming here.

First up is Caramel, which had some people wowed at Cannes and which is a very pretty, light-infused study of female longing and friendship -- written, directed by and starring the light-infused Lebanese beauty Nadine Labaki. It’s set in a hair salon, where the owner and her coworkers fluff and curl and shampoo, sharing secrets about their love lives and supporting each other when things get rough. An old, solitary woman in the neighborhood has a nutty obsession with paper, picking up scraps and documents everywhere she goes. Is this the future that awaits them?

Then it’s the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Phew! Set in 1980 Texas (and a key bit in a Mexican border town), this tale of drugs, money and killing with Tommy Lee Jones as a third generation Lone Star state sheriff and Javier Bardem as a creepily twisted, lethal sociopath, is gorgeous, spare, haunting. Best thing I’ve seen so far, far-and-away. Josh Brolin is taciturn and terrific as a kind of modern-day western loner, out for himself (but also looking out for his wife, played by Kelly Macdonald), who stumbles on a suitcase full of $100 bills – and tumbles into a mess o’ trouble. The jolting, graphic, wide-eyed violence is hard to take, but it means something – it’s not the Looney Tunes bloodshed of Shoot ‘Em Up. A return to form and then some for siblings Joel and Ethan.

No time for lunch, just a quick ride down Bay Street to the Ryerson Theater, on the city campus of Ryerson College, where the queue winds around the block for the aforementioned Ballon Rouge. Luckily, promo-people with bags full of free O Henry Pro’s walk by handing out the chocolate nut bars. (Now if somebody would just come along with free BLTs, chips and soda!) This is my last chance to see the film before talking to Juliette Binoche tomorrow. It’s Hou Hsiao-hsien’s homage to the French children’s classic about a boy and his balloon, and likewise it’s set in Paris. Binoche plays a harried actress who lends her vocal talents to a master Chinese puppeteer while her son walks around with his new nanny (a young Chinese woman studying moviemaking), and now and then a big red balloon hovers nearby. Long, improvisatory and full of sweet humor and mystery. Binoche trots out before the screening to take a bow and tell the audience how making Ballon Rouge was a "life changing" experience. It’s midafternoon and she’s wearing a ghastly black and white gown (there, my couture criticism), but manages to be charming and funny and Binoche-y nonetheless.

Pick up a ticket for the 6pm public showing of Disengagement, this one back at the Varsity – the indoor multi-level shopping/screenplex where most of the press and industry screenings take place. Juliette Binoche is in this one too (last year she had three films at the festival), playing a messed-up French gal whose father has passed away, an event which brings her Israeli French half-brother (Liron Levo) back to town, and sets off a trip to Gaza, in search of Binoche’s long-abandoned daughter, now a teacher on a kibbutz. This is an Amos Gatai movie, and it’s full of musings about borders, national identity and the confusion and dangers of religious and ethnic branding. It’s overstuffed, digress-y, art-y, but full of powerful moments, and a brutal, chaotic final-act sequence involving the forced removal of Israeli settlers from a Gaza homestead.

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, '07. Day 1.

2007-09-07T04:15:00.000-07:00

Thursday, September 6.

Arrive midafternoon. They’ve moved the Film Festival headquarters a few blocks down busy Bay Street from where it’s been located the last 3 or 4 years, so a lot foot traffic in a new direction. The city has always embraced the fest wholeheartedly, and this year’s no exception: Shops sport banners and window displays with TIFF tie-ins, restaurants and cafes have special signs; my favorite, though, is the table of books at the front entrance of Indigo (a Canadian Borders-like chain). The sign says “Option Me,” inviting producers and directors (and independently wealthy spec script-writers?) to nab such presumably unaquired literary properties as William Boyd’s Restless (the WW2 spy thriller/mother-daughter portrait could actually be a great film), Dinaw Mengetsu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bars, Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography, by the great graphic novelist Chester Brown and Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford, among about 30 titles.

First film: Slingshot, or Tirador, part of the Contemporary World Cinema program. And jeez, this is part of the contemporary world I don’t really want to see (why didn’t I go to that French guilt-trip pic about the war in Algiers?), but I stick it out: Shot with a jumpy, hand-held digital camera and set in the grim squalor of a Manila shantytown (open sewers, open sex, open shooting-up, open thievery, babies lying unattended on the ground), the film offers a verite ramble among the squatter set: a young woman scamming money for new false teeth; a trio of robbers; a bicycle cabbie in arrears on paying for his machine, and, of course, slimeball local politicians. Philippines filmmaker Brillante Mendoza knows how to move through the crowds (he should try his mini-cam at the corner of Bay and Bloor), but Slingshot suffers from a lack of narrative tension, basic storytelling, and acting (the cast is pretty much all off the street). It’s hard stuff.

The short that preceded Slingshot, called “The Shock Doctrine,” is hard stuff, too: Naomi Klein and brothers Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron equate 1950s emergence of electroshock therapy for patients with schizophrenia to global mega-crises like war, natural disasters and 9/11. The seismic economic and political changes that emerge after such events are never an accident, posit the filmmakers.

Next up: Control, a biopic of Ian Curtis, the young, brilliant, Bowie-influenced singer/songwriter/frontman of the short-lived late 70s Manchester band, Joy Division. A beautiful first feature by the Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn (he photographed Curtis and his mates back in the 70s), it’s a sad tale (Curtis hung himself at 23), but smart, funny and powerful, too. Sam Riley, who plays Curtis, is dead-on and scary, and he and the three actors who make up the band are musicians: they perform for all the movie’s club, concert and recording session scenes. Add Bowie, Iggy Pop, real Joy Division and the Killers to the soundtrack, and, well – where do I get me a CD? There’s also a Joy Division doc at the fest, and a Lou Reed concert film – a picture of Reed is on the wall of the bedroom where the teenage Curtis writes his poetry and song lyrics, smoking cigarettes and miming Ziggy Stardust in the mirror. Samantha Morton, looking like Carol White in Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, plays Debbie Curtis, Ian’s widow, and author of the memoir on which Corbijn’s film is based.

That’s it for (half-) Day 1.

Superbad -- The College Years?

2007-08-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

With its super-good opening weekend ($31.2 mil), Superbad is on track for late-summer box office success. Which begs the question: will producer Judd Apatow and screenwriting duo Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg succumb to temptation and studio pressure, and spawn a sequel?

What say the Superbad stars, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse? Sequel talk from an interview a few weeks ago:

MICHAEL CERA: So far, there's just been discussion among our friends.

CHRISTOPHER MINTZ-PLASSE: Evan [Goldberg] said if you want to make a sequel, he said he’d combine Superbad and the upcoming movie he's working on, The Pineapple Express [a potheads-and-cops action comedy].

JONAH HILL: I think there’s nothing serious going on. I also think it’s weird to talk about making a sequel to a movie that hasn’t come out yet, or done well. That’s like the worse thing you can do.

MC: Sequels, generally, you push your luck, it’s like you overstay your welcome.

JH: It's so, so rare that a sequel is better than the original.

CMP: 28 Weeks Later... --it’s unbelievable.

JH: I’m the only person who thinks that Back to the Future 2 is better than Back to the Future 1. Everyone makes fun of me for it.

MC: Why do you think the second one is better?

JH: It’s the future.

MC: Because he's got the hoverboard?

JH: The almanac, the sports almanac, man, come on! And Godfather 2 they say is better than Godfather 1.

"Rocket Science" Casting Crisis

2007-08-10T07:02:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Blitz had found his star: After watching hundreds of audition tapes and testing dozens of teenage actors, Blitz -- the Oscar-nominated director of the spelling bee doc Spellbound -- had landed the leading kid for Rocket Science, his fiction feature debut. Carter Jenkins, a California-based teen thespian, nailed the role of Hal Hefner, a New Jersey highschooler with a serious stutter, who tries out for the debate team.

And then, two weeks to go before Rocket Science was ready to rock, NBC -- which had contractual say over what Jenkins could or could not do -- said nah.

"They didn’t want to let him spend his hiatus working on the movie, they thought it was too risky," says Blitz, who had collared Jenkins just after the young actor had shot the pilot for Fathom (aka Surface), the network's deep-sea sci-fi series. "We flew him from Los Angeles out to Baltimore, we were about to turn our schedule upside down and start to shoot, without enough prep time in order to get this kid because I thought he was amazing, and then NBC said `No.' They said it while he was in the air, so when he landed we essentially said you can spend the night, we’ll go out to dinner, but then we’re going to put you back on a plane and send you back home because NBC won’t let you do this.

"So then the movie nearly fell apart.... The whole crew is hired, so it’s very expensive, and [producers] HBO said we’ll give you another two weeks to find a kid, we’ll float you for two weeks, and if you find him and we agree, then you can make the movie, and if you find him but we don’t agree, or you don’t find him, then the movie goes into turnaround. So it was really sheer luck that we found Reece Thompson. We had looked for months already, six months looking for the kid, and I had found one kid out of the hundreds that we had auditioned, and now we were told that we had two weeks and that’s that."

So how did he find Thompson (who, by the way, is great in this great absurdist coming-of-ager)? "His agent had sent in a tape, unsolicited… and somebody from production was ready to throw all those tapes out, unwatched, because no one ever looks at unsolicited tapes. But it was because we were so desperate that I said, `Wait a minute, I’m going to spend my afternoon looking at these tapes,' and Reece was in that batch. Otherwise, I don’t think the movie ever would have been made -- at all."

Rocket Science opens at the Ritz Five and Showcase at the Ritz Center/NY on August 17.

Watching Ingmar

2007-07-30T11:58:00.000-07:00

Ingmar Bergman, the profoundly influential, profoundly depressing Swedish filmmaking giant, died in his sleep today, age 89.

Back in March, writer Joe Queenan sat down and watched every Bergman title he could get his hands on -- 38 in all, spanning five decades. Queenan's essay, funny and perceptive, ran in the Guardian. Press here to read.

Wrote Queenan: "No one who ever ventured behind a camera has adopted a more unapologetically bleak view of the relationship between men and women than Ingmar Bergman. With a handful of exceptions (The Seventh Seal, The Serpent's Egg) where the director goes in somewhat different directions, Bergman's movies break down into three broad groups: the ones where men torment women, the ones where women torment men, and the ones where men and women torment each other. Not terribly surprisingly, Bergman's first movie (as an actor) is entitled Torment."

Matt Greoning's "Simpstasia"?

2007-07-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

There's a scene in The Simpsons Movie in which Homer and Marge are getting ready for some serious amour-making, when in fly a bevy of bluebirds to help undress the leading couple. It's a fleeting but very funny homage to the chirpy menageries of Disney cartoon classics like Cinderella and Snow White, where friendly flocks and forest critters assist the humans with their couture and their chores.

Simpsons creator Matt Groening has long talked about his dream of making Simpstasia -- a Simpsons parody of Disney's Fantasia. But given the years and years it's taken to make the leap from TV series to feature film, this little bit of The Simpsons Movie might be as close as the kazillionaire cartoonist gets to tipping his baseball cap at Uncle Walt.

"Joshua"'s parents.

2007-07-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

Director George Ratliff didn’t have much money to lure actors to his deft demon-seed thriller, Joshua, but he nonetheless managed the coup of casting Confessions of a Dangerous Mind's Sam Rockwell and The Departed's Vera Farmiga as the title character’s increasingly freaked-out father and mother.

How’d he do it? By telling the two indie stars that they’d be playing opposite one another.

“Sam really wanted to work with Vera, and Vera really wanted to work with Sam,” Ratliff explains. “They’re two rock stars of Method acting, and they were eager to do a project together.”

Joshua is currently playing at the Ritz at the Bourse, the AMC Plymouth Meeting and Showcase Cineart at the Ritz Center/NJ.

CASSAVETES ON CASSAVETES

2007-07-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

Zoe Cassavetes' great first film, Broken English, is playing now at the Ritz At the Bourse. Starring Parker Posey as a single New Yorker with a miserable love life -- and co-starring Justin Theroux as a Hollywood actor, Drea De Matteo as Posey's best pal, Gena Rowlands as Parker's mom and Melvil Poupaud as a Frenchie who may or may not be Monsieur Right -- it's a smartly observed take on the trials and tribulations of romance.

Cassavetes, 37, who divides her time -- much like Broken English -- between New York and Paris, was in town not long ago. She talked about the work written, directed and acted in by her father, John Cassavetes: a legacy of raw, improv-y 1970s and 1980s indies that includes Faces, Husbands, Woman Under the Influence, Love Streams. Some were shot in the family house, with little Zoe running around playing with castmembers between takes. And she discussed her mother, Gena Rowland, and Rowland's work in her dad's pics.

"What’s really amazing is that the older I get, and more life experience I have, that I can relate to these movies and understand them more," she says. "Because they’re totally adult movies, in their mentality, the examination of people, and their interactions.... Every time I watch them, every couple of years, I think, Jesus Christ, this guy was so completely focused on what he was doing, and so smart, and so deep, and understood women so well, in such a complex way. And even talking to my mom about it, she’ll say I don’t understand how he knew that, but he really did, and he really felt it.... Not to take anything away from my mother, because she really just took those roles and ran with them."

"I love all of them for different reasons, but I love Opening Night. It's so sad and glamorous at the same time, and I love the kind of mystical thing about the ghost of that girl. And the comedy, and the play within the movie. It has an All About Eve kind of feeling... But I also enjoy something like Minnie and Moskowitz, which is a very pure and simple story. Not on the same level as my movie, but there’s something similar going on. And you know, I love Husbands, and I love The Killing of the Chinese Bookie — that one is like the most beautifully shot movie I’ve ever seen.

"And I love Love Streams, but Love Streams really kills me because it’s the last movie that he made. [John Cassavetes died in 1989, of cirrhosis of the liver.] I can see the sickness in him. I was 12 or something when they made that movie, so it’s my most recent memory… there’s hardly a time when [I'm] not crying, or feeling very tense.

"But I’m so proud to be able to look at that body of work and think that I might have some trickle-down genes."

MICHAEL MOORE, NATIONAL TREASURE?

2007-06-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

Eugene Jarecki, the documentary director whose Sundance-winning Why We Fight is one of the most important films of the decade, had this to say about his fellow doc-maker, Michael Moore, last week:

"Love him or hate him, Michael Moore is a national treasure. He is so because America prides itself on speaking its mind, on confrontation and candor, and being unafraid to confront the powerful. That’s what we did in the Revolution... we confronted the powerful, and I think anyone who puts himself in the line of fire as Michael Moore does, to confront the most powerful issues and political actors and economic actors of our time, is going to win the hearts of the American people."

Jarecki was waxing about Moore because Moore's new film, Sicko, is out (or imminent). It's the baseball-capped Michigander's essayistic take on the American health care industry, a screed against corporate greed and selfishness, and a plea for free, universal health coverage. At the end, in a voice-over, Moore's urges his viewers to get involved, to initiate change, for America to become a society where we is more important than me.

"If we correct that we’ll be able to fix a lot of things," Moore said in a phone interview this week. "And what I was saying at the end of the film is that I’m willing to take the first step by holding my hand out across the great political divide, and help someone out in need who does not share my political viewpoints -- and, in fact, who attacks me constantly."

Jarecki applauds Moore's activist approach: "He causes people, particularly young people, to understand, whether you agree with him or not, that it is hip to think about the world you live in. It’s hip to think politically, and that engagement is the heart and soul of being a citizen of this world. And that disengagement is a recipe for the demise of this world.

"That’s a huge message that Michael Moore sends simply by getting out of bed in the morning and causing so much trouble."

MORE WINTERBOTTOM

2007-06-22T10:19:00.001-07:00

Michael Winterbottom has long been accustomed to shooting on the run, on the cheap, in out-of-the-way spots. In In This World, the U.K. filmmaker told the story of two Afghan boys traveling from Pakistan through Iran and Turkey and onto Italy, France and England. In The Road to Guantanamo, about the arrest and imprisonment of three British Muslims at Guantanamo Bay, he again set his cameras down in Pakistan. He has shot in snow-cloaked rural Canada (The Claim), in Eastern Europe (Welcome to Sarajevo), and now, with A Mighty Heart, the 46-year-old director has returned to Pakistan, and also to India.

With Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in tow.

In A Mighty Heart, Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl, wife of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and murdered in 2002 by Pakistani militants. The film, produced by Pitt's Plan B company, is based on Mariane Pearl's memoir. It opened Friday, June 22.

"Brad and Angelina’s presence meant that we had to be slightly more careful in Pakistan, perhaps, than we would be normally, with a high-profile film based on a story that is itself quite high-profile," Winterbottom says. "It made things a little more complicated.... Whereas, perhaps if we did do it in a low-budget way with a cast of lesser-known actors, we might have shot the whole thing in Karachi. But I think in this case, we all felt that with Angelina and this specific story, we couldn’t risk staying in Karachi, we had to do [the majority of her scenes] somewhere else. And we went to India.

"That meant, of course, that we had to get all the Pakistani actors, and all the non-professional actors that we were using -- we had to get all those people to India. Which in itself was quite complicated, because Pakistan and India don’t have the best relationship. We had to get visas for all those people. In a way, it was a big headache for the production. But then we were in India, with Indian crews… and everyone got on really well."

2007-06-18T06:49:00.000-07:00

GALACTUS INTOLERANCE

Okay, a small gaffe in my review (since fixed) of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: I wrote that the interstellar silver dude was surfing around the universe destroying worlds at the behest of the evil Galactica, when everybody who's ever read a Jack Kirby FF comic knows that it's Galactus. Many a dear reader called/emailed/letter-bombed to point out this egregious error. I apologize, and am checking myself into the sick bay on the Battlestar as we speak!

2007-06-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

THAT HOSTEL DUDE

More stuff from Eli Roth, who dropped into town recently to talk up Hostel Part II, a sequel that he proudly predicts "will have the reputation of being the most violent R-rated movie ever to hit theaters."

The director's canned line of defense for this orgy of torture porn and misogyny, in which a group of women (and one deserving fellow) get maimed, mutilated, dismembered and worse -- is a sound-byte he's probably offered to a hundred journos by now. It goes like this: "It’s Hostel Part II, it’s not Happy Feet 2. People that are going to see this want to be pushed to the edge."

And about pushing the horror/slasher genre to the edge, Roth -- 35, the product of a psychiatrist dad and an artist mom -- had this to say: "If you look at the stuff that was in Hostel 1, it’s being done on television now. I mean, Hostel 1 was so shocking.... People were saying it was the most violent American film that had been made in years, since the heyday of The Last House On the Left and Dawn of the Dead.

"And now you watch 24 and it’s the same shot: a hand-held point-of-view, picking up a power-drill, and you see it drilling into someone. So, the stuff that I did in the first one [for] theaters that was so shocking, is now being done on television.

"Not only is there competition with other movies, other horror movies, you’re competing with 24, Nip/Tuck, The Shield.... violent stuff that people can get in their own homes.

"So, my goal was to make a better, smarter, scarier film. I think if I had just put more gory moments, people wouldn’t go see it.… And I knew that putting girls into the situation raises the stakes. With girls, it’s the difference between hunting a lion and hunting a deer. When a hunter kills a lion, it's `Oh wow, what a great hunter, they killed a lion!' If they kill a deer, it’s, `Aw, that poor deer.'

"So, with the girls, I could not shoot any torture scenes the way I shot the guys' [torture scenes] in the first one. They had to be more over-the-top, more theatrical and much more stylized."

Enough of that.

2007-05-29T05:52:00.000-07:00

IF I'VE TOLD YOU ONCE...

The Irish film Once, opening Friday, June 1, at the Ritz theaters, is a remarkable little film. A love story, and a loping musical featuring the songs of -- and starring -- Frames frontman Glen Hansard and the young Czech singer/songwriter, Marketa Irglova , the pic has been winning raves since it emerged from Sundance in January with the Audience Award and a Fox Searchlight distribution deal.

But while it's impossible not to recommend the film, written and directed by John Carney and shot on a shoestring in Dublin, there's a danger with all the heaping praise. Once is a low-key, modest affair, shot with hand-held digital cameras. The closest thing to a special effect is when Hansard, as a street busker who's falling for this smiling yet melancholy Prague girl, arches his eyebrows. Inevitably, as moviegoers read the gaga accolades in print and online, expectations are going to be running high. But Once is so shambling and unassuming -- it's the anti-Pirates of the Caribbean! -- that it's better to leave those expectations at home -- and just go, kick back and enjoy.

And then, afterwards, head to the pub for a nice pint.

2007-05-22T06:33:00.000-07:00

PIRATES 3 PLOT RESOLUTIONS REVEALED (NOT)!

Disney has been handing out letters at its advance screenings of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End entreating critics, journos and bloggers not to give away the myriad turns of events and character outcomes in its skull-and-crossbones franchise's third outing.

"We respectfully ask the following," writes the Disney publicity gang. "Please do not reveal the many plot resolutions that occur throughout the film... completing the characters' story lines....

"We would appreciate it if you would not reveal these details in your articles, on your program, online, on your blogs or in any other format. We hope you appreciate there are many Pirates fans who will enjoy their moviegoing experience so much more not knowing in advance the outcome of the many plot twists."

Believe me, there are enough plot resolutions and character story lines in the long and windy Pirates 3 to supply the next ten sequels and spinoffs. Who can follow 'em all? Plot twists? Characters? Keira Knightley in a funny hat? Who cares!

2007-05-11T12:42:00.000-07:00

NOT SO "FAST" FOR "THE EX"

For most of its pre-screen life, The Ex, which stars Jason Bateman, Zach Braff and Amanda Peet and which opened Friday, May 11, was known as Fast Track. That's what the script (from the team of David Guion and Michael Handelman) was called; that's what the production was known as when director Jesse Peretz and his team were shooting in New York a year and a half ago; that was its title in the editing room, and in the marketing suites of the Weinstein Company. Until January.

"The movie almost came out a couple of months ago," reports Peretz, on the phone a few weeks back. "The Weinsteins changed their plans at the last minute, realizing that the idea of how they were marketing the movie wasn’t really true to what the movie really was. It was sort of stuck around this idea, with the original title being Fast Track, of it being this workplace comedy."

And while much of it is that -- Braff's character going to work for his father-in-law (Charles Grodin) in a New Age-y ad agency, and being sabotaged left and right by an exec played by Arrested Development's Bateman -- the crux of Peretz's comedy is the relationship between Braff and Peet, a couple with a baby, and Bateman, her former flame, still carrying a torch, madly.

"We weren’t doing ourselves justice, because it’s really much more of a kind of nasty love triangle comedy," says Peretz. "And also, we realized it would probably be a better draw in terms of getting people to actually come see the movie. So we decided to pull the plug on what was going to be a January release and give ourselves enough time to re-set up the movie, marketing it for what it really is. Hence the name change and everything. It was frustrating -- I was anxious to see it come out -- but in retrospect I'm glad."

2007-05-10T11:21:00.001-07:00

THE POST-APOCALYPTIC ZOMBIE LATINO MIND MELD

If you've seen Alfonso Cuaron's set-in-the-near-future thriller Children of Men, you'll remember the scene in which Clive Owen and the Girl That Can Save Humankind make their escape from a farmhouse, pursued by radical undergrounders, and jump-start a stalled car just in the nick of time.

And if you've seen Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's set-in-the-near-future thriller 28 Weeks Later..., you'll have noted a similar scene, in which the besieged Anglos, chased by viral maniacs across the desolate cityscape of a zombiefied London, make their escape -- by jump-starting a stalled car just in the nick of time.

And if you've seen 28 Weeks Later..., the dark, beautiful, scary-as-heck followup to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later..., you'll also have noted that an angry troop of human contagion are taken out -- de-limbed, decapitated, de-everythinged -- by the whirring blades of a helicopter, tilted frontward so the rotors become weapons. And if you've seen Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse installment, the zombie pastiche Planet Terror, you'll have observed the very same novel, bloody, use for a whirlibird. Yes, a killer 'copter.

"Of course, I've seen Children of Men. And yes, somebody told me about Planet Terror and the helicopter," says Fresnadillo, the Spanish director of the 28 sequel, on the phone the other day. "It is so funny. Sometimes ideas are in the air. And both are Latinio directors. My god, we are connected! We had an unconscious, imaginary mind meld!"

2007-05-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

"LUCKY" SIGHTINGS

Curtis Hanson's Lucky You, with Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore and Robert Duvall, is set in Vegas, in the world of high-stakes poker, which means a lot of casino tables and chairs had to be filled. Along with squads of extras and real-life poker champs, those seats are occupied by a number of familiar-looking faces. One of the stranger mugs: Ken Davitian, better known to the world as Sacha Baron Cohen's portly, hirsute and scary naked sidekick Azamat Bagatov in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Happily, Davitian keeps his clothes on.

And yup, that lounge singer crooning "Dance Me To the End of Love" as Bana heads for the gambling tables early on in the pic: it's alterna-chanteuse and Billie Holiday-wannabe Madeleine Peyroux. Bana tosses Peyroux a suave, Bogie-like wave as he crosses the room.

2007-05-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

PHILADELPHIA YOUTH FILM FESTIVAL

If you're a kid and you're interested in films, filmmaking, music, broadcast journalism and recording -- and that's what, 99 per cent of the 10-to-18 crowd? -- then you may want to head over to 440 N. Broad Street this Sunday, May 5, for the Philadelphia Youth Film Festival. Philly moviemaker and hip hop entrepreneur Tim Greene will be on hand, among many, many other folk. The fest and its workshops are sponsored by the Philadelphia School District, the Greater Philadelphia Film Office and Scribe Video Center. Click here for info.

2007-05-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

FREE(!) TIM BUCKLEY CONCERT PIC

The late, great singer/songwriter Tim Buckley -- father of the late, great singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley -- is the subject of My Fleeting House, a doc screening on Thursday, May 10, at the Tin Angel. It's got rare concert footage, including Buckley and band performing on 1960s TV shows (The Monkees, Steve Allen), plus interviews, plus great '60s-'70s hair and couture, plus -- most importantly -- the film offers a vivid reminder of how unique an artist, mixing folk, blues and jazz, that Buckley was. He died, at 28, of a drug overdose.

There are two screenings of the Rick Fuller-directed film, at 7:30 and 10 pm. It's free, but you have to RSVP. Call the Tin Angel at: 215.928.0978.

2007-04-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

BRANDING BERRY

Halle Berry, in town a few weeks back to talk up her tricky erotic psychothriller Perfect Stranger, also spoke a bit about her long-running and lucrative contract to promote Revlon products. Work-wise, she says, it requires "very little, if you want to know the truth," saying that at most it involves 10 days out of her year, doing a commercial, a print shoot, or a speaking engagement.

She added: "I do some charity work for them. They’re very involved in women’s health care issues. So, I spend time throughout the year working with charities that they belong to, through that association with them....

"When I first got asked to do it I was getting asked to do lots of things — and I still get asked to endorse certain products. I really have a serious criteria [which is] that if I don’t use the product, then I can’t endorse it, I don’t want to put my name on it. And Revlon was the first brand of cosmetics that I ever bought when I was a young girl, and I still use their products. So it’s something that I feel honestly good about attaching my name to because I really do use it, and that part of it feels good for me. It’s not just about having my face out there or getting a paycheck. I do think it matters — our brand, and what we endorse."

2007-04-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

MORE ON "THE KILLER WITHIN"

In the story that ran Friday, April 13, on The Killer Within -- the documentary about Bob Bechtel, a University of Arizona psychology professor, who, 52 years ago at Swarthmore College, killed fellow student Francis Holmes Strozier -- I excerpted a statement from the Swarthmore administration in repsonse to the film. Below is the statement in its entirety:

"The film is compelling but potentially misleading. After an exhaustive internal investigation following the shooting, the Swarthmore community concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that Bob Bechtel had been the victim of bullying by any other students. It is particularly notable that Holmes Strozier was widely considered to be a kind and thoughtful young man. The single most important factor that cannot be overlooked, and certainly influenced Robert Bechtel's behavior at the time, is the diagnosis of mental illness that prompted a jury to find him not guilty by reason of insanity.
We believe that many of the issues raised by the film are worthy of exploration – whether or not a person can be redeemed following such a heinous act; whether or not someone ruled insane can recover his sanity; the struggle between a desire to forgive, on the one hand, and a desire for justice, on the other, these are all complex issues.
However, out of respect for the Strozier family and our alumni from the time, and for the sake of accuracy, the Swarthmore administration objects to Robert Bechtel's misleading portrayal of the events of 1955. In his comments to the media, to the Arizona Legislature, and in the documentary film "The Killer Within," Prof. Bechtel appears to attribute the shooting solely or primarily to "bullying" perpetrated by his fellow students. Holmes Strozier was a completely innocent victim and no one can watch the film without being moved by the nobility and generosity of his family. We are enormously saddened by the unrelenting pain foisted upon the surviving Stroziers via the senseless murder of Holmes."

In my interview with Bechtel, he disputed Swarthmore's findings that he was not the target of bullying: "Some of the people said there wasn’t any bullying at Swarthmore. I think that’s kind of embarassing to them, because it’s a totally unsupportable position.… If they want to do that, obviously they have a right to, but it’s pretty indefensible."

2007-04-12T14:11:00.000-07:00

POWERS OF PERSUASION

William Wheeler, Harriton High class of '85, wrote the tricky, funny, fascinating screenplay for The Hoax, the Lasse Hallstrom-directed true-life tale of author Clifford Irving's infamous 1971 scam in which he convinced a New York publishing house that he had the authorization, and cooperation, to pen a biography of billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.

After reading an account of Irving's extraordinary lie and the lengths he went to perpetrate it (and cash in a $1 million check), Wheeler flew to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to meet with the convicted felon. Irving had written a memoir about the hoax, originally called Project Octavio, and first published in 1977. (A new movie tie-in paperback, The Hoax, is out from Hyperion Books.) Richard Gere plays Irving in the film, out now.

"I went to see Clifford Irving," recalls Wheeler, 39, the son of former KYW TV news reporter Judi Barton and former area kiddie show host Gerald Wheeler. "I remember that I went in trying to have more of a journalistic stance towards him, where I wanted him to open up and tell me things… But he was so charming and engaging and compelling and persuasive that it was one of those things that by the end of the dinner, after a few glasses of sake, I was like, `Hmmm, maybe you’re right, maybe it should be like Butch and Sundance with you as the hero riding off into the sunset. Maybe I’m coming at this all wrong.'

"At that moment I had a glimpse into the incredible persuasive powers in this man's possession."

2007-04-12T13:49:00.000-07:00

MORE BECHTEL

Reached at his home in Tucson, Ariz., earlier this week, Bob Bechtel talked openly and at length about the murder of a fellow Swarthmore student in 1955, the conditions and circumstances that may have compelled Bechtel to act, and what happened to Bechtel during his time at Farview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and in the decades since his release. Here are a few extra excerpts:

Q: The Killer Within is a story of forgiveness, and many people -- including the mother of the victim, Francis Holmes Strozier -- have offered their forgiveness. Have you forgiven yourself?

Bechtel: I think that I began to forgive myself in Farview. I began to understand that life has to go on. My insight in Farview — this is an institution for the criminally insane, there was practically no treatment of any kind, it was just hell on earth. And my insight was that the difference between Hell and Heaven is that in Heaven [people] help each other. So I decided to help the other patients and start up a school. I taught people to read and do math…. They got a standard gradeschool education... and it worked very well. The kids who were pupils in the school were getting discharged before I was -- which was kind of ironic.

Q: Were you taunted, bullied, at Farview?

Bechtel: There was an AA group there that I helped, because I was running the newspaper and the print shop... and I would give them publicity. The one guy in charge of it wanted to stay in power there, and I suggested that he step down, and he became very threatening. [But] I just faced up to him. It was the first time that I really ever faced up to a bully. This guy was bigger than I was, he was a professional football player, and I just stuck my finger right in his face and I said, "You don’t have the guts," and he backed down. So, that was another turning point.

Q: What do you think it was in your personality that invited bullying, made you the target?

Bechtel: I was intelligent and the teachers kind of favored me, and that made me like a teacher’s pet-type, and that’s a target for bullies. And because it started so young, when I was only 4, I developed this kind of automatic response where I would just start crying. And that was rewarding to them.

2007-04-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

"VANISHING POINT" DRIVER

A reader, Dave, emailed a correction over the weekend: In the sidebar roundup of vintage grindhouse titles that accompanied Sunday, April 1's, story on the Rodriguez/Tarantino exploitation double-header, I wrote that 1971's Vanishing Point starred Barry Nelson as a driver racing to get from Colorado to California, pursued by police. In fact, wrote Dave, it was "the long-forgotten Barry Newman, star of the long-forgotten Petrocelli TV series."
Apologies to both Barrys. But check out Vanishing Point if you get a chance. Nelson -- I mean Newman -- is super-cool, and Cleavon Little plays a blind DJ named Super Soul who gives the star some supernatural counsel via the AM radio in Newman's Dodge Challenger.

2007-03-31T04:11:00.000-07:00

TARANTINO ON RODRIGUEZ, RODRIGUEZ ON QT

It's a blood fest and a love fest, Grindhouse is. The double feature project -- homages to the exploitation pics that ran the grunge circuit of shabby urban theaters and nowheresville drive-ins in the '60s and '70s -- hail from best buds Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. RR's is a zombie pic called Planet Terror, and QT's is Death Proof, a car chase/slasher mash-up. They open, together, April 6.

Interviewed (separately) by phone from L.A. where they were hawking their wares at a weekend-long press junket, the writer-directors talked a little about what they admire in each other's work.

Rodriguez on Tarantino: "There’s stuff that he does differently than me. Like his action scenes are done reel-for-reel [no fancy visual effects -- just the real action, shot in real time, like the 90 MPH muscle car chase sequences in Death Proof.] That lends itself a realism that’s spectacular. I don’t think I would want to do it that way, because I would just be too afrad of getting myself or one of the actors hurt. I would do it on green screen.
"I just thought it was really awesome that he went and did it the old-school way with stunt guys from that era who had been dying to do that kind of thing again. You can just tell that it’s the real deal."

Tarantino on Rodriguez: "The thing that always blows me away about Robert is his terrrific editing. I think he’s one of the greatest director/editors whoever lived. He’s right up there with Russ Meyer and Eisenstein.
"But to me, with Robert, it’s about a shot -- he comes up with some cool shot that just feels like a comicbook artist drew it. When he does those kinds of things, that’s what really gets me thinking, `Hey, maybe there’s something to this whole green screen thing.' He’s literally able to draw his frames in, practically the way a comicbook artist would draw his frames in. To me, the shot of the year, the year he came out with Sin City, was that shot of Marv, Mickey Rourke, frantically swimmng away from the cars and buildings in the background through the water.
"And here, in Planet Terror, he has a shot of Cherry, you know, Rose McGowan, being pulled away in the air in a helicopter. It's this magnificent kind of closing monment for a sequence that’s just poetic and wonderful."

2007-03-05T07:11:00.000-08:00

BORN TO BE WILD (HOGS), or EASY (GHOST) RIDER?

Two of the biggest hits in the multiplexes right now -- the male menopause buddy pic Wild Hogs and the Satanic comicbook actioner Ghost Rider -- have more than mere motorcycles in common. They both have that long-haired, bird-flippin', American-flag-wearin' hippie biker dude from the seminal 1969 counter-culture classic, Easy Rider, in the cast.

Yup, Peter Fonda -- whose portrayal of Wyatt, a.k.a. Captain America, in Easy Rider, made the Son-of-Hank an iconic figure in the flower power days of the Age of Aquarius -- is jokin' around with the likes of paunchy suburbanites Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence at the end of Wild Hogs (Fonda shows up as the founding father of a biker gang called the Del Fuegos). In Ghost Rider, the 67-year-old Fonda is no less a figure than Mephistopheles himself, and as such, the proprietor of the soul of a crazed motorcycle stunt man, Monsieur Ghost Rider (Nicolas Cage).

So almost forty years later, Fonda, nominated for a screenplay Oscar for Easy Rider (with co-scriber, and co-star, Dennis Hopper, and author Terry Southern), is trading on his anti-establishment, chopper-hits-the-blacktop image. Whatever happened to that other Peter Fonda, the one who scored serious thespian cred -- and a best actor Academy Award nomination -- for the great little 1997 indie, Ulee's Gold?

Get your motor runnin'....

2007-02-27T07:06:00.000-08:00

THE LIVES OF OTHERS, AND THE LIFE OF A STRUGGLING STUDENT FILMMAKER

It took Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck close to two years to research and write The Lives of Others, the gripping tale of police-state East Germany in the 1980s, when the Stasi -- the government's many-tentacled secret police force -- spied on citizens, arrested them, tortured them, and sometimes killed them. On Sunday night, Donnersmarck, a strapping 6'9'' German who speaks flawless English (he spent a good part of his childhood in New York), took the stage at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood to accept the Oscar for best foreign-language film for his poignant, potent directorial debut.

So how did he manage life in those days when he was an unknown, struggling, yet-to-be filmmaker, poring over government files, interviewing former Stasi agents, Stasi informants and victims, writing and researching day and night, month after month?

"I was still a student in film school," Donnersmarck explained in an interview a few weeks before he nabbed the Academy Award. "I actually managed to make a little money out of my short films, and some award money. I sold a short film -- Doberman, a four-minute black-and-white action film about a dog chasing a man -- to Steven Spielberg, to a website that he and Ron Howard had started up in the '90s called pop.com.

"But I had a meager life, actually, until about a half a year ago. I’m still repaying debts to my father, my brother, and friends. You have to swallow quite a lot of humiliation, you really do.… What people admire about artists once they’re successful is the fact that they were willing to take that absurd risk of just living with that kind of humiliation for all of their life, because it’s crazy. As a person working in the arts, you have to have a certain pride and confidence, but everything around you conspires to make you lose that, you know. It really is tough.

"And especially, with this one, it took me so long. Sometimes, you have people who can live with that type of thing because they feel that there is nothing else they can do, so the opportunity cost is not that great. My opportunity cost was pretty high, because I was offered lots of really interesting things and jobs -- in the film field, but also in other fields. And, also [for a] macho-minded man, it’s painful to have your wife making so much more money than you and pulling far more than her weight in support of the family. That’s not something that I wish upon any man."

2007-02-23T09:52:00.000-08:00

TONGUE-TIED?

In the 78 previous Academy Award ceremonies, no foreign-language film has won the big prize, the best picture Oscar. Could that change on Sunday?

Although I still think Little Miss Sunshine is going to take the statuette, the best picture contest is one of the few categories where there isn't a lock, a presumptive shoo-in. For a time, Babel looked to be the frontrunner, then the buzz started buzzing for Scorsese's The Departed, then Little Miss Sunshine nabbed the Producers Guild best pic kudo. And there's The Queen and its clutch of supporters (there are A LOT of Brits, and Anglophiles, in Hollywood, and in the Academy.)

And then there's Letters from Iwo Jima. For one thing, it's a masterpiece. For another, it's from Clint Eastwood, the actor/icon-turned-director much revered by Academy members. Eastwood already has two best picture Oscars and two for directing (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby) and was nominated in the same categories for Mystic River. If Letters wins, and it just might, Eastwood would be making history: the first foreign-language best picture. And if he wins best director along with it, that would be a shocker -- Scorsese is the odds on favorite.

But assuming that happens -- Letters best pic, Eastwood best director -- he'd still have to make another feature (First Man, maybe? -- Eastwood's developing the biopic of NASA moonwalker Neil Armstrong) , and win again, to tie the record for the director with the most golden statuettes. That would be John Ford, who won his four directing Oscars for The Informer (1935), The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952).

2007-02-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

DEJA VOODOO?

Have you seen the trailer for Premonition, the Sandra Bullock thriller opening March 16th? A cop shows up at her door and says, "I'm sorry to tell you this. Your husband was in a car accident. He died on the scene -- yesterday." The only thing is, Bullock dreamt that awful moment, and her husband is still alive -- or maybe not, she's not sure. But she saw him making goo-goo eyes at his office workmate, that one-time supermodel Amber Valetta, and there's a calendar entry Bullock wrote on the day before her hubby's demise that reads "Jim dies!" in big red letters. Is she psychic or psychotic? Or is Premonition an unofficial sequel to Denzel Washington's thriller Deja Vu, and she's just messing with that same space-time continuum machine that the Feds were using down in New Orleans to alter the future and upset the past? To watch the trailer, click here.

2007-01-12T11:26:00.000-08:00

PAN'S NOTEBOOK

On the table in front of Guillermo Del Toro at the Hotel Inter-Continental -- where the good-natured, bespectacled Mexican filmmaker was holed up as the Toronto International Film Festival premiered his amazing Pan's Labyrinth -- there's a heavy, handcrafted, leather-bound notebook.

It's the book that Del Toro kept in the months before and during the making of Pan's Labyrinth. Its pages abound with intricate, detailed notes (in his native Spanish) and incredible sketches of some of the film's characters and sets: the half-man, half goat; skullheads; eyeless faces; spooky houses; gnarled trees; owls, and a little girl that looks like Lewis Carroll's Alice.

"I always keep a notebook on the movies, and I started this one on Pan," says Del Toro, handing the book over to peruse. "When the movies come out on DVD, one of the extras I put in are the pages from the notebook that belonged to that movie. But maybe one day I'll publish them too. I'll have to do some editing, however, because they also serve as diaries. ‘I woke up this morning and washed my socks.’"

Nothing scandalous?, I ask.

"Unfortunately not. I wish there were," he laughs.

"Each of them is a different art project. Like this one, for Pan, I call it the psychopath book, because I changed my writing, I modeled it after the psychopathic writing in Seven. And the other ones, if you see them, they’re all different....

"I think eventually when film goes absolutely to hell, I’ll just go to school, learn to paint, and I’ll just paint, and do books. And I’ll live in a little coastal village....

"Because, at the end of the day, the satisfaction I get is creating the image -- that’s 99 percent of my satisfaction. Then showing it and all that -- all of the work that goes with promoting and distributing and presenting a film -- I suffer, mostly. But when you create the image and it’s incontestibly beautiful, that’s most of the fun."

For a look at some of the pages in Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth book, click on this link to the Guardian UK. http://film.guardian.co.uk/flash/page/0,,1949730,00.html

2007-01-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

MORE SWANK

Some stuff from the interview with Hilary Swank at her house in New York last week, quotes that I wasn't able to squeeze into the Sunday, Jan. 7 story.

On playing real-life figures, like transgendered Nebraskan teen Brandon Teena -- or Teena Brandon -- in Boys Don't Cry, and Erin Gruwell, the idealistic young teacher in Freedom Writers:

"With Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry, I felt yes, [it was] a big responsibility, just to tell the story in a way that that person would want their story told. But they’re not alive, so how do you know? With Erin, she’s alive, so I felt it was brave and courageous of her to be willing to have her story told. That must be such a scary thing. I mean, how do you tell someone’s story in two hours or less? How do you do that? It becomes everyone’s responsibility, my responsibility, the director’s responsibility."

On what she looks for in a project:

"I don’t ever want to say, ‘I want to tell important stories.’ It’s not my goal in life. My goal in life is just to find stories that I find fascinating, or that inspire me, or scare me, or make me reach deeper, and be a part of telling it."

On the huge changes brought on by winning an Oscar, for Boys Don't Cry:

"I was suddenly getting lots of offers, lots of scripts, and all of that was incredible. But on the flipside, it was also a reminder of how easily we’re judged by first impressions. Because I was sent a lot of scripts that had to do with similar issues. For being one of the most creative businesses -- Hollywood, the movie business -- sometimes you find that the people don’t think outside of the box. It takes a real open-minded and visionary person to see people in different ways.

"For all the amazing doors that opened, which were enormous and life-changing, it also opened another door of challenges. And that's, well, that’s life: everything has a double side to it. People knew me like that [the Boys Don't Cry role], but they didn’t know me as the girl that I am. It was interesting to get people to learn who I am."

And Richard LaGravenese, the screenwriter (The Horse Whisperer, The Fisher King) who penned Freedom Writers and directed it, had this to say about P.S., I Love You, the romantic comedy he just wrapped shooting in Ireland and New York with his Freedom Writers star, Swank:

"What’s wonderful about doing this project with her was that it was a chance for me to give her an opportunity to show herself in a way that no one’s ever seen before. It’s more of an Audrey Hepburn part, it’s more of a beautiful, bubbly, feminine, funny, clumsy, beautifully dressed kind of role. And a love story, something where she can show herself as a woman, in a relationship....

"Hilary’s commitment is so enormous that you just throw any idea out there and she’ll do it 100%. She has one scene where she mimes a song in her apartment by herself, and she was just doing take after take after take and having so much fun… she does Judy Garland’s "The Man That Got Away," and again, she got the mannerisms down, she studied the way Judy had performed that song in A Star Is Born, and she just does the best, the greatest job of it."

2006-12-22T06:06:00.000-08:00

MEL AND LENNY

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, the concert doc featuring the words and songs of the great Canadian poet, novelist and tunesmith, was out in theaters this summer, and is just now out on DVD. The film begins with the Icon Productions logo -- a face-in-a-box image that's also affixed to the first reels of the controversial and bloody The Passion of the Christ and the super-violent Maya chase pic, Apocalypto. Yes, Icon is Mel Gibson's company, and Mad Mel helped make I'm Your Man.

"Leonard Cohen is this wonderful poet," Gibson says of the Montreal gentleman behind such plaintive ditties as "Sisters of Mercy," "Suzanne" and "Tower of Song." "I grew up listening to that stuff. We’d listen to it and loved it and saw the truth of it, but we laughed at it, we also cried at it. He’s an amazing person."

So, when fledgling filmmaker Lian Lunson came to Gibson's company with the idea to do a Cohen doc, and invite musicians Antony, Jarvis Cocker, Beth Orton, Rufus Wainwright, Bono and The Edge to pay tribute, Gibson said yes. "She laid this thing out and I said, `Lets go for it.'... And boy, nobody thought it would do well, but she made it, and she made it on a shoestring, and it's done really well. It endears you to him, and you can see the wide range of music and poetry… I just dig him. He’s a very private, very reclusive man, very humble man. I was proud to have been a part of putting that piece of entertainment and insight on the screen."

2006-12-12T06:47:00.000-08:00

FILMADELPHIA -- FROM DEMME TO DE PALMA, STALLONE TO SHYAMALAN

Irv Slifkin, a walking encyclopedia of film facts, factoids and trivia, has a new book in stores, and anyone who loves movies, and loves Philadelphia, should check it out. Filmadelphia (Middle Atlantic Press, $17.95) is a handsome soft-cover survey of movies made in, set in, or somehow significantly connected to Philadelphia and its environs, from homegrown megahits (M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky) to obscure noirs (Paul Wendkos' 1957 Dan Duryea-Jayne Mansfield caper, The Burglar) and gritty blaxploitation (Larry Yost's 1973 all-over-Philly Trick Baby).

Slifkin devotes page-long essays to scores of Philly titles, including Brian De Palma's Blow Out, with its Wissahickon Creek crime scene and famous City Hall chase sequence. About the 1981 John Travolta starrer, Slifkin writes: "Like a mad scientist in an old Boris Karloff movie, Brian De Palma mixes the premises of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 arthouse puzler Blow Up and Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 paranoid masterpiece The Conversation with a dose of Watergate conspiracy, a healthy sprinkling of cynicism, and images reminsicent of the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick incident to make one helluva Frankenstein thriller." (Phew!)

The book includes sidebars on key Philly area locations, a history of the town's storied screen past, and mini-bios of famous filmmakers, screenwriters and stars that hailed from these here parts (John and Ethel Barrymore, Bill Cosby: Philadelphia; John Forsythe and Bruce Willis: Penns Grove, NJ; Joanna Cassidy and Steven Spielberg: Haddonfield, NJ).

For more info, click on www.middleatlanticpress.com. To check out Slifkin's "Movie Buzz" webzine, go to www.moviesunlimited.com

2006-12-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

FROM THE EVERYBODY'S A CRITIC DEPT.

In short order (the weekend of Dec. 9-10), the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, The New York Film Critics Circle and the American Film Institute released their respective year-end lists .

A quick rundown:

LAFCA:
Best film: Letters from Iwo Jima
Best director: Paul Greengrass, United 93
Best actor: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
Supporting actor: Micheal Sheen, The Queen
Supporting actress: Luminita Gheorghiu, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Best doc: An Inconvenient Truth
Best foreign: The Lives of Others (Germany)
Best animated: Happy Feet

On the other coast, the NYFCC:
Best film: United 93
Best director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed
Best actor: Forest Whitaker
Best actress: Helen Mirren
Supporting actor: Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
Supporting actress: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Doc: Deliver Us from Evil
Foreign: Army of Shadows, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 French resistance drama
Animated: Happy Feet

American Film Institute Top 10 of 2006 (alphabetical)

Babel
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
The Devil Wears Prada
Dreamgirls
Half Nelson
Happy Feet
Inside Man
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
United 93

Glad that United 93, which came out April 28, was remembered amidst the post-summer onslaught of releases. Greengrass' taut, terrifying film is so much more than just a TV-style docudrama. In smart, subtle strokes the filmmaker asks us not only to think about what we would have done if we were on that 9/11 flight, but also -- and this is the heavy stuff -- what is the nature of God, is there a God, and if there's a God, is he/she/it heeding the prayers of Christians and Muslims alike?

2006-11-22T12:03:00.000-08:00

ALTMAN TALKS, RIP

Some quotes from Robert Altman (2/20/25 - 11/20/06), from two back-a-decade interviews, when he was basking in the comeback kliegs with his gleeful skewering of the Hollywood establishment, 1992's The Player, and when he went off to take an amiable ramble through the small-town South, 1999's Cookie's Fortune.

Talking about The Player, which used a murder mystery to nail a business built on ego and greed -- and which featured an A-list of stars (Cher, John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, Jack Lemmon, Andie MacDowell, Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, Bruce Willis) playing themselves -- Altman insisted that his film isn't bitter or vindictive. Though he holds the Hollywood of today in some contempt, it is an attitude born of observation, not hatred. Revenge was not, he says, a motive for making The Player.

"Oh, I don't think it's about revenge," he says, chewing some ice. "I can't think of any film director in history, dead or alive, that has had a better career" - and by this he means a more personally satisfying career - "than I have. So, if I become revengeful or bitter, I've got to be a pretty arrogant, selfish person. . . .

"I'm always frustrated because there's a certain film I can't get done or whatever - and I'm frustrated by that and always have been and always will be - but there's no revenge in this. I think The Player is a kind of mild assault, and it's not personally aimed at anybody because I don't personally know any of these people. "

There's a note of disingenuousness to this last statement. After all, Altman rubbed elbows with studio bigwigs for 30 years or more. He knows where these people are coming from.

"I don't know where they came from," he jokes,"but I know they're there. And I hope they're moving on. And I hope they'll be replaced by people who perhaps agreed with this picture, and by the time they get into those jobs they'll change (the business) a little bit.

"But I think the first thing we have to do is get the corporations out of it. The studios are run by big money-management entities, not by people. Nobody can make a decision. Nobody can play a hunch, because there isn't anybody in charge, there's nobody in the room at the top.

"The room at the top," Robert Altman declares, "is empty."

(from "On Movies," the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 26, 1992)

And talking about Cookie's Fortune, whose cast included Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Liv Tyler, Charles S. Dutton, Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty, Lyle Lovett and Patricia Neal, Altman had this to say about his penchant for overlaying dialogue, for weaving actors in and out of crowded, talky scenes:

"I've just always done it that way," Altman explains, on the phone from his New York office. "In the beginning I probably thought, well, if this gets boring I can always cut to something else - I don't have to depend upon one character. . . . Now, I just feel comfortable working that way. That's just what I do. "

(from "On Movies," the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 11, 1999)

2006-11-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

FAST FOOD NATION: CARNIVORES VS. HERBIVORES

Richard Linklater, the prolific Austin filmmaker (his A Scanner Darkly came out just a few months ago), has been a practicing vegetarian since his early 20s --"almost half my life," he says. But his mission making Fast Food Nation, the fictionalized adaptation of Eric Schlosser's 2001 nonfiction bestseller on America's meat industry, was not about converting carnivores to herbivores.

"I don’t disparage anyone who eats meat," says Linklater, who cowrote the Fast Food Nation screenplay with Schlosser. "Eric eats meat. I just think that people should eat healthy, certified humane and organic meat. Not the factory processed stuff we show in the film."

In researching Fast Food Nation -- which stars Greg Kinnear as a marketing exec investigating reports of tainted beef patties coming from a huge livestock/slaughterhouse/meat packing plant that supplies his chain -- Linklater interviewed several ranchers who raise cattle the old-fashioned way. Kris Kristofferson is an amalgamization of them in the picture.

"I really admire these guys," says Linklater. "The ones who are doing it right -- you know, grass-fed, no hormones or antibiotic pumpage. They’re good stewards of the land, they care about the animals, they’re doing it the right way. But they’re under such tremendous pressure. How can you compete against someone who’s cutting every corner, breaking every rule, and is poluting the environment? It’s not a level playing field.... I tried to depict that a little bit with Kris Kristofferson's character. A lot of the things he’s saying came right out of the mouths of some of these ranchers. They’re being encroached on, every which way."

Click here for the Fast Food Nation offical site.

2006-11-10T11:31:00.000-08:00

HIPPIES VS. HIPSTERS – COMPARE, CONTRAST, DRINK HAMM'S

Two great little indies – Old Joy, which opened Friday, Nov. 10, and Mutual Appreciation, which hits the Ritzes Friday, Nov. 24 – have more in common than just their improv-y, not-much-happens scenarios. They have the same product placement.

In Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, singer/songwriter Will Oldham and actor Daniel London play a couple of long-time pals in Portland, Ore., who take a weekend camping trip in the thick of an old growth forest. Oldham’s Kurt is the quintessential west coast hippie, bearded, potbellied and potheaded, too. London’s Mark is about to become a dad, and has to ask permission, sort of, from his wife to take off for a few days. Then the two guys go, and talk – about impending fatherhood, about déjà vu, about the blurring lines between city and country life - and they hike, and soak naked in a natural hot springs and mellow out. And they smoke weed, and drink cans of Hamm's beer.

In Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation, the musician Justin Rice plays Alan, an educated, jobless twentysomething trying to get a band together, and some gigs, in Hipsterville USA, a.k.a. the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He hangs out with his old buddy, Lawrence (played by writer/director Bujalski), and Lawrence’s girlfriend, Ellie (Rachel Clift). They go to a couple of parties, talk about friendship and art and skirt around the twin subjects of fidelity and adultery. And they smoke weed, and, yes, drink cans of Hamm's beer.

Maybe it’s an East Coast vs West Coast thing, but while both films are wholly engaging, I found Mutual Appreciation – shot in 16mm black and white – a little richer, smarter and more satisfying than Old Joy. The latter - in color, full of Zen moments of beauteous calm, courtesy of the ferny woods and tweety birds of the Oregon Cascades - received a couple of outsized raves, notably from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. But its rambling, shambling Oregon hippie aesthetic requires a certain amount of patience – not for the slow pace and spare dialogue, really, but for the characters themselves. Especially Oldham’s Karl, who can’t seem to articulate all the sad yearning he has inside.

In any event, both films are well worth checking out. The link to the Ritz Theaters is here. The link to the Hamm's Club is here.

2006-11-07T12:19:00.000-08:00

CHEESE, DOCTOR, POLICE -- MORE "BORAT," PLEASE

Advertising Age "Media Guy" columnist Simon Dumenco reports on some of the scenes cut from the final version of Sacha Baron Cohen's over-the-top, box office mega hit. The scenes - "Cheese," "Doctor" and "Police" - are all out there on the Web, and they're certain to be included in the Borat DVD. Here's the text of Dumenco's column:

Media Guy's Pop Pick: Beyond 'Borat'
Our Columnist's Current Media Obsession
By Simon Dumenco

Published: November 06, 2006

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The viral marketing campaign for "Borat" has been so effective, so omnipresent, that you almost (almost!) didn't need to go see the movie this past weekend. Now we can all look forward to the DVD release, which is going to be awesome, because there's so much stray viral Borat material already floating around out there that can be larded on as DVD extras. (I predict it'll be the best-selling comedy DVD since the "Chapelle's Show" first-season box set.) Need a quick fix of potential DVD extras now? Surf away:
.

Cheese, a scene deleted from "Borat" in which "Borat tours a grocery store with the supermarket manager" (search for the user "boratmovie" on YouTube).

Doctor, a deleted scene in which "Borat discusses the sexually transmitted diseases he has had in his life, some contrived [sic] from his sister, as a stoic doctor takes notes" (also via "boratmovie").

Police, a deleted scene in which Borat is pulled over by Dallas cops and "warns them about a cavity search because of all the Cinnabon he had eaten previously."

2006-11-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

SIR RIDLEY AND THE HORROR, THE HORROR

Ridley Scott, Knight of the Realm and Director of Really Big Movies, is trying his hand at something new: a comedy. A Good Year, opening Friday, Nov. 10, and starring Scott's Gladiator pal, Russell Crowe, is from the Peter Mayle book about a London financier who inherits his eccentric uncle's chateau in the South of France, and then has to choose between a life of making millions and squashing people, or a life of tending grapes, slathering brie on baguettes and playing footsy with the beautiful Marion Cotillard.

Tough decision, huh?

In an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sir Ridley talked about the first time he realized the power that movies had on people -- well, his movie: the jump-from-your-seat sci-fi scare pic, Alien. Watching it with a test audience, he saw viewers jolted and freaked by the scene in the galactic trawler's kitchen, when the crew sits down to dinner, thinking they'd vanquished the titular space monster, and suddenly a ferocious slimy hatchling erupts out of John Hurt's chest.

"My films are usually so savage, and I got this funny sense of responsibility, funnily enough, when I was doing Alien. I saw an audience rocked to the point of fear, and then saw the irritation that followed the fear.... People sit in a dark room and watch what happens, and for those two hours they're quite critically influenced by it.
"For a while I was amused, in an impish way, by that power. But then it gave me one big pause for thought. I realized, if you’re going to go that deep, it better be worthwhile, it better be about something."

2006-10-30T05:20:00.000-08:00

RICKY JAY AND A COUPLE OF MAGICIAN MOVIES

Neil Burger's sleeper hit The Illusionist and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige have more than their Victorian era settings and magician heroes in common. Both pictures have Ricky Jay -- the sage prestidigitator and magical arts historian -- onboard in key capacities. For The Illusionist, director Burger hired Jay and his consulting firm, Deceptive Practices (providing "arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis"), to give Edward Norton's sleight-of-hand act just the right authentic air.

Before Burger embarked to Prague, where The Illusionist was shot (subbing for Vienna), he met with Jay. "I worked with him for about a week," Burger recalls, "to fill in some holes in the illusions themselves, and there were certain things that I wanted slightly different takes on. I just had a lot of questions for him about the period and how the magicians conducted themselves and what they thought of themselves.... But in a sense the best thing that I got from him was his blessing -- that he loved the screenplay, loved the spirit of the film....

"And then he also worked for a week with Edward Norton, teaching him the tricks. Everything that you see Edward doing in the movie he’s really doing -- no hand doubles or anything like that."

For The Prestige, Jay -- a familiar face to anyone who's seen a David Mamet movie (he's had a role in nearly every one) -- appears as Milton, a music hall illusionist who employs both Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman's characters as ringers, fake audience members.

Jay has a cool official website, http://www.rickyjay.com/, which, although it isn't terribly up-to-date (the most recent film credit is Last Days, from 2005) includes a link to a Mark Singer-written New Yorker profile, "Secrets of the Magus." Worth checking out.

2006-10-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

ANGELS AND INSECTS AND PHILIP HAAS, OH MY

Writer/director Philip Haas' 1995 gem, Angels and Insects -- adapted from A.S. Byatt's novella, Morpho Eugenia -- is a sumptuously creepy tale of class conflict and sexual goings-on in Victorian England. Mark Rylance, playing a down-on-his-luck entomologist, becomes involved with a pale and delicate young upper-cruster (Patsy Kensit), and gets in a complicated tangle with her wealthy family's intellectually formidable nanny (the great Kristin Scott Thomas). Then stuff happens -- bizarre, beautiful stuff.

Haas, whose credits include Up At the Villa (also with Scott Thomas) and the Paul Auster adaptation, The Music of Chance, will screen Angels and Insects Tuesday, Oct. 30, at Drexel Univeristy, with a discussion to follow. The filmmaker is spending a week at Drexel's Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, conducting classes, critiques and screenings as the Majorie E. Rankin Scholar in Residence.

The screening of Angels and Insects is FREE and open to the public. Facts: Monday, October 30th, 7 p.m., Stein Auditorium (Nesbitt Hall - 33rd & Market Streets).

2006-10-23T11:58:00.000-07:00

DELIVER US FROM EVIL

Amy Berg's searing documentary about ex-priest and convicted pedophile Oliver O'Grady, Deliver Us from Evil, doesn't open at the Ritz theaters until Friday, October 27, and I fear some readers may have misinterpreted Sunday's "On Movies" column in the Inquirer. Berg's powerful doc is as much about the victims of Father O'Grady's 20 year run of serial molestation and rape as it is about the perpetrator himself. And the film is in no way an apologia for his despicable deeds. It honors the victims and their incredible bravery in coming forward, and captures the shame, suffering and pain they've endured since childhood.

Says Berg, from her interview with me at the Toronto International Film Festival: "How amazing are they? I mean, they talked to me after I interviewed their perpetrator. They were able to trust me... And they all really like the film. I’ve never done a story where the victims were happy with the outcome.... They're so real and raw [in the filmed interviews]. And then to be happy and proud of me and proud of themselves for doing it -- it's an incredible accomplishment."

2006-10-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

DEATH OF SOME PRESIDENTS

The heat-seeking fake doc Death of a President, opening Friday Oct., 27 (not via any of the big chains, though), isn’t the only picture out there with assassination on its mind. An audacious, bad-taste speculative scenario in which George W. Bush is gunned down on a Chicago sidewalk, the British-made telefilm seems to have anticipated a spate of fictional kill-the-prez productions.

Vantage Point, from the UK director Pete Travis (Omagh), is a Rashomon-like drama in which William Hurt plays a Clinton-esque Commander In Chief who becomes Target One on a state visit to Spain. Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, Saïd Taghmaoui, Zoe Saldana and Eduardo Noriega also star in the 2007 release.

And in Shooter, which just wrapped production in Vancouver and Philadelphia, Antoine Fuqua runs Mark Wahlberg and Danny Glover through the hoops. The suspenser's about an expert marksman called out of retirement to track down a would-be presidential killer. Washington Post movie crit Stephen Hunter wrote the bestseller, and the screenplay. Big question: Is Wahlberg, who plays the marksman, going to keep that Gumby-ish Departed hairpiece, or did he leave it in Boston?

2006-10-16T08:23:00.000-07:00

BEING IDI, WATCHING DEMAGOGUE DOC

Forest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin, the late and infamous Ugandan dictator, is one of the most stunning turns in this great American actor's estimable career (think The Crying Game, think Ghost Dog). To get the African ruler down, Whitaker studied films and books and watched old TV interviews of Amin, whose violent reign over Uganda lasted for most of the 1970s. But Whitaker credits Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait, the 1974 documentary by Barbet Schroeder, as the single most important resource. (The DVD is available from Criterion, www.criterionco.com)
"I definitely studied that documentary intensively," Whitaker says, interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. "It showed him in every situation. It's unusual in its candidness, and it captured some moments that helped me key in, like his eye movement in his episodes of extreme paranoia. When he’s talking to the doctors... you can see that he’s nervous, agitated… and then he tells a joke and all of a sudden people laugh. You see him exhale this sigh of relief, and relax."
Whitaker, a sure bet for an Academy Award best actor nom, says that playing such a rich, richly tormented and tormenting character required lots of modulation, and a certain moderation, too.
"I tried to find the character, play each scene honestly, and that was it. I wasn’t trying to build the insanity, because the film builds the insanity on its own. I knew that he had a sense of humor, I’d seen it in all the tapes, so I let him have the largeness, and tried to figure out what his passions were, and by that [the performance] would modulate, or at least shift gear, depending on what his mood, his temperment, was. Because he was very singularly focused about whatever he was doing at the moment."
Whitaker, who's been on an intensive work jag for the last year, plays another big and woolly character in Spike Jonze adaptation of the Maurice Sendak kid-lit classic, Where the Wild Things Are. Whitaker provides the voice for one of the titular Wild Things in the animated feature, due in 2008. Other cast members: Paul Dano, Catherine Keener, Catherine O'Hara, and Michelle Williams . Maverick novelist and McSweeney's publisher Dave Eggers had a hand in the screenplay.

2006-10-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

EAT, PRAY, LOVE, GO TO BANK, MAKE DEPOSIT.
Philadelphia-based author Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia has been optioned by Brad Pitt's Plan B production shingle, and Julia Roberts has signed to star. A travel memoir about a woman who, in the wake of a nasty divorce, goes on a year-long sojourn, Gilbert's tale ventures first to Rome (to feast), then to an ashram near Mumbai (to meditate) and on to Bali (for "balancing").
Gilbert's agent, Sarah Chalfant, confirmed the deal via her BlackBerry. Gilbert's website, www.elizabethgilbert.com, boasts a photo of the author that has a wee bit o' Julia Roberts-ness about it.

2006-10-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

KATE TAKES A VACATION

There are four films out now, or coming between now and December, that have Kate Winslet in them: the unfortunate All the King's Men, the sublime and startling Little Children, Aardman Studios' animated rodent yarn Flushed Away (Winslet's the voice of the heroine, a punky-cute London rat) and the holiday-season romantic comedy The Holiday , opposite Jack Black, Cameron Diaz and Winslet's All the King's Men colleague, Jude Law.
So, now, apart from a few days of press to promote the respective projects, Winslet has decalred herself on extended leave.
"From the beginning of last year until May of this year, I did three films," reports Winslet, who lives in New York with her husband, director Sam Mendes, and their two kids. "I wouldn’t usually do that many. But these were all amazing opportunities. So I'm taking a year off now. I’ve been off since May, and I’m probably not going to work again until next summer, because my daughter’s just started kindergarten, my son’s started preschool, and I don’t want to be pulling them out to go off to wherever and work....
"It’s been a busier time, which on the one hand has been absolutely amazing, but on the other one I’ve just run out of stuff now -- you know, run out of stock, just things, to throw into [the] characters."
So, no matter what comes along, Winslet's steadfastly maintaining her unemployment?
"Yes. Absolutely. And there have been things that have come in. And I’m reading, I am, I love reading scripts anyway. You can’t stop me from doing that!
And there have been some things that have come along that I thought, 'Oh, hell,' but then I thought `No, no.' And it’s no hardship saying no, when what I’m actually saying yes to is just being completely, consistently around and in one place with my children."

2006-09-12T03:23:00.000-07:00

THE POLICE ARE WATCHING (AGAIN), MARRIAGE ON THE ROCKS IN REYJKAVIK, MURDER IN SWARTHMORE, EWE ZOMBIE EWE, PLUS ANIMATED NOIR

FROM TIFF '06:
MONDAY: “Red Road,” a first feature from the Oscar-winning (for live action short) English director Andrea Arnold, is set in the grimmest corners of Glasgow and stars Kate Dickie as a pretty-grim-herself cop who sits all day in a control room watching monitors of video surveillance cameras positioned around the city. (Her department: City Eye.) This isn’t some futuristic thriller; it’s the here-and-now, and this quiet, coolly observed psycho-suspenser is about what happens when Dickie’s character abuses her position – her ability to literally zoom-in on people’s lives – when she discovers a guy who’s been released early from jail, and who clearly did something awful to her (it's the Scots answer to the German opening-nighter, "The Lives of Others"). The story transpires in bleak, barren council housing and grimy cafes; the accents are thick, tangled Glaswegian. There are English subtitles, and you need them.
Interview at the Intercontinental with Guillermo del Toro, the cheerful, articulate Mexican filmmaker (he taught himself English reading Mad magazine, he says) for “Pan’s Labyrinth.” On the table in front of him is a leather-bound notebook: his journal, and notes, and amazing sketches in colored ink for the monsters and fawns, faeiries and Fascist officers that populate his surreal saga. (He has a notebook for each of his films – one day, he says, he might publish them – although the personal stuff (“Monday I do my laundry”) would have to be deleted.) Just here from Venice, where he served on one of that fest's juries, del Toro is in serious pre-production on “Hellboy 2.”
Back into the dark: “Thicker Than Water,” from Iceland, about a couple expecting their second child who are thrown into a domestic maelstrom of doubt and betrayal when the husband discovers that his first son, now a frail preteen, is not his biological progeny. It’s “The Last Kiss,” sort of (Himar Jonsson even looks like Tom Wilkinson), except a generation older and it’s in Icelandic and everyone’s drinking a lot and living in Ikea showrooms. Message of the movie (and “The Last Kiss,” and “Little Children,” and who knows how many other festival entries: Marriage – It’s Rough.)
Next: “The Killer Within,” a documentary about Robert Bechtel, a successful academic (in environmental psychology)who, 50 years after the deed, comes clean to his grown daughters, his family, friends, his students and faculty coworkers: In 1955, as a student at Swarthmore, he murdered a dorm mate. Found innocent by reason of insanity and sent to a state mental hospital for only four years, Bechtel went on to have a distinguished career, and a loving family – now confronted with this shocker from the past. Produced by Discovery Channel, Macky Alston’s pic is disturbing on all sorts of levels: why’d Bechtel do it? Where’s the remorse? Can people really change? What about the victim’s family, and his cruelly aborted life? Is Bechtel the father of Columbine? And why did he, his wife, and their two girls agree to go through this psychic torment for the camera? Am interviewing the daughters, Amanda and Carrah, and Alston, tomorrow.
“Black Sheep” is an early-Peter Jackson-ish genre romp from New Zealand about a flock of genetically mutated sheep gone wild: Zombie sheep who go for the jugular and turn their human victims into, yes, zombie sheep. Shot in the glorious Land of the Long White Cloud (the Maori name for Kiwiland), also known as Middle Earth, it’s a cautionary tale of bioengineering with a Cain and Abel overlay -- well, actually, it’s just silly, fake-blood-and-oozing-offal stuff, with a few funny, gross gags and a good kicker. (A sheepdog sequel?)
“Mon Meilleur Ami” ("My Best Friend") finds the great, prolific veteran French director Patrice Leconte (“Monsieur Hire,” “Girl On a Bridge,” “Man On a Train”) in humorous mode, with Daniel Auteuil likewise shedding his grave “Cache” vibe to play an all-work-and-no-play Paris antiquities dealer who realizes he has no friends. He goes about finding one, thanks to the help of a sociable, sincere and smiling cabbie (Dany Boon). It’s light, maybe too light, but gets better, and slightly stranger, as it moves along, ending with a “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” game show sequence. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but the premise seems sabotaged somewhat by the fact that Auteuil’s character is surrounded by people who care about him (a daughter, a lover, his beautiful lesbian business partner), even if – and as -- he doesn’t seem to care about them.
There’s a late screening of “Renaissance,” the animated French futuro noir (English-language version, with Daniel Craig in the lead voice). It’s a graphic novel-come-alive, and a dazzling vision of a “Blade Runner”-esque Paris in the later 21st century.
Bonne nuit.

2006-09-11T03:38:00.000-07:00

“TAXIDERMIA”: THE TRUE “BORAT,” AND OTHER TALES OF OXEN, OFFAL, BLOODY DESPOTISM AND MAGIC FAERIES

FROM TIFF '06:
SATURDAY: For all its gross, excessive hilarity, Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” pales in comparison to Saturday’s first offering, “Taxidermia” (a TIFF press & industry programmer’s idea of a sick joke: showing this at 9am!). From Gyorgy Palfi, a Budapester whose inspired, altogether more tasteful “Hukkle” screened here in 2002, “Taxidermia, like “Borat,” parodies backward Soviet-influenced village culture, its wart-faced populace’s too-close relationship to poultry and pigs, and other things that make you laugh, wince, hunch over in pain and pop your eyeballs in wonder. Palfi’s whirligig visual style mixes and mashes Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Terry Gilliam and Jan Svankmajer, while his scatological, out-there sexual sensibilities have a bizarro John Waters (if he was Slavic, and straight) edge. What’s it about? Ha! A multigenerational tour through Hungary’s post-war Soviet rule and aftermath, it’s about the sport of speed-eating (championship gluttony, spooning down pounds of bean soup and gelatin-encased offal!) It’s about love and parenting and Army life, Peeping Tomism, and father-son relationships gone really, really bad. It’s about a lot of “ations” – masturbation, fornication, regurgitation. It has to be seen to be believed, and it should be.

Interview with Sir Ridley Scott, who tells you he’s getting over a nasty 5-day flu -- AFTER he shakes your hand. He and Peter Mayle, who wrote “A Good Year,” are old London ad-world buddies and they each have spreads in Provence. Scott’s wrapping his third film with Russell Crowe, the 1970s drug and cops saga, “American Gangster”, in New York right now. The director and his star like each other.

In “The Last King of Scotland,” Forest Whitaker is Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. It’s a big, lusty part, and Whitaker is great in it, going from charming revolutionary to paranoid despot in the span of a couple of tumultuous (and over-directed, breathlessly edited) hours. Seen from the perspective of a young Scottish doctor who goes to work for Amin and becomes one of his closest advisers, it’s a remarkable and odd story, very much worth watching despite its filmmaking flaws. Whitaker = Oscar nom (even though, having now seen Christopher Guest’s indie-world awards season pararody, “For Your Consideration,” it seems utterly foolish and predictable saying that.)

Interview Russell Crowe, who’s wearing black Sydney football club sweatshirt and who’s chatty and smart and talking about his daily commute from north of Manhattan to Governor’s Island, for the shoot of "American Gangster" (he plays a cop, Denzel Washington has the title role): The Aussie star gets ferried down the Hudson each morning on a speedboat. His daily commute on the set of “A Good Year” in the South of France: a 10-minute bike-ride from hotel to chateau. He’s beaming like a little boy.

Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” is another super-cinematic, dark, bloody, graphic, saga – this one set in Spain as the Fascists battle a stray band of freedom fighters at the close of WW2, and a little girl has an amazing journey into realms of faeriedom and fantasy. It’s “The Wizard of Oz,” if Tarantino got his hands on it, and he was Spanish, kind of.

I didn’t get what was going on half the time in the Indonesian musical “Opera Jawa,” a combo of Bollywood singalongs and a more spiritual, avant-garde-y art-installation and dance mindset. It’s beautiful, though, and strange, especially when the lovely Artika Sari Devi does weird dances with oversized, conical straw hats. Javanese puppetry, Indonesian politics and street crime have a part, too. As do beheaded cows. What’s with all the bloody, butchered livestock at this year’s fest?

EARLY EXITS, HARVEY KEITEL BLOWS, “LITTLE CHILDREN” IS BIG AND MICHAEL MOORE PREPARES TO SUE

SUNDAY: Things start badly – bloody awful, as the fake-Brits in “Love and Other Catastrophies” would say. A stab at jaunty, sophisto, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” tooling-around-London-in-a-vintage-Mini sex and relationship comedy, this self-consciously clever piffle from Alex “Madonna: Truth or Dare” Keshishian stars Brittany Murphy as an American ex-pat who gads, gawks, and I dunno what. The opening credits music, blasting over putatively snappy dialogue, was nothing if not distracting, the characters (a gay screenwriting journalist, a fashion mag editor, a hunky photo assistant) were annoying, and “For Your Consideration” was starting in 10 minutes in Varsity 8. Make a run for it.

(A note, in case anybody’s reading this: the last thing a critic does is quit a movie before it’s over, and if “LAOC” gets distribution and my colleague can’t review, I’ll revisit it in its entirety. But there are way too many possibilities and potential gems at TIFF, and buyers and other industry-ites get up and leave all the time. It feels bad, but then it feels good.)

“For Your Consideration”: the Christopher Guest Players do their thing, gently mocking Hollywood/Indiewood narcissism. But this stuff’s beginning to feel stale and crusty and somewhat off-the-mark. Thank God for Fred Willard, who plays an “Entertainment Tonight”-like co-anchor, wears a faux-hawk and gets off all the best lines.

“Little Children,” from Todd Field, is next. Kate Winslet is amazing as an unhappy housewife who tumbles into an affair with a hunky Mr. Mom (Patrick Wilson) in upper-tier suburban settings. Beautfully shot, and deploying a smart, ironic voice-over that lends a dimension of humor, and distance, to an otherwise too-disturbing tale, this is formidable, thought-provoking stuff. Michael Moore is sitting next to me. Before the film starts he tells me about the “Borat” public screening -- he could have fixed the projector if they’d let him cannibalize a part from another booth (he was a projectionist for many years in Detroit), but they wouldn’t. Then the lights go down and “Little Children” begins, with the Canadian distributor Atlantis Alliance’s logo: “They still haven’t paid me for “Bowling For Columbine,” Moore whispers. “I’m getting ready to sue them.” Then, five or ten minutes into “Little Children,” a weird meta moment as Jennifer Connelly’s character explains what she does for a living. “I make documentaries.” “Oh, like Michael Moore?” someone asks. No sound from the seat next to me.

I just make it into Benoit Jacquot’s “L’Intouchable.” His “A Single Girl,” with Virginie Ledoyen, is a real-time mini-masterpiece, and like that, this one lovingly follows a young French beauty (Isild Le Besco) on a psychic odyssey – although this is a geographic odyssey, too, as Le Besco’s Jeanne quits Paris for New Delhi to find her Indian father. A father that she only just found out about! Jacquot shoots doc-style, so people on the crowded streets of New Delhi eyeball his camera and occasionally grin, but mostly his camera only has eyes for Le Besco. She’s very good, and the film stays with you, even though it flirts with French art movie cliché and verite self-parody.

Speaking of self-parody, Harvey Keitel absolutely kills “Un Crime,” Manuel Pradal’s interesting up-to-the-moment-Keitel-appears story about a guy (Norman Reedus) who races his greyhound and bails drunken floozy Emmanuelle Beart out of jail for a living. Set in interestingly grungy quarters of Manhattan and Brooklyn (and boasting an opening shot of a Delilah’s Gentleman’s Club billboard – yes, the Philly strip club), “Un Crime” (it’s in English) is a mystery of sorts about the death, several years earlier, of Reedus’ girlfriend. Keitel plays a cabbie that may or may not have been the culprit, the perp. Beart, pursuing the case, pouting her lips and puffing les cigarettes, climbs into Keitel’s taxi (yes, he’s a Scorsese alum and he’s a Taxi Driver!) for the first time. They chit and chat, and then Keitel delivers his first major clunker: “In the harsh light, I see that you’ve got sadness written all over you.” People start running for the exit.

2006-09-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

SIGHTINGS (from TIFF '06)

Kevin Costner wandering around the Four Seasons carrying a shopping bag with a little purse inside.... Russell Crowe posing for photos with a family of kids. The kids' Mom says she knows the girl who played Crowe's daughter in that movie made by "you know, Howard from "Happy Days."" (That would be "Cinderella Man." I swear!)..... Marion Cotillard, Crowe's star in "A Good Year," conversing in French with her Quebecois handler in the Four Seasons elevator, discussing red carpet etiquette....

2006-09-10T04:18:00.000-07:00

BETRAYAL, REVENGE, INCEST AND SACHA BARON COHEN WRESTLING WITH A FAT, NAKED GUY

Friday, Sept. 8

Day 2: First up, “Deliver Us From Evil,” an expertly made, profoundly troubling doc about defrocked and convicted Catholic priest Oliver O’Grady and his 20-year run of sexual abuse of children and adult parishioners in California. Amy Berg, a veteran CNN and CBS news producer, intercuts chilling interviews with the serial pedophile, now roaming free (and apparently jolly) in Ireland, and heartbreaking segments with a number of O’Grady’s victims and their families. Lawyers, activist priests, abuse experts and historians fill out the narrative, which does not paint a pretty picture of the institution of the Catholic Church, from the Los Angeles archdiocese that oversaw O’Grady to the Vatican itself.

Then, “La Tourneuse de Pages (The Page Turner).” Director Denis Dercourt’s ice-cool and elegant French revenger takes a page (or deux) from Chabrol -- “La Ceremonie,” especially -- and demonstrates that Deborah Francois’ performance in the Cannes-winner “L’Enfant” was anything but a fluke. Here, the mole-specked actress stars as Melanie, a musical prodigy from a working class provincial family (the parents are butchers – more about animal carcasses later). In childhood, following a traumatic audition, she abandoned the piano. Now a young woman, she gets a job as a page-turner for a celebrated classical pianist (Catherine Frot). The position is no accident, it seems, as Melanie insinuates herself into the lives of the frosty musician, her high-powered lawyer husband and their piano-playing son. Revanche!

A run from the Varsity, a 12-screen complex in a block of fancy shops where most of the press and industry screenings are held, to the Intercontinental, where a swarm of indie P.R. firms have their offices and the hotel patio becomes a defacto gab-lounge during the festival run. Interview with Amy Berg, director of “Deliver Us From Evil.” This is only her second fest -– she landed Lions Gate as a distributor at the first, the L.A. Film Festival, in a “little bidding war.” Berg’s head turns along with others as Glaswegian comic Billy Connolly works the al fresco room (he’s here with "Fido," a Canadian entry). The waiter reports that Penelope Cruz and her director, the Spanish brandname Pedro Almodovar, have already come and gone.

Third pic: “Borat Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” in which Sacha Baron Cohen goes from the Frenchie racecar driver of “Talladega Nights” to this mustachioed newscaster of Kazakhstan’s state-run TV station. The mock-doc, directed by “Seinfeld”/ “Curb Your Enthusiasm” dude Larry Charles (no relation to Larry David), starts in Borat’s Kazakh village, where he bids farewell to family and livestock to take a road trip across the USA, but not before merrily lampooning post-Soviet Eurasian culture, with references to, I dunno, bestiality, incest, prostitution and wrinkled old crones in babushkas. Cohen, who is Jewish, delves into anti-Semitic themes, too, in both his character’s homeland (the traditional "Running of the Jews") and in the USA, where Borat begins his journey in New York and ends it in Orange County. An outrageous odyssey, it brings the hirsute foreigner into contact with Southern etiquette classes, a plus-size black hooker, a giant bear, an ice cream truck, an Evangelical ministry, an unbelievable naked wrestling match/quasi sex scene between Borat and his portly news producer, and a Pamela Anderson autograph signing that ends with the former "Baywatch" babe being put in a sack. Seriously. (The press screening went without a hitch; but the previous night’s public presentation went south 15 or 20 minutes into the film, with a projection room disaster. No one could fix things, so Cohen, Charles and documentarian Michael Moore (he was in the audience) offered to entertain – and entertain questions from the crowd.

“Chacun Sa Nuit” (“To Each Their Night”, or the less-telling Anglo title “One to Another”) is next – a disappointment co-directed by the actor Jean-Marc Barr. It’s about five randy teenagers, four guys and a girl, in some sunny quadrant of France --childhood friends who swim naked, have sex, play in a bad rock band and occasionally go home for dinner. (Think: Gallic version of Larry Clark’s “Kids.) The pouty, Converse-wearing Lizzie Brochere plays Lucie, who goes from boy to boy, but who remains in love with her brother, Pierre (Arthur Dupont), in a rather intimate manner. Meanwhile, Pierre, who’s bisexual, goes missing and then turns up dead. Call the cops. It’s a mystery, kind of, but less a whodunit than a who-cares?

Lots of talk about the serious, socio-political tenor of this year’s festival, and it’s true. Even “Borat,” for all its comic outrageousness, grapples with weighty stuff (and not just that fat guy): American xenophobia, international anti-Semitism, radical Islamicism and East-West conflict. The documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” which showed tonight, echoes the opening night German secret police drama “The Lives of Others” in its account of the Nixon administration’s and FBI’s orchestrated campaign of surveillance and interference against the ex-Beatle peacenik and his wife, Yoko. Not to mention the much-buzzed, yet-to-be-screened "Death of a President" -- the hypothetical, faux doc about the assassination of President George W. Bush and its tumultuous aftermath.
Good night, and good luck.

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