Nichols At MoMA

NYTIMES.COM: Mike Nichols, Master of Invisibility
By CHARLES McGRATH -- Published: April 10, 2009
Photo by Tony Cenicola

MIKE NICHOLS, the subject of a two-week retrospective starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art, is not an obvious choice for a place as artsy and highbrow as the MoMA film department. MoMA retrospectives tend to be awarded to brooding European auteurs — Milos Forman was the last one, and Bernardo Bertolucci is scheduled for next year — and not to commercial Hollywood directors who include on their résumé pop hits like “Working Girl,” “The Birdcage” and, just recently, “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

Except for a puzzling string of duds in the mid-’70s, almost all of Mr. Nichols’s movies have made money, and a few, like “The Graduate” and “Carnal Knowledge,” have been recognized as cultural landmarks. But because of their commercial shimmer, their way of eliciting exceptional performances by top-of-the-line stars, it’s sometimes hard to say what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols movie. They seem like vehicles for actors, not the director, whose stamp is in leaving almost no trace of himself.

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To read the rest of the article, click here.

It's interesting... I would've thought that "The Graduate", "Who's Afraid Of Virgina Woolf?" and "Carnal Knowledge" alone would have sufficient highbrow cachet to merit a MoMA retrospective. But they still made too much money? Sheesh!

What If... Brad Bird Had Directed The Spirit?

LA TIMES: 'The Spirit' movie that could have been
by Steven Paul Leiva - 11:55 AM PT, Dec 12 2008

For every movie that makes it to the screen, there are a thousand projects that fall to the wayside. Later this month, "The Spirit," finally, hits theaters after plenty of failed attempts. Steven Paul Leiva was a key figure in one of those failed attempts and in this guest essay for Hero Complex he talks about the film that could have been.

Frank Miller’s film version of Will Eisner’s innovative 1940s comic book, “The Spirit” opens on Christmas Day. It will be stylistic and hyper-visual, a hoped-for perfect melding of film and “sequential art,” a term coined by Eisner. What it will not be, however, is revolutionary. Comic book movies are now the meat and potatoes -- not to mention several side vegetables -- of Hollywood. And even its green screen, scene-simulation style is just part of a Miller continuum that started with “Sin City.”

But if the world had turned a little differently, if fate had been a little kinder, a “Spirit” feature film would have debuted in the 1980s that would not only have been revolutionary but -- those of us involved in it were convinced -- a huge hit, possibly the first $100 million-grossing animated feature. And the futures of such filmmakers as Brad Bird, Gary Kurtz, John Musker and John Lasseter might have taken alternative paths.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Thanks to Cartoon Brew for the tip!

Yogi Bear Returns to The Big Screen

YAHOO! NEWS: Yogi, Boo-Boo ready for their close-ups
By Steven Zeitchik - Thu Oct 2, 8:46 AM ET

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Warner Bros. is taking a trip to Jellystone Park.

The studio is developing a feature version of "Yogi Bear," the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon. "Surf's Up" co-helmer/co-writer Ash Brannon will direct the film.

To read more, click here.

The Sad Story Of David Lean's Nostromo

"Sir David Lean is rightly celebrated as one of British cinema's greatest ever directors, the creator of, among others, Lawrence of Arabia, Great Expectations and The Bridge on the River Kwai. And yet little is known of his final project, Nostromo, which proved to be one of the biggest epics never to see the light of day and which caused the downfall of a tormented genius.

Based on Joseph Conrad's novel, written in 1904, the project took five years of work, involving four different scriptwriters and some of the most celebrated names in cinematic history, including Steven Spielberg, Alec Guinness, Marlon Brando and Peter O'Toole. But the effort involved proved too much for the director, whose mental and physical health declined dramatically during the course of the project and, ultimately, led to his death on 16 April 1991 at the age of 83 – six weeks before the film was set to shoot."

To read the rest of Chris Evans' article for The Independent, click here.

Henson Biopic A Possibility

EMPIREFILMGROUP.COM: Empire acquires rights to Jim Henson screenplay
Empire has scheduled the film for production in late summer with a $30 million budget
February 4, 2008

Empire Film Group, Inc. has acquired the motion picture production and distribution rights to "Henson," an original screenplay by Robert D. Slane that chronicles the life and achievements of Muppets creator, Jim Henson. Empire has pegged the film for production in late summer with a $30 million budget to be funded through a consortium of international presales and co-production partners.

"This is a major project about an entertainer of legendary stature and worldwide acclaim," said Dean Hamilton-Bornstein, CEO of Empire Film Group. "The script is superb and should provide a terrific roadmap for a completed film that will satisfy both mainstream audiences and critics. We're very excited about this acquisition and the commercial caliber of this project."

"Henson" covers the life of puppeteer, filmmaker and entertainment mogul Jim Henson, from his early fascination with television as a teenager, through his spectacular career and life achievements. Empire anticipates hiring a major director, such as Penny Marshall, and hopes to attract notable star cast in key roles. Bornstein will act as Executive Producer, with Empire Home Entertainment President Eric Parkinson producing the film along with Xavier Mitchell.

"Jim Henson is one of the best known and most beloved entertainers of all time," said Parkinson. "His story is inspiring, tragic, heartwarming and epic, and will make for an important and entertaining motion picture. This is the sort of movie that Empire will be pursuing as we build the company into a leading independent studio."

Learn more about Empire Film Group by visiting www.empirefilmgroup.com.

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Sounds great to me! I'd love to see a good film about Jim Henson. His work has been languishing for years, and a well-made biography might help inspire a new generation of puppeteers.

Remake OTD: C.H.U.D.

DREAD CENTRAL UPDATE: Zombie to Redo C.H.U.D.!
Submitted by Johnny Butane on Wed, 11/07/2007 - 4:25pm.

This just in! Spoke with Rob and he confirmed he WILL be helming the C.H.U.D. remake!

Now this would be just plain weird ... But kinda cool at the same time.

Billboard.com just posted an article about Rob Zombie’s upcoming projects, everything from a White Zombie box set to the special edition of Halloween, and made mention in passing that the rocker cum director is attached to a remake of C.H.U.D..

Whoa now, what? Why? I mean, the original is a classic in its own right and a remake sure wouldn’t hurt, but why would Zombie tackle it? Billboard didn’t get confirmation from Zombie if that is his next film or not, so we’ll put this one in the “rumors” box for now.

Keep checking back; we’ll give you more when we know it!

- Johnny Butane

Don Rickles - Still Going Strong In 'Mr. Warmth'

LA TIMES: Don Rickles is still in your face
A new documentary captures the myriad sides of insult comic Don Rickles. - November 8, 2007
By Paul Brownfield, LA Times Staff Writer - Photo by Anne Cusack

THERE are various ways to gauge the longevity of Don Rickles. His longtime publicist, Paul Shefrin, is the son of Rickles' previous publicist, Gene Shefrin, just as Rickles' longtime business manager, Bill Braunstein, is the son of Rickles' previous business manager, Jerry Braunstein.

"There was no voting, they were just given the jobs," Rickles said of the sons.

Rickles is 81 and enjoying a little bit of a renaissance, as it happens, with a memoir, "Rickles' Book," and now "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project," a feature-length documentary directed by John Landis, of "Animal House" and "The Blues Brothers" movie fame. The film screens at the AFI Film Festival Friday night and debuts on HBO Dec. 2.

The Rickles vault will always contain vintage "Tonight Show" clips and his appearances on Dean Martin celebrity roasts, Rickles brandishing his malice in a way that somewhere came back around to him as an ambassador of goodwill.

Today, when it comes to the art of the insult, the air is thicker but the skin is thinner (see Chris Rock versus Sean Penn at the Academy Awards in 2005). Maybe that's why Rickles holds up; he is, finally, still better than anyone at making ridicule seem cathartic. Despite this fact, no one had ever captured his live act on film, largely because Rickles himself never wanted to participate.

"Mr. Warmth" offers generous portions of Rickles performing last November at the Stardust in Las Vegas, before that hotel and casino was imploded. (Rickles said he just signed up for dates at the Orleans.)

According to Shefrin, Rickles does his act approximately 75 times a year. Occasionally, Rickles said, he can get the Indian casinos he plays to send him a private plane, but there's no mistaking his stunning endurance, and the mental acuity it takes to work a room, firing off insults at various customers who've paid for this very privilege.

Landis, who figures he's seen Rickles perform 50 times, says 65% to 70% of the act doesn't much change (ribbing the band; interludes of singing; assaulting the guy in the front row with: "That your wife?").

"But then there's always that 30 to 40% you've never heard before," Landis said. "The truth is he's a performance artist. I always thought so. He tells no jokes. There are no Don Rickles impersonators."

And yet "Mr. Warmth" is more than a concert film; it's a march through the history of Rickles' life, full of grace notes. Son of an Eastern European-Jewish immigrant father and a strong-willed mother, Rickles never went to college and served in the Philippines in World War II, later attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before moving to L.A., where, deep into his 20s, he continued to live with his mother Etta (in a high-rise then called Park Sunset, mother and son's living quarters separated by a curtain) while going onstage at a club called the Slate Brothers, where one night, as legend has it (though the venue changes according to the source), Rickles befriended Frank Sinatra by calling out: "Make yourself at home, Frank. Hit somebody."

Fraught silence, then a release of laughter. At L'Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills this week, munching on peanuts, Rickles told a similarly themed story from his days working the lounge at the Sahara, back when Vegas was run by the mob. Rickles performed on a stage over the bar ("There was a small stage and in between was a pit, where the bartenders walked, and the bar," he said). He did several shows nightly with Louis Prima -- midnight, 2 and then 5 a.m. for the breakfast crowd.

"I used to go out in the casino and go, 'Hold it! . . . hold it!' Really loudly. 'I'm performing in there, and the . . . noise is too much, I want it stopped! You understand that? Stopped!'

"They all stopped, froze," Rickles said, "then they laughed their asses off."

"MR. Warmth" begins with actor Harry Dean Stanton sitting in a booth at Dan Tana's in West Hollywood, blowing on a harmonica. For Landis, it's a self-referential prelude: The director met Rickles in the hillsides of Tito's Yugoslavia, where Landis was an 18-year-old gofer making 60 bucks a week on the set of "Kelly's Heroes," the 1970 movie starring Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Stanton, Rickles and Donald Sutherland as soldiers who go behind German lines to seize $16 million in gold bullion. (Rickles likes to poor-mouth his film career, but Landis isn't buying it. "He was in 'Run Silent, Run Deep!' ")

In "Kelly's Heroes," Rickles played a character called Crapgame. At the end of the shoot, Rickles gave Landis a $50 tip, and a friendship was born.

"Mr. Warmth" has four producers, including Rickles' son, Larry, and Mike Richardson, publisher of Darkhorse Comics and producer of the "Hellboy" movies, who gave Landis the initial money to shoot Rickles at the Stardust.

Like many documentaries about comedians, "Mr. Warmth" gingerly attempts to explain Rickles' appeal without spoiling the joy that his slurs paradoxically bring (Robert De Niro is interviewed, as is Rock, Martin Scorsese, Bob Newhart, Sarah Silverman and Sidney Poitier, though you mostly keep wanting the film to return to Rickles onstage at the Stardust).

At first, you see him backstage, sipping coffee in a robe, putting on his tux and shambling to his position backstage, accompanied by his longtime tour manager, Anthony "Tony O" Oppedisano.

Watching Rickles before he goes out, it's hard to conjure what happens next. Which is why Landis wanted to show the transformation. "Don's an 81-year-old man who has an 81-year-old man's body," he said. But then the horn sounds and the spotlight hits, and it's Rickles. All over again.

"You like that, huh, you Nazi . . . ?" he barks at a customer in the front row, after dangling the microphone to imitate old Jewish men in the steam in Florida.

These jokes are impossibly vintage. And yet what is contemporary about Rickles is his command, the way in which he can make himself seem dangerous again, even now -- or maybe especially now. Things at the Stardust, for instance, get momentarily iffy when Rickles starts working a Japanese customer in the house and mis-hears the guy's last name ("No need to get [upset], Joe. Just asking your name").

There is a scene in "Mr. Warmth" where Rickles, sitting at home surrounded by photos of his show business pals, goes down one wall and says: "Dead. Dead. Cancer. Dead. Hanging on the ropes. Very bad. Very sick. Almost dead. And dying."

Rickles toured with Sinatra when the singer was having to read lyrics off a teleprompter.

"He was really struggling too," Rickles said. "I remember. . . . If I lose that, it won't be Don Rickles anymore."

Joey Bishop, the last Rat Pack member, died last month. Red Buttons died a day before Landis was to interview him for "Mr. Warmth," the director said. Rickles has diabetes and is more hunched over these days; he says he gave up tennis and golf because of back issues, and a few weeks ago, in New York for the screening of "Mr. Warmth" at the New York Film Festival, he cracked a rib riding his exercise bike.

He's better now, though the rib injury has prevented him from performing until after Thanksgiving.

"The audience won't know," he said of his return, "but maybe my trigger will be slightly slower. Slightly. Until it gets going, anyway."

paul.brownfield@latimes.com

X-Files Halloween, Convention Costumes To Become Recognizable Again

VARIETY: Fox sets date for 'X-Files' sequel
Scully, Mulder return to theaters on July 25
By PAMELA MCCLINTOCK, TATIANA SIEGEL
Posted: Wed., Oct. 31, 2007, 3:33pm PT

The long-awaited second "X-Files" film is finally a go, with 20th Century Fox setting a July 25, 2008 release date.

Untitled project reunites "X-Files" creator Chris Carter with thesps David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who will reprise their signature roles as FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

Carter begins lensing in December in Vancouver from a script he co-wrote with Frank Spotnitz, a veteran scribe of the long-running "X-Files" television series, which became a worldwide hit in its 1993-2002 run on the Fox network. Spotnitz also co-wrote with Carter the screenplay for 1998 feature "X-Files."

Studio is keeping the film's logline under wraps, but stressed the pic is a stand-alone story and supernatural thriller that takes the complicated relationship between Mulder and Scully in new directions.

As of now, there are only two other titles skedded for July 25, both comedies. Sony unspools Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly starrer "Step Brothers," directed by Adam McKay, while MGM has bows untitled Ice Cube family laffer.

Bringing the "X-Files." sequel to the bigscreen was waylaid when Chris Carter brought a 2005 lawsuit against Fox over how the "X-Files" syndication profits were divvied up. Suit was later settled.

Earlier this year, the issue seemed to have been resolved, with Duchovny and Anderson both indicating the that the film was finally forward.

Released in 1998, feature film "The X-Files" grossed $187 million worldwide, including a domestic haul of $83.9 million and an international cume of more than $103 million.

Happy Hallowe'en!

This still is from The Innocents, one of my favorite horror films. Check it out on DVD if you haven't already - it's delightfully creepy!

Enjoy your holiday!

The Counterfeiters Trailer

Here's a blurb about the film from the Apple website:

The true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, counterfeiter extraordinaire and bohemian. After getting arrested in a German concentration camp in 1944, he agrees to help the Nazis in an organized counterfeit operation set up to help finance the war effort. It was the biggest counterfeit money scam of all times. Over 130 million pound sterling were printed, under conditions that couldn’t have been more tragic or spectacular. During the last years of the war, as the German Reich saw that the end was near, the authorities decided to produce their own banknotes in the currencies of their major war enemies. They hoped to use the duds to flood the enemy economy and fill the empty war coffers. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks were separated from the rest of the camp and the outside world, and transformed into a fully equipped counterfeiters workshop. “Operation Bernhard” was born.

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The trailer looks good! I want to check this out at some point.

Remake OTD: The Birds

VARIETY: Naomi Watts set for 'Birds' remake
Martin Campbell in talks to direct for Universal
By TATIANA SIEGEL, MARC GRASER
Posted: Thurs., Oct. 18, 2007, 1:26pm PT

Naomi Watts will star and Martin Campbell is in negotiations to direct Universal's new version of "The Birds."

U is planning a reimagining of Daphne du Maurier's short story, which inspired the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic.

Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller will produce through their Platinum Dunes shingle, while Peter Guber and Cathy Schulman are producing for Mandalay Pictures.

U is not looking to rush the pic into production prior to a possible strike.

Stiles White and Juliet Snowden wrote a version of the script that is still being developed. New scribes may be brought aboard.

For the moment, Campbell's and Watts' dance cards are already filled with other projects.

Campbell is attached to Fox's runaway train actioner "Unstoppable" and crime thriller "36" at Paramount. He most recently helmed the latest James Bond installment "Casino Royale."

Watts, who will next be seen in Warner Independent's "Funny Games," is filming "The International" and will follow that up with First Look's adaptation of Amy Sutherland's "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the World's Premiere School for Exotic Animal Trainers."

Mandalay's David Zelon and Jonathan Krauss will oversee for Mandalay. Scott Bernstein is overseeing the pic for U.

Richard Kelly's Next Film

VARIETY: Frank Langella to star in Kelly's 'Box'
Actor joins Cameron Diaz in horror film - By DIANE GARRETT
Posted: Thurs., Oct. 11, 2007, 2:42pm PT

Frank Langella will star with Cameron Diaz in "The Box," a horror film to be directed by "Donnie Darko" helmer Richard Kelly.

The $30 million production is being bankrolled by Media Rights Capital.

Langella will play a stranger who presents a mysterious box to a woman.

Kelly wrote the script based on Richard Matheson short story "Button, Button" He is producing with Sean McKittrick of his Darko Entertainment shingle. Ted Hamm will be exec producer.

Pic starts shooting mid-November (Daily Variety, June 29). By then Langella will have wrapped the film version of "Frost/Nixon" for Imagine and director Ron Howard.

Langella won the Tony award for his work in "Frost/Nixon" on Broadway. In November, Roadside Attractions will release Langella's "Starting Out in the Evening" which played at Sundance and Toronto.

MRC, which pays star salaries along with partial copyright ownership that gives talent a DVD windfall, also bankrolled "Babel" and Sacha Baron Cohen's "Bruno."

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Hmm. I thought this story was made into a post-Serling "Twilight Zone" episode at one point. We'll see, I guess.

Universal Decides To Spend 100,000 Times More On Land Of The Lost Episode Than Kroffts Originally Did

VARIETY: Universal OK's 'Land of the Lost'
Will Ferrell comedy to cost $100 million
By DIANE GARRETT, MICHAEL FLEMING
Posted: Tue., Oct. 9, 2007, 8:00pm PT

Universal is pushing the button on "Land of the Lost" for a March start.

Decision to greenlight the Will Ferrell project surprised observers, who are aware that U had a rough ride with its $160 million comedy "Evan Almighty." Studio sources suggest the budget of "Land of the Lost," described as an event comedy, was recalibrated from $125 million to $100 million in order to earn its start date.

Brad Silberling will helm the bigscreen adaptation of Sid & Marty Krofft's children's skein of the same name. Jimmy Miller is producing along with the Kroffts; Julie Wixson-Darmody and Daniel Lupi exec produce.

Decision to move ahead effectively removes Ferrell from availability for other pre-strike projects on the cusp, such as "Himelfarb" for Warner Bros. The comedian has been attached to "Land of the Lost" for several years. Miller reps Ferrell and the Kroffts, who have long tried to get a bigscreen adaptation of their show made.

Adaptation by Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas revolves around a disgraced paleontologist, his assistant and a macho tour guide who find themselves in a strange world inhabited by dinosaurs, monkey people and reptilian Sleestaks.

Donna Langley spearheaded the effort to obtain rights from the Kroffts, who also produced and created smallscreen skeins such as "H.R. Pufnstuf," "Lidsville" and "Donny and Marie."

Sequel-Mania Reaches The Art House

VARIETY: Morgan prepares 'Queen' sequel
Film looks at U.K.-U.S. relationship
By ADAM DAWTREY - Posted: Mon., Oct. 1, 2007, 8:39am PT

Peter Morgan has started work on a follow-up to "The Queen" that will dig into former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair's relationships with U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

The movie will focus on Blair's reaction to the handover of power from Clinton, a natural liberal ally, to Bush, who came from the other end of the political spectrum.

"Peter sees this as a pivotal moment when the special relationship between Britain and America changed," said producer Andy Harries.

Project will be the third film in Morgan's "Blair trilogy," which began with Channel 4 telepic "The Deal" and continued with "The Queen." Michael Sheen is expected to reprise his role as Blair.

"Peter always hoped to do a trilogy to mark the Blair years that we've all lived through, but it's been difficult to find the right point at which to look at Blair in power," Harries said.

Morgan initially considered tackling the more obvious drama surrounding the run-up to the Iraq war, when Blair fatally compromised his own premiership through his wholehearted support for Bush's invasion plans. But in the end Morgan decided that the roots of those events lay in Blair's difficult adjustment to the transition from Clinton to Bush a few years earlier.

He's researching the project with a plan to start writing by the end of this year. Harries and Christine Langan, the team behind "The Deal" and "The Queen," will produce. No financing is attached, although with Langan working at BBC Films, that would be an obvious home for the project.

Harries already has another Morgan screenplay, "The Damned United," in development with Langan at BBC Films. It's adapted from David Peace's novel about the legendary English soccer coach Brian Clough, with Sheen set to play Clough.

The project was originally due to be directed by Stephen Frears, who also helmed "The Queen," but he stepped aside over the summer to be replaced by Tom Hooper. Pic is casting to shoot next April.

Morgan recently finished a rewrite of "State of Play" and a draft of the adaptation of John le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," both for Working Title. Working Title and Imagine Entertainment are also co-producing "Frost/Nixon," Ron Howard's movie version of Morgan's stage hit.

Good-Bye, Miss Moneypenny

AFP.GOOGLE.COM: Miss Moneypenny actor Lois Maxwell exits stage

SYDNEY (AFP) — On screen, Lois Maxwell played the woman James Bond never seduced, Miss Moneypenny. In real life, she was more than his match -- an adventurous traveller, an entertainer, and a flirt to the end.

Her death on Saturday at Fremantle Hospital, in Western Australia, from a combination of lung and vascular disease, followed several weeks of treatment there. She was 80.

The Canadian-born actress, a constant in 14 James Bond movies as the starring role changed hands, took on the Miss Moneypenny role in 1962 alongside Sean Connery in "Dr No."

And she continued to play the secretary to spy chief M, constantly flirting with her 007 agent, until 1985's "A View To A Kill" with Roger Moore.

In a 2005 interview, Maxwell said she insisted when she took on the role that she be allowed to give Moneypenny a "background" and that Bond director Terence Young not "put my hair in a bun and horn-rimmed glasses on me."

The "background" was an unexplained sexual tension between Moneypenny and Bond and the chemistry worked.

"She was my lucky token," Moore told the British broadcaster Sky News after her death.

"(People) who remember the Bond films with Moneypenny will remember her with great affection. She certainly will be missed by me and I'm sure by millions of fans around the world."

Born Lois Ruth Hooker on February 14, 1927 in Ontario, Canada, Maxwell ran away from home at 16 to join the Canadian Army Show.

She ended up in London, where she met Roger Moore at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, beginning what was to be a life-long friendship.

She changed her name in Hollywood, won a Golden Globe award and worked with Ronald Reagan on "Bedtime For Bonzo."

When the first Bond movie came along, Maxwell was an experienced actor in need of an income after her husband, British television executive Peter Marriott, developed a heart problem.

"I had a husband who was desperately ill, with two small children and no money, so I called producers I had worked with before and said 'help me,'" she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2005.

Maxwell's life was as colourful as that of her screen sweetheart -- she gained her pilot's licence, went on safaris, travelled widely and sailed across the South China Sea on an armed boat in case of pirates.

She was in Fremantle, near the Western Australian capital of Perth, to visit her son and his family five years ago when she collapsed while out shopping as a result of a blood clot on her elbow.

Maxwell required emergency surgery to save her arm and was so relieved at waking up from the operation and finding her limb intact, she became a fundraiser for Fremantle Hospital and a strong supporter of vascular surgeon Professor Paul Norman.

"We used to joke that he became her new leading man. She used to flirt shamelessly with him," former hospital worker and friend to the Maxwell family Penny Young told AFP.

Young said despite failing health, Maxwell had rallied in recent days.

"The thing about Lois for the family, she was such a strong fighter and in the past she would never give up," she said.

"She had that that attitude of, 'Damn, my heart will continue beating until I'm ready for it to stop.'"

"She was just adorable, and cheeky and fun."

Wes Anderson Turns To Animation

MTV MOVIES BLOG: Wes Anderson Enlists Bill Murray For ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fox’
Published by Josh Horowitz on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 7:04 pm.

It will be five films in a row for the collaboration that is Wes Anderson and Bill Murray. I talked to Anderson about his upcoming animated flick based on the Roald Dahl story and he confirmed his voice cast. “George Clooney is going to be Mr. Fox. Bill Murray has a part. Jason [Schwartzman] is doing a voice. That’s our team,” he told me.

But don’t line up at the multiplex just yet…this one is still a long ways off. “It will take a couple years to do the animating,” said “The Darjeeling Limited” helmer, adding that they are about to record the voices. As for the animation, “It’s stop-motion. It’s like ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ or those Christmas specials. These [characters] have fur, so it’s not like claymation.”

It sounds like Anderson will make this one quite unique (big surprise). “The settings will be very natural. We want to use real trees and real sand, but it’s all miniature,” he said.

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I haven't liked a Wes Anderson film since "Bottle Rocket", so I'm not thrilled about this news. It's hard for me to see how Anderson's chilly storytelling will mesh with the content and the new-to-him medium. I remember liking the book, but I'm not even sure how well it'll adapt to film - I'll have to read it again.

Movie Trailers...With Commentary?

Necessary? Not at all. Nerdy fun? You bet! Check out the trailer for Psycho (one of my favorites), and afterwards, watch it again with commentary by John Landis! But don't stop there - not with tons of others to choose from!

Remake OTD: The Wild Geese

VARIETY: Hollywood Gang flocks for 'Geese'
Film unit signs deal for remake - By MICHAEL FLEMING
Posted: Wed., Sep. 19, 2007, 8:00pm PT

Hollywood Gang Prods. has made a deal to remake "The Wild Geese," the 1978 film about a group of British mercenaries who are contracted to free an imprisoned African leader.

Rupert Sanders is attached to direct. Hollywood Gang's Gianni Nunnari will produce. Discussions are under way to bring the film to Warner Bros., where Nunnari was a producer on "300."

Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris starred in the original, which was based on Daniel Carney's unpublished novel "The Thin White Line."

New deal came out of a conversation between Nunnari and Sanders in which each recalled the original as a favorite film.

"It has it all: great characters, action, plot twists and revenge," Sanders said. "We are making a tough film, taking ex-British soldiers from the murky London underworld to the battlefields in Africa."

Euan Lloyd and Hollywood Gang partner Craig J. Flores will exec produce.

Hollywood Gang is teamed with producer Nick Wechsler on an adaptation of the Warren Ellis graphic novel "Ocean" and has Sylvain White ("Stomp the Yard") attached to direct an adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novel "Ronin" at Warner Bros.

Southland Tales Trailer Is Up

As Keanu Reeves would say, '"Whoa". It'll either be a wild ride, or rend itself apart through sheer ambition. Take a tiny peek inside Richard Kelly's head here.

Southland Tales Poster Arrives

I'm still curious about this film (mainly because I like Donnie Darko), but I'm getting more and more wary, since it's been in post-shoot-tinkering-limbo for two years. In the meantime, I read the comic books prequels, but I had a really tough time following them. I guess we'll find out on November 9th, when the film's released.

Thanks to I Watch Stuff for the poster image!

Who Is Number Six?

Doubtless you've heard that there's a feature-film adaptation being developed of the cult television show The Prisoner. Who knows how you can take something so idiosyncratic and transform it into a new story that doesn't cling too tightly to the past, or fixate too much on the present? But I do feel pretty certain about one thing. I really, really want Kevin McKidd to play Number Six.

If you don't know him, he did a terrific job as the character Lucious Vorenus on the short-lived HBO series Rome. There's a certain degree of physical resemblance, but I think what makes McKidd so appropriate is that his role on Rome shares a powerful sense of righteousness with McGoohan's creation. Lucious is taken to a place in the story where he feels that he has nothing to lose or live for, and I think that brought him within a stone's throw of the distrustful, acerbic Number Six.

McGoohan was so extreme with the character that your alliance with him was not so much based on sympathy as it was a sense of agreement, a desire to share or believe in his certainty of right and wrong. McKidd's performance gives me confidence that he could bring more sympathy and emotion to the role, to give Number Six's strident qualities some warmth.

Maybe the film'll never happen, and I'm sure Universal and the filmmakers have plenty of ideas on who will don the black blazer. Still, I had to get this off my chest, just in case someone who has a say in things is reading... you just never know.

Be seeing you.

"I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With" Trailer

This looks pretty funny, plus it's great to see a movie about people trying to connect who are older than college students. No offense to Superbad or anything (I did think it was funny), but it's getting harder and harder for me to relate to the teen sex comedy thing. I'm forty-two, that was a while ago, you know?

Anyhow, I definitely want to check this out!

About Fucking Time Dept, Part 2

VARIETY: Lucas taps Ridley to write 'Tails'
Filmmaker exec producing WWII movie
By MICHAEL FLEMING - Posted: Mon., Aug. 27, 2007, 8:00pm PT

George Lucas has hired John Ridley to write "Red Tails," a WWII action adventure about the Tuskegee Airmen based on a story by Lucas, who is financing development through his Lucasfilm production company and exec producing.

Pic charts a group of young pilots as they overcame racism to form the Tuskegee Airmen, a distinguished group of fliers who broke the aviation color barrier to become the first African-American fighter pilots in U.S. military history.

Lucas, who has been busy with the fourth installment of "Indiana Jones," has long had a passion for the Tuskegee Airmen, whose planes were distinguished by the red-painted tails that give the film its title.

He hired Ridley after reading "L.A. Riots," the Universal/Imagine drama Ridley just turned in to director Spike Lee. Ridley's just getting off the ground on "Red Tails" after meeting with the surviving pilots at a convention in Texas.

Rick McCallum and Charles Floyd Johnson are producing.

"These were guys who had to figure everything out for themselves, because military units were completely segregated at the time and there was no seasoned war pilot to teach them," Ridley said. "President Roosevelt formed the unit as a publicity stunt because he wanted the black vote for his re-election campaign, but these guys were such skilled pilots that they ended up becoming true heroes by escorting bombers in North Africa and Italy."

Ridley added: "ILM will make the fight sequences come alive, and make you feel what it must have been like to be 19 and flying in a fighter plane."

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I've been hearing about this film for well over ten years - probably closer to twenty. This is definitely a Lucasfilm project that I'd really like to see! Something other than "Star Wars" - awesome!

The Violent Legacy Of Bonnie And Clyde

NY TIMES: Two Outlaws, Blasting Holes in the Screen
By A. O. SCOTT - Published: August 12, 2007

THE story of “Bonnie and Clyde” has been told so many times that it has acquired the patina of legend. It’s the kind of historical fable that circulates to explain how the world once was and how it came to be the way it is now: a morality tale in which the wild energies of youth defeat the stale certainties of age, and freedom triumphs over repression.

I’m not talking about the adventures of the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who robbed and shot their way through Texas, Oklahoma and adjacent states in the bad old days of the Great Depression. Their exploits have been chronicled in books, ballads and motion pictures, never more famously than in the movie named after them, which first opened in New York 40 years ago this month. The notoriety of “Bonnie and Clyde,” directed by Arthur Penn from a long-gestating script by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty, who also played Clyde, has long since eclipsed that of its real-life models.

The ups and downs of the movie’s early fortunes have become a touchstone and a parable, a crucial episode in the entwined histories of Hollywood, American film criticism and postmodern popular culture. “Bonnie and Clyde” was a scandal and a sensation largely because it seemed to introduce a new kind of violence into movies. Its brutality was raw and immediate, yet at the same time its scenes of mayhem were choreographed with a formal panache that was almost gleeful.

Their horror was undercut by jaunty, rambunctious humor and by the skittering banjo music of the soundtrack. The final shootout, in which Mr. Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s bodies twitch and writhe amid a storm of gunfire (not long after their characters have successfully made love for the first time), was both awful and ecstatic, an orgy of blood and bullets. The filmmakers seemed less interested in the moral weight of violence than in its aesthetic impact. The killings were alluring and gruesome; that the movie was so much fun may well have been the most disturbing thing about it.

As we endure another phase in the never-ending argument about movie violence — renewed by the recent popularity of extremely brutal horror films like the “Saw” and “Hostel” cycles; made momentarily acute by the Virginia Tech massacre last spring; forever hovering around the edges of dinner-table conversations and political campaigns — it’s worth re-examining this legend to see if it has anything left to teach us.

“Bonnie and Clyde” had its North American premiere on Aug. 4, 1967, at the Montreal film festival. When it opened in New York a short time later, the initial critical reception ranged from dismissal to outright execration. Leading the charge was Bosley Crowther, chief film critic of The New York Times, who attacked “Bonnie and Clyde” as “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy.” Crowther’s short, merciless review — the film’s “blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste” — was followed by a Sunday column that made the case at greater length.

The most celebrated, and consequential, brief for the defense was longer still. In more than 9,000 words in the Oct. 21 issue of The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, then a freelance contributor, hailed “Bonnie and Clyde” as “the most excitingly American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ ” which had come out five years earlier. Hardly an unqualified rave (“probably part of the discomfort that people feel about ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ grows out of its compromises and its failures,” she noted), Kael’s article instead made a sustained argument for the film’s status as a cultural event.

“ ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ” she wrote, “brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about. And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or ‘knowing’ group. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture.”

And so “Bonnie and Clyde” was the somewhat improbable vehicle — a period picture made, with some reluctance, by a major movie studio (Warner Brothers) at the insistence of an ambitious young movie star — by which a new mode of expression and a new set of values entered the cultural mainstream. The movie was quickly marked as a battlefield in an epochal struggle: between “the kids” and their stodgy, respectable elders, between the hip and the square.

According to the standard accounts, now duly taught in classrooms and rehearsed around baby-boom Elderhostel campfires, hip triumphed. By the beginning of 1968 the squares had been routed. Time magazine, which had run a dismissive review, put Bonnie and Clyde, as rendered by Robert Rauschenberg, on its Dec. 8 cover, accompanying an essay by Stefan Kanfer called “The New Cinema: Violence ... Sex ... Art.”

Crowther, after 27 years at The Times, retired. His place was taken by Renata Adler, a writer for The New Yorker who was not yet 30. Kael, already a contentious and influential figure in the world of movie criticism, joined the staff of The New Yorker, where for the next quarter-century she would reign as the most imitated and argued-about film reviewer in the English-speaking world. “Bonnie and Clyde” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.

That it won only two — best supporting actress for Estelle Parsons and best cinematography for Burnett Guffey — may have helped to assure its enduring cachet. Too complete a victory would have led to a loss of credibility. Hip is, by definition, an oppositional stance that the embrace of the establishment can only compromise.

The products of the liberal Hollywood establishment — the earnest, socially responsible dramas that Crowther frequently championed and that Kael in particular despised — did not retreat in the face of a generational challenge mounted by “Bonnie and Clyde” (and also, less noisily, by “The Graduate”). The big Oscar winners that year were “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both movies about gray-haired, socially empowered white men whose prejudices are demolished by Sidney Poitier, at the time Hollywood’s all-purpose answer to America’s race problem.

At the height of the ’60s, the solution proposed by those movies — that basically decent men could work toward mutual understanding and respect — might have seemed wishful at best. The Oscar ceremonies took place on April 10, 1968, a week after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The summer before, “Bonnie and Clyde” had opened against a backdrop of rioting in Newark and Detroit. Part of the film’s mythology has been a product of that coincidence. American cities were burning, the war in Vietnam and the protests against it were escalating, and a new revolutionary consciousness was in the air, somehow shared by college students and third-world guerrillas, by artists and the urban poor.

As J. Hoberman notes in “The Dream Life,” his revisionist history of the ’60s and its movies, “ ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ popularized the attitude Tom Wolfe would derisively call ‘Radical Chic.’ ” Its hero and heroine exist in a state of vague solidarity with the poor and destitute — the banks they rob are the real enemies of the people, and they are admired by hard-luck farmers and sharecroppers — but they themselves are much too glamorous to pass as members of the oppressed masses.

They are not fighting injustice so much as they are having fun, enjoying the prerogatives of outlaw fame. They exist in a kind of anarchic utopia where the pursuit of kicks is imagined to be inherently political. In this universe the usual ethical justifications of violent action are stripped away, but the aura of righteousness somehow remains.

When pressed by his brother, Buck, about the killing of a bank employee — “It was him or you, right?” — Clyde mumbles that he had to do it, even though the audience knows there was no real question of self-defense. Later, Bonnie’s humiliation of a Texas ranger is justified because the ranger is such a brutal, reactionary authority figure. His subsequent pursuit of the criminals, in contrast, is treated as sadistic and irrational.

But the Barrow gang’s own sadism is evident when the outlaws kidnap a nervous undertaker and his girlfriend after stealing the man’s car. The couple turns out to be the very embodiment of square: He complains about his hamburger; she reveals that she lied to him about her age. These people are along for the ride, but they just don’t get it.

Not Getting It has been, ever since, the accusation leveled against critics of a certain kind of movie violence by its defenders. The easiest way to attack movie violence is to warn of its real-world consequences, to worry that someone will imitate what is seen on screen. The symmetrically literal-minded response is that because violence already exists in the world, refusing to show it in movies would be dishonest.

Neither of these positions quite acknowledges the particularity of cinematic violence, which is not the same as what it depicts. Even the most bloodthirsty moviegoer would be likely to leave a real fusillade like the one at the end of “Bonnie and Clyde” sickened and traumatized, rather than thrilled. The particular charge of that scene, and others like it, is that it tries to push the pretense — the art — as close to trauma as possible and to make the appreciation of that art its point. Missing the point is what marks you as square.

The Hollywood and critical establishments, both of them in the early stages of a generational upheaval, did not miss the point for long. “Bonnie and Clyde” was hardly the first picture to push against the limits of what was conventionally seen as good taste. But it conducted its assault in the name of a higher form of taste, fusing the bravado of youth with the prestige of art. It legitimized the connoisseurship of violence, which does not present itself as an appetite for cheap thrills, but rather as a taste for the finer things.

Thus the geysers of blood at the end of Sam Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch” two years later could be savored for the director’s visual and formal audacity. The unflinching brutalities of ’70s movies like “The Godfather” and “Chinatown” became hallmarks of the honesty and daring of the New Hollywood. (At the same time the harsh, righteous vengeance unleashed in the “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish” movies appalled many of the same critics who dug the radical chic of “Bonnie and Clyde.”)

By the 1990s, as a newer generation of filmmakers began to fetishize the glories of post-“Bonnie and Clyde” American cinema, stylized, tongue-in-cheek violence became a sign of rebellious independence. The ear-slicing sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” seemed like a deliberate attempt to replicate the kind of shock produced by the wildest moments in “Bonnie and Clyde,” but without the pretense of political or social relevance. This year the best-picture Oscar went to “The Departed,” a movie whose jolting, cold-blooded killings occasioned little objection.

And to raise objections at this point is, perhaps, worse than square. It seems philistine. But I can’t escape the feeling that, just as it has become easier since “Bonnie and Clyde” to accept violence in movies, and more acceptable to enjoy it, it has become harder to talk seriously about the ethics and politics of that violence. The link between real and pretend violence has been so completely severed that some of the ability of movies to offer a critical perspective — to elicit thought as well as gasps and chuckles — has been lost. We’ve become pretty comfortable watching the infliction of pain, and quick to laugh it off.

Don’t misunderstand: I still get a kick out of “Bonnie and Clyde,” but it’s accompanied by a twinge of unease, by the suspicion that, in some ways that matter and that have become too easy to dismiss, Bosley Crowther was right.

A Sequel I Actually Want To See

Sweet! Chunky bat-suit aside, I'm there!

This July 24th... The Wolfman's Got 'Nards

A 20th anniversary, two-disc set of The Monster Squad's being released - I'm assuming this is its debut on DVD. I remember liking it at the time, but who knows how it'll seem to me now? I'll probably rent it for a nostalgia wallow.

Interesting Ralph Bakshi Article

Check out this career-long synopsis/defense/appreciation by Bakshi fan Jeff Kuykendall. You may not agree with some (or any) of his points on why Ralph's work is compelling and thought-provoking, but I think only a fan with his level of passion could have written it.

This column illustrates in vivid detail why I was excited to work with him on his Mighty Mouse show in the late '80s. I saw Fritz The Cat in college (the perfect time), and was bowled over by the complete abandonment of almost every animation feature convention I'd ever seen. To my eyes, it was raw, gritty, and altogether new.

Ralph's work to some degree is out of fashion now, and the prevailing attitude is to badmouth his films. I've fallen prey to that myself in recent years, but this article reminded me about the qualities some of his films have to provoke and inspire - and why they're still in my video library.

Thanks to Kill The Snark for the article, and The Groovy Age Of Horror for the link!

The Nerd Can't Help It

Anita and I drove to Mountain View last night to check out the 7-11 there. Eleven of them all over the country have been re-dressed as Kwik-E-Marts (even stocked with boxes of Krusty-O's and cans of Buzz Cola!) to promote The Simpsons Movie.

Sadly, the eBay sharks beat me to it again - there weren't any of the custom Simpsons products to be had, so like good nerds, we gorged on Squishees and took lots of pictures! I'm sure there's plenty of shots like this to be had all over the internet, but I thought I'd share them anyhow. Enjoy!

Donnie Darko Director's New Project

VARIETY: Cameron Diaz to star in 'The Box'
Richard Kelly to direct horror film
By MICHAEL FLEMING
Posted: Thurs., Jun. 28, 2007, 1:24pm PT

Media Rights Capital has set Cameron Diaz to star in "The Box," a horror film to be directed by "Donnie Darko" helmer Richard Kelly.

Kelly wrote the script based on Richard Matheson short story "Button, Button." Production will begin in the fall on the pic, which will aim for a PG-13 rating. Diaz will play a young woman given a mysterious box by a stranger. She's told that certain things will happen depending on which buttons she presses.

Media Rights Capital is committed to bankrolling the entire $30 million-plus budget, as it did with "Babel" and will with Sacha Baron Cohen's "Bruno."

Kelly and Sean McKittrick will produce and Ted Hamm will be executive producer.

Media Rights Capital won't begin the process of pursuing distribution until the fall, though it is unclear when those deals will be made.

MRC, which pays star salaries along with partial copyright ownership that gives talent a DVD windfall, has shown a knack for making distribution deals at the most advantageous time. That's the model it used with Universal on "Bruno," which sold during the height of "Borat" mania and secured a $42.5 million commitment to license rights in North America and certain other territories.

The recent $20 million opening of "1408" made the star-driven, high-concept supernatural thriller "The Box" feel like a viable financial proposition.

"The storyline has all the commerciality of 'The Ring,' but with Richard and Cameron, this film can rise to the level of 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'The Others,' " said Modi Wiczyk, the former Endeavor agent who founded and runs MRC with Asif Satchu.

"My hope is to make a film that is incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining my artistic sensibility," Kelly said.

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Huh. What happened to "Southland Tales"? I haven't heard anything about it in quite a while. The last I heard, it was going to come out this fall, but it's been pretty quiet. I've also heard that it wasn't very good, and the silence is a little ominous. But I'm still really curious to see it!

I think "The Box" was also done as a post-Serling "Twilight Zone" episode. Still, Matheson's a good place to start for a movie...

It's Just A Logo Right Now...

...but I think it'll be a good idea to check back here later on.

It's almost a tradition now for superhero movies. One of the characters is usually a scientist or an engineer, so inevitably, the first sign of a new production is the logo for their 'corporation'. The Spider-Man movies started with free Oscorp and Otto Octavius Inc. caps. Where do super-villains go for their venture capital, and how do they stay motivated once their company starts to thrive?

First "Where The Wild Things Are" Still From Spike Jonez

Well, we'll see. Maybe Jonez can pull this off. He and first-time screenwriter Dave Eggers are writing it together, so who knows?

Thanks to I Watch Stuff! and mtvmovieblog.com for the image.

Neat Transformers Promotional Site

* Go here,

* Type 'codeblack' in the entry field,

* Click on the red drive on the left side of the window that pops up,

* Click on all of the files - pick your favorite! I like the birthday party clip.


Yup, that's a Dinobot - apparently, they're going to be in the inevitable sequel (I've heard there's a blurb about that somewhere, but haven't been able to find it yet).

There's other stuff to sift through at Sector 7, too, but it's not as interesting.

The 'Real' Mach 5

I couldn't care less about the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer movie, but this is one nifty car! Is it just me, or does this car look like a CG still?

Brain Fart: It's too bad someone didn't cast Tom Cruise in this project years ago! I always thought he would've been perfect.

Day Night Day Night Trailer

This looks really compelling! I hope the film is as well made as the trailer.

Tim Roth Versus The Incredible Hulk

VARIETY: Roth cast as 'Hulk' villain
Actor to play Abomination
By MICHAEL FLEMING - Posted: Wed., May 9, 2007, 10:43am PT

"The Incredible Hulk" will be matched against the oversized adversary Abomination, and Tim Roth will play the villain's alter ego, Emil Blonsky.

Roth joins Edward Norton and Liv Tyler in the Louis Leterrier-directed drama, which is being financed by Marvel Studios and distributed by Universal Pictures on June 13, 2008.

While Roth's deal is still being negotiated, he becomes the latest piece in a reinvention of a franchise, following the self-serious Ang Lee-directed "Hulk."

Blonsky is a KGB agent who deliberately exposes himself to the gamma rays that caused Bruce Banner to morph into the Hulk. Blonsky has upped the dosage, making him larger and stronger than the Hulk, but unable to change back to human form. He blames Banner for his problem, and makes his best efforts to destroy the Hulk.

"The Incredible Hulk" is being produced by Avi Arad, Gale Anne Hurd and Marvel's Feige. Jim Van Wyck, David Maisel, Ari Arad and Stan Lee are exec producing. Zak Penn wrote the script.

Roth stars this fall in "Youth Without Youth," the Francis Ford Coppola-directed drama for Sony Pictures Classics. He also stars with Naomi Watts in "Funny Games" for Warner Independent Pictures.

Brain Fart: The Chick Star Wars

I've been thinking about this for way too long, so I thought I'd put this up for discussion.

If you ask just about any nerdy guy - especially one in his late thities/early forties - chances are really good that he's a big Star Wars fan. He knows a lot of the dialogue, and peppers it into his converstations.

(Aside: I know there's an ongoing Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that will never end, so I'm disregarding it for that very reason. I also know that there's a lot of female Star Wars fans too - Princess Leia? Hello? - but I think most people would agree that there's significantly more male fans.)

Anyway, you get the idea. He's loaded with trivia on the film, and if he works in the industry in any way, there's a good chance that Star Wars is the reason he steered in that direction in the first place. I'm one of these guys.

So my question is: what is the chick equivalent? What childhood/adolescent movie do women get all nerdy and obsessive about? Which film do most ladies endlessly quote, and resonates through their lives whether they really want it to or not?

I have some suggestions:

* Pretty In Pink - John Sanford says that in his dating days, he often ran into women who would talk a lot about this film. I can't say, as I don't think that's in my, uh, age range.

* Grease - Well, maybe not, but it was released at about the same time as Star Wars, and I wonder if that's what most of the young girls went to see.

* The Princess Bride - This one might be the main contender. It's a fairy-tale romance, but it's clever and quirky, so it could appeal to the misfit-chick-nerds, too (I had just seen Baron Munchausen, so it didn't work very well for me at the time, even though it has a better story).

* Sleepless in Seattle - It probably appeals to a slightly older crowd, but it rebooted the chick flick in a big way, so I figure it's probably a contender.

* When Harry Met Sally - Another chick-flick milestone with a pretty universal experience - risking a friendship for love.

* Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Okay, it's a television show, but I do know a fair number of women who get pretty nerdy about it. Buffy stands on Princess Leia's shoulders and kicks ass at the same time. It's clearly not just a show for most of its audience, so it makes sense to me to include it.

So there's some thoughts. What do you think? Let me know.

Remake OTD - DOUBLE FEATURE: The Jetsons, Land Of The Lost

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: Future or past for Rodriguez?
By Borys Kit - May 9, 2007

"Grindhouse" might have taken a drubbing at the box office, but director Robert Rodriguez is very much in demand. He is in talks to direct a live-action feature version of futuristic 1960s cartoon "The Jetsons" for Warner Bros. Pictures, being produced by Denise Di Novi and Donald De Line.

At the same time, the helmer has met with Will Ferrell and Universal execs for helming duties on "Land of the Lost," based on the 1970s Sid and Marty Krofft fantasy TV series to which Ferrell is attached to star.

While no offers have been made, sources say "Jetsons" has the edge because its script, whose latest draft is by Adam Goldberg ("Fanboys"), is further along. One possible hurdle the studios will have to contend with is Rodriguez and the DGA.

Rodriguez left the guild in March 2004 when it refused his request to share the director's credit with Frank Miller on "Sin City."

Rodriguez could direct a studio movie if he declared himself under "financial core" status with the DGA, paying partial dues but remaining a nonmember.

The whole production would be done under the DGA auspices, with a DGA supervisor on the set. For Endeavor-repped Rodriguez, who is less concerned about such matters, the question is whether he wants to do a space movie or a dinosaur movie.

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Wow - I've been hearing about a Jetsons movie for a long time. I think Chevy Chase was attached to it at one point.

I'm kind of surprised a Land Of The Lost movie is being considered before a H.R. Pufnstuf movie, though I don't want to see either one of them, so I'm not sure why I'm thinking about it. Looks like this TV-to-film-thing is going to keep going no matter how many of them fail.

Which film do you think started this? Star Trek - The Motion Picture? That's my guess. Even though it initially tanked, it did start a ten-film franchise, and jump-started a five-show television franchise.

Higher-Res Iron Man Armor Image

Super sweet! Thanks, I Watch Stuff!

On Filmmakers And Sequels

LA TIMES: THE BIG PICTURE | PATRICK GOLDSTEIN
Cue the sequel, and the safe, boring route
May 8, 2007

IS there anyone besides me who is depressed by the news that Steven Spielberg, a great filmmaker with the clout to get any project he wants off the ground, is going off to make … "Indiana Jones 4"?

Due to start filming in mid-June, the latest installment in the long-dormant "Raiders" series is simply the latest example of the movie industry's maniacal devotion to sequels. With "Spider-Man 3" leading the way last weekend, making $151 million in domestic box office, this summer boasts an average of nearly one sequel a week. According to figures from Media by Numbers, there are 14 summer-release sequels in all, up from seven last year and three in 2005. The inflation is striking — there were only 14 summer sequels made from 1998 through 2001.

Hollywood makes sequels for one good reason: They make money. The biggest summer hits of the last three years were all sequels. After its record-setting weekend, Sony Pictures chief Michael Lynton boasted to the BBC that the "Spider-Man" series may continue ad infinitum, saying. "Everybody has every intention of making a fourth, a fifth and a sixth and on and on." Geez, is that a promise or a threat?

The blind urge to make money might let studios off the hook, since there are few people left in Hollywood who expect great films to emerge from the primeval ooze of studio development. Studio chiefs are at least up-front, if you read their interviews about their desire to manage risk, create multiplatform franchises and generally treat movies as a form of brand advertising.

That leaves two culprits: the filmmakers who sign on to make the movies and the millions of filmgoers who line up to see the latest extension of the brand. I'm not a lunatic idealist. I have no beef with a journeyman taking a gig, like TV actor turned director Fred Savage doing a sequel like "Daddy Day Camp." What I find demoralizing is that so many of our most gifted filmmakers are behaving as much like careerists as anyone running a studio.

There's a list — a short one, but still an impressive one — of filmmakers who refuse to turn themselves into brand managers: Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Baz Luhrmann, Danny Boyle, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, David Fincher and M. Night Shyamalan, to name a few.

Then look at the great talent who's on the sequel beat: Steven Soderbergh has done two "Ocean's" sequels. Bryan Singer, the wunderkind behind "The Usual Suspects," has done "X-Men 2" and is at work on a sequel to "Superman Returns." Christopher Nolan has left behind the raw originality of "Memento" to do "Batman" movies. Robert Rodriguez, who burst on the scene with "El Mariachi," has done two sequels for "Spy Kids," with a "Sin City" sequel on its way. After making "Darkman" and "A Simple Plan," Sam Raimi seemed poised to be our generation's dark prince of meaty thrillers but has turned himself into an impersonal "Spider-Man" ringmaster instead.

Sequels are not automatically crass or derivative — just ask anyone who's seen "28 Weeks Later," the new sequel to "28 Days Later" directed by the gifted Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. But that's an exception. Francis Ford Coppola may have struck gold with "Godfather II," but you can't use that as a fig leaf when you're doing "Hostel 2" or "Alien vs. Predator 2."

So why spend the best years of your creative life doing something that's already been done? Some filmmakers truly have a sense of artistic proprietary: Once they've started a franchise, they don't want the material slipping into someone else's hands. Others are clearly eager for a paycheck. "But it's not always about the money," says Brett Ratner, who's finishing "Rush Hour 3," one of this summer's many sequels. "I get the same fee for directing an original script as I do for this."

Ratner, who also did the last "X-Men" sequel and "Red Dragon," an installment in the Hannibal Lecter series, admits that franchises aren't creative high points. "I know that Soderbergh's great film isn't going to be one of the 'Ocean's' sequels," he says. "But I don't feel like I'm slumming. If Ridley Scott could do a sequel ["Hannibal"] to a movie than won an Oscar for best picture and hold his head up high, then why couldn't I?"

Ratner insists that sequels are challenges. "You have to make the film feel fresh and keep the audience's expectations satisfied, all at the same time. Trust me, it isn't easy."

But other filmmakers are leery of sequels. "It's kind of sad," says Wayne Kramer, who has directed several critically praised thrillers, including "The Cooler." "It's one thing for studios to not want to make personal films, but now it's some of our best directors too. I thought Sam Raimi did an amazing job with 'Spider-Man,' but I can't imagine why someone that talented would still want to be involved with a third film. I thought he would've gotten it out of his system after No. 2."

Kramer says he keeps turning down sequel offers, preferring to work on something original. "I just don't want to be someone's sequel bitch," he says. "It's very seductive because you know the material is financed, you'll get a big payday and you'll have all the movie toys and extra shooting days that come with it. But why would you want to spend all that time on someone else's story? I want to speak with my own voice."

So why would Spielberg, who sees every great script, want to go back to the "Indy" well? It obviously isn't for the money, since Spielberg and "Indy" producer George Lucas have enough loot to last a hundred lifetimes. According to DreamWorks Co-Chairman Stacey Snider, David Koepp's "Indy" script made all the difference.

"It was the best script we saw all year — by far," she says. "To me, it's not so much a sequel as an affectionate reprise of a beloved character and his story. It has much more in common with the feeling you had when the 'Star Wars' movies were coming back than what you feel about a lot of sequels, which is, 'How do I wring one more dollar out of the franchise?' "

Other Spielberg watchers say that the idea of bringing "Indy" back to life one more time — with soon-to-be 65-year-old Harrison Ford as the aging hero — must have an emotional resonance for Spielberg, who is 60 himself. Spielberg has never apologized for being an entertainer — he directed the sequel to "Jurassic Park" himself. But he also aspires to greatness. And the directors who had the best careers after turning 60, be it Robert Altman, John Huston or Akira Kurosawa, were all mavericks who refused to repeat themselves, preferring to explore the unknown rather than revisit past triumphs.

On the other hand, if there is anything that Spielberg understands, it's what audiences want. And people today have made it clear that when it comes to pop culture, they have a craving for comfort food. Surely it is no coincidence that music fans are being deluged with almost as many rock band reunions as moviegoers are with sequels. This year the list of groups either touring or making a new record include the Police, Genesis, Squeeze, the Stooges, Van Halen, Smashing Pumpkins and Rage Against the Machine.

Once again, the motivation is complicated, but as with sequels, money is clearly a major factor. The Wall Street Journal reported that a Van Halen tour would be a blockbuster, generating sales of up to $34 million. But something else is at work. We seem to have a need to relive the same thrills over and over, as if our culture has become a real-life version of "Groundhog Day." Filmmakers often say they do sequels to earn capital to make more original films. But in their eagerness to reach as large an audience as possible, it's hard to tell where artistic aspirations end and mercenary territory begins.

From "Spider-Man" to "Shrek" to whatever Spielberg has in store for Indiana Jones next summer, mass appeal has become synonymous with cozy and reassuring. Maybe I'm missing a nostalgia gene, but coziness gets old pretty fast. When it comes to entertainment, I'll take excitement and unpredictability over familiarity every time.


"The Big Picture" appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

Happy Birthday, Star Wars!

VARIETY: 'Star Wars' 30th anniversary
How Lucas, ILM redefined business-as-usual
By PAUL CULLUM
Posted: Fri., May 4, 2007, 5:45pm PT

In the official souvenir program for "Star Wars," George Lucas says of his most famous creation: "It's always been what you might call a good idea in search of a story." One that 30 years later, the industry seems to have taken to heart.

"George never set out to reform or change Hollywood," says Steve Sansweet, Lucasfilm's official "Star Wars" ambassador. "He has invested in what he thought was necessary to make the kind of movies that he wanted to make."

Lucas arguably created the concept of the summer blockbuster by targeting Memorial Day weekend as the optimum release window -- an honor Sansweet is loath to claim.

But Lucas was clearly the first to see the latent value in merchandising, a profit stream so obscure that Fox Studios, which legendarily released the film on just 32 screens, allowed him to take 40% of it in exchange for a reduced salary. Forbes Magazine estimates earnings for all "Star Wars"-related products at $20 billion. Sansweet will only confirm the figure of $12 billion in worldwide merchandise sales, which he calls "the big number," plus more than 100 million copies of various "Star Wars" videos sold, but he notes that merchandising went from a $5 billion annual business in 1976 to $60 billion within a decade, largely on the film's example.

Jeff Walker, a freelance marketing liaison between studios and fan conventions, credits Lucasfilm's Charles Lippincott with pioneering the marketing of genre pictures to their core audiences. "He's the guy who took 'Star Wars' out to the conventions," Walker says. "He did slideshows at 'Star Trek' and comicbook and science-fiction conventions the year before it came out, and really revolutionized this whole approach of going directly to the fans -- where essentially those three audiences converged."

Walker credits "Star Wars" with launching the '70s-'80s boom in science-fiction films, and credits the merchandising with tiding the fans over during the three years between each of the first three installments. But arguably, the whole notion of extended franchises, fanbase marketing and ancillary licensing -- the comicbooks, novelizations, et al that within the subculture are known as the "expanded universe" -- would not be possible without Lucas' unprecedented dedication to creating new technology.

One who knows that dedication firsthand is Richard Edlund, a key figure at the inception of Industrial Light & Magic, the Lucasfilm division created in 1975 to meet the series' special effects needs. Today a major visual effects supervisor himself, he hailed from a background in photography, robotics and motion control, and was recruited by effects team leader John Dykstra.

"John was a real evangelist," says Edlund, "and got the ear of ("Star Wars" producer) Gary Kurtz, who was really the unsung hero of ILM. Gary is a gearhead, and he understood that this lugubrious process we had to build was the only way to do it." He credits his team with perfecting motion-control repeatable robotic photography and the mastery of the bluescreen process, with its ability to composite multiple images, among other innovations.

"Basically, we would paint ourselves into a corner, and then we would have to invent ourselves out of it," he says. "Every day we were doing something that hadn't been done before."

"Star Wars" also initiated what later evolved into animatics -- creating crude, sometimes multiplane animations as placeholders and previsualizations of more complex effects shots still to be realized. It was the first film to screen in Dolby stereo (a special Dolby mix was created for participating theaters), which allowed the film to use sound for the first time as a spatial component, and for subfrequencies to augment traditional sound effects. Sound designer Ben Burtt also garnered a Special Achievement Oscar for his unique sound textures. This led directly to THX, Lucasfilm's own sound calibration division, as well as TAP, the Theater Alignment Program, whereby filmgoers could report technical inconsistencies back to the parent company -- in effect providing quality control for individual theaters.

The company's EditDroid digital editing technology was eventually sold to Avid as a basis of that company's system, and its SoundDroid innovation represents the first digital sound mixing capability. The team that eventually became Pixar was imported en masse from New York and kept on payroll as an open-ended experiment.

As Internet film maven Harry Knowles says of Lucas: "He was a one-man research-and-development arm for the technology of the film industry."

That's not to mention the renewed interest in Joseph Campbell or the revival in movie soundtrack sales or what we know today as "fan fiction." Nor does it include the "Star Wars" missile defense system, "the evil empire," "the Force," "the dark side" and all the other ready-made political tropes and working metaphors that have impacted the culture at large.

Perhaps Sid Ganis, who joined Lucasfilm in 1979 and is currently head of the Motion Picture Academy, offers the film's ultimate legacy. "I can tell you I have a 4-year-old grandson named Isaac who has not seen 'Star Wars' and does not know that I was a member of the team from 'Empire' on. But he knows the characters by name, he wears a Darth Vader cape, and he goes to the library and gets kids books about 'Star Wars.'

"So 'Star Wars' is in his life because it's in the culture. The merchandising exists, but it's not being pounded into the psyche of kids. It doesn't have to be. They know it."

The Shark Is Still Working

I just subcribed to Kevin Smith & Scott Mosier's SModcast, and they talk about an upcoming three hour documentary about Jaws called The Shark Is Still Working, directed by Erik Hollander, written by James Gelet and produced by Gelet, Hollander, Jake Gove and J. Michael Roddy. It sounds great, and the filmmakers are talking now with Universal about distributing it. Good luck, guys - can't wait to see it!

Shooting Jesse James: Two Years Later

VARIETY: Brad Pitt's 'Jesse James' comes under fire
Early cuts of Brad Pitt's 'Jesse James' have tested poorly, but Warner Bros. is sticking to its guns.
By John Horn, Times Staff Writer
May 2, 2007

Every great western has a duel, and there's a showdown at the center of Brad Pitt's new movie about gunslinger Jesse James. The struggle hinged on the film's tone and length — at one point its running time was more than three hours — according to several people close to the production.

But running time wasn't the main issue. The thornier challenge was to come up with a cut of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" that satisfied audiences and Warner Bros., the studio making and distributing the film. At one point there were competing versions — one from writer-director Andrew Dominik and another from producer and star Pitt, according to a person familiar with the making of the movie. It's unclear which version of the film will be released.

Warner Bros. only recently announced a Sept. 21 release date for "Jesse James," about two years after it was filmed. (In the time since, Pitt has had daughter Shiloh Nouvel and completed two other movies, "Ocean's 13" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." "Ocean's" will be in theaters more than three months before "Jesse James.")

Adapted from the novel by Ron Hansen, the film follows the last heist committed by James (Pitt), and Ford's (Casey Affleck) devoted and then vengeful relationship with the legendary outlaw.

Dominik, a New Zealand filmmaker who rose to prominence with the 2000 crime drama "Chopper" starring Eric Bana, wanted to deliver a dark, contemplative examination of fame and infamy, in the spirit of director Terrence Malick ("The New World"), according to several people familiar with the production. The studio, on the other hand, wanted less contemplation and more action, closer to Clint Eastwood's filmmaking style, sources said. (Dominik, Pitt and Affleck declined interview requests.)

Various versions of the film were assembled and tested, with Pitt, producer Ridley Scott ("Gladiator") and editor Michael Kahn ("Saving Private Ryan") either overseeing new cuts of the film or suggesting revisions, according to people familiar with the process.

Early test scores were poor, but some who have seen the film say the performances by Pitt and especially Affleck are among the best in their careers.

One otherwise favorable review of a research screening posted on the website www.aintitcoolnews.com said, "I see one serious problem with this film. A major studio made it. This film isn't for everyone. This isn't 'Tombstone,' it's not an action-packed Western."

In a statement last week, Warner Bros. said that the version being released this fall "is true to the source material and in keeping with the creative vision of its filmmakers. We do not comment on the internal creative process of bringing a picture to the screen, but the goal of both the studio and the filmmakers is to deliver the best film possible…. We are all very pleased with the picture we are bringing to theaters this fall."

Modestly budgeted at around $30 million, "Jesse James" is one of several Warner Bros. films facing problems in the editing room. Some half-dozen different cuts of the $50-million Bana-Drew Barrymore romantic comedy "Lucky You" have failed to wow preview audiences, and the studio is now cutting back on its marketing push for the film, which opens Friday opposite "Spider-Man 3," according to a person familiar with the production. The studio also has reshot approximately 50 pages for the Nicole Kidman movie "The Invasion," replacing original director Oliver Hirschbiegel with James McTeigue, with new screenplay pages written by Larry and Andy Wachowski ("The Matrix").

Yet as Warner Bros. knows, difficult productions do not always mean death at the box office. The studio (and some cast and crew) clashed with "Lake House" director Alejandro Agresti, but when it came out last summer, the $40-million film grossed more than $100 million worldwide.

john.horn@latimes.com

The Final Season

My friend Ken Mitchroney storyboarded on this movie, which premieres this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. Hopefully, we'll all be able to see it soon, too. Good luck, guys!

Until then, check out the trailer!

Metal Men Movie? Maybe

ANIMATION MAGAZINE.NET: WB Drawn to DC’s Metal Men
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
By: Ryan Ball

In the latest case of Tinsel Town pilfering the comic racks for tentpole material, Warner Bros. Pictures has picked up film rights to the 1962 DC Comics property Metal Men. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Eric Champnella (Mr. 3000) is writing the screenplay for producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who produced all three X-Men movies and is also working on the Wolverine and Magneto spin-off flicks.

The concept of Metal Men lends itself to liberal use of CG animation. Written by Robert Kanigher, penciled by Ross Andru and inked by Mike Esposito, the comics chronicle the adventures of six intelligent robots that possess unique powers dictated by the different types of metal they’re made from. Forged in a laboratory by scientist William Magnus, the team of shape-shifting heroes is led by Gold and also includes the strong Iron, the slow-witted but loyal Lead, the self-doubting and insecure Tin and the hot-headed Mercury. Rounding out the crew is Platinum, who wants to be a real woman and harbors romantic feelings for Dr. Magnus.

Respected comic-book scribe Geoff Johns is contributing to the development efforts and will serve as an exec producer on the film. Dan Lin and Elishia Holmes are spearheading the project for Warner Bros. and Gregory Noveck is overseeing for DC Comics.

While costumed crime fighters Spider-Man, Superman and Batman have been sure-fire box-office draws over the years, films based on more marginalized superheroes have been a crap shoot. Twentieth Century Fox hit a winner with the X-Men trilogy and made a surprise hit out of Fantastic Four, but the deeper studios dig into the comic bin the harder they have to work to sell it to the public. Lions Gate’s take on Marvel’s The Punisher didn’t set the box office on fire and fellow moderate successes Constantine (DC Vertigo) from Warner Bros. and Ghost Rider (Marvel) from Columbia Pictures relied heavily on the star power of Keanu Reeves and Nicholas Cage, respectively. In the next couple of years we’ll see how moviegoers take to the likes of Nick Fury, Dr. Strange and Ant Man and a host of other comic heroes making their way to the big screen.

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Wow. After "The Shadow" and "The Phantom" disappointments, it's interesting that a comic even more obscure is being considered. I'm a pretty hard-core comic nerd, and I barely read that title. You should get free admission if you actually know the film's based on a comic!

Thanks to I Watch Stuff! for the link and the image.

Full Tracy Trailer Now Online

I have a small role in Dan Scanlon and Brian Fee's upcoming film Tracy, about the life and death of Tracy Knapp, the host of the 70's kiddie show Imagination Train Station. Check out the trailer here, and the accompanying MySpace page here!

Chris Sanders Hired At DreamWorks

VARIETY: Sanders joins DreamWorks
Disney animator to direct 'Crood'
By BEN FRITZ
Date in print: Wed., Mar. 28, 2007, Los Angeles

DreamWorks Animation has hired "Lilo & Stitch" director Chris Sanders, a longtime Disney vet, to helm its cavemen comedy "Crood Awakenings." The talent coup is reminiscent of the competition for animators in the mid-'90s.

DreamWorks had been developing "Crood" with Aardman, but took it inhouse after its partnership with the British claymation house recently ended.

After a nearly 20-year stint, Sanders left Disney early this year due to creative differences with studio leadership, including John Lasseter, over his movie "American Dog." Mouse is continuing the pic with a new director (Daily Variety, Feb. 9).

Helmer, whose 2002 toon "Lilo & Stitch" was the most critically and commercially successful film for Disney Animation since the '90s, talked to several studios before making a deal with DreamWorks.

"I've been so anxious to start working on things, and so I talked to a lot of people," he told Daily Variety. "I like the way DreamWorks looks at animation. Animation still has a lot of different places to go, and I don't want to miss out on a chance to try some new things with it."

Sanders is the second Disney vet to sign onto a DreamWorks project in the past few months. "The Lion King" helmer Rob Minkoff is directing a bigscreen version of '60s TV toon "Mr. Peabody and Sherman" for the studio.

DreamWorks Animation topper Jeffrey Katzenberg knows both helmers from his time at Disney.

"Crood Awakenings," which is about a culture clash between cavemen, has a script by Brit comedy icon John Cleese and Kirk De Micco ("Racing Stripes"). Sanders is rethinking the project, however, and will likely end up doing a significant rewrite.

"We have always loved the premise, and when we finished our relationship with Aardman, we were very interested in keeping it inhouse," said Bill Damaschke, DWA's head of creative production. "We would have been excited to work with Chris on any project. But 'Crood Awakenings' is a high priority for us, and he responded to it."

"The idea of having all the modern conveniences and social structures that we're familiar with gone and being left with just a pure form of people was really fun to imagine working with," said Sanders, who started work at DreamWorks Animation on Monday.

Studio doesn't have a release date for "Crood" yet. Its slate is full through the first half of 2010, when a fourth "Shrek" is slated to bow. Should development go well, "Crood" would likely come out in late 2010 or 2011.

Don't Hold Your Breath Dept.

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Despite controversy, Disney could unlock ’Song of the South’
By TRAVIS REED - Associated Press Writer

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Walt Disney Co.’s 1946 film “Song of the South” was historic. It was Disney’s first big live-action picture and produced one of the company’s most famous songs — the Oscar-winning “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” It also provided the inspiration for the Splash Mountain rides at Disney’s theme parks.

But the movie remains hidden in the Disney archives — never released on video in the United States and criticized as racist for its depiction of Southern plantation blacks. The film’s 60th anniversary passed last year without a whisper of official rerelease, which is unusual for Disney, but President and CEO Bob Iger recently said the company was reconsidering.

The film’s reissue would surely spark debate, but it could also sell big. Nearly 115,000 people have signed an online petition urging Disney to make the movie available, and out-of-print international copies routinely sell online for $50 to $90, some even more than $100.

Iger was answering a shareholder’s inquiry about the movie for the second straight year at Disney’s annual meeting in New Orleans. This month the Disney chief made a rerelease sound more possible.

“The question of ‘Song of the South’ comes up periodically, in fact it was raised at last year’s annual meeting,” Iger said. “And since that time, we’ve decided to take a look at it again because we’ve had numerous requests about bringing it out. Our concern was that a film that was made so many decades ago being brought out today perhaps could be either misinterpreted or that it would be somewhat challenging in terms of providing the appropriate context.”

“Song of the South” was re-shown in theaters in 1956, 1972, 1980 and 1986. Both animated and live-action, it tells the story of a young white boy, Johnny, who goes to live on his grandparents’ Georgia plantation when his parents split up. Johnny is charmed by Uncle Remus — a popular black servant — and his fables of Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear and Brer Fox, which are actual black folk tales. (An honorary Oscar to James Baskett for his portrayal of Uncle Remus.)

Remus’ stories include “The Tar Baby,” a phrase Republican presidential hopefuls John McCain and Mitt Romney have been criticized for using to describe difficult situations. In “Song of the South,” it was a trick Brer Fox and Brer Bear used to catch the rabbit — dressing a lump of hot tar as a person to ensnare their prey. To some, it’s now a derogatory term for blacks, regardless of context.

The movie doesn’t reveal whether it takes place before or after the Civil War, and never refers to blacks on the plantation as slaves. It makes clear they work for the family, living down dirt roads in wood shacks while the white characters stay in a mansion. Remus and other black characters’ dialogue is full of “ain’t nevers,” “ain’t nobodys,” “you tells,” and “dem dayses.”

“In today’s environment, ‘Song of the South’ probably doesn’t have a lot of meaning, especially to the younger audiences,” said James Pappas, associate professor of African-American Studies at the University of New York at Buffalo. “Older audiences probably would have more of a connection with the stereotypes, which were considered harmless at the time.”

Pappas said it’s not clear that the movie is intentionally racist, but it inappropriately projects Remus as a happy, laughing storyteller even though he’s a plantation worker.

However, Pappas said he thinks the movie should be rereleased because of its historical significance. He said it should be prefaced, and closed, with present-day statements.

“I think it’s important that these images are shown today so that especially young people can understand this historical context for some of the blatant stereotyping that’s done today,” Pappas said.

From a financial standpoint, Iger acknowledged last year that Disney stood to gain from rereleasing “Song.” The company’s movies are popular with collectors, and Disney has kept sales strong by tightly controlling when they’re available.

Christian Willis, a 26-year-old IT administrator in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., started a “Song of the South” fan site in 1999 to showcase memorabilia. He soon expanded it into a clearinghouse for information on the movie that now averages more than 800 hits a day and manages the online petition.

Willis said he doesn’t think the movie is racist, just from a different time.

“Stereotypes did exist on the screen,” he said. “But if you look at other films of that time period, I think ‘Song of the South’ was really quite tame in that regard. I think Disney did make an effort to show African-Americans in a more positive light.”

Though Willis is hopeful, there’s still no telling when — or if — the movie could come out (beyond its copyright lapsing decades from now).

In a statement to The Associated Press, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Disney’s distribution arm, said: “‘Song of the South’ is one of a handful of titles that has not seen a home distribution window. To this point, we have not discounted nor committed to any distribution window concerning this title.”
———
On the Net:
http://www.songofthesouth.net

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I just can't imagine Disney releasing this title on home video. There are plenty of films that are more volatile and potentially damaging - "Birth Of A Nation" and "Triumph of the Will" are both available on DVD - but releasing this film under the Disney banner would be a pretty controversial move, at best.

I'm not personally offended by "Song of the South", and I do think it has historic importance, but I understand if a lot of people don't think it should be shelved next to "Bear In The Big Blue House" at the video store.

Ultimately, I'm not sure "Song" is really worth the struggle. Take away the lures of its scarcity and political incorrectness, and... I don't think it's all that compelling a film. The biggest loss (to me) is that the general public can't see the animated segments, which to me are by far the most entertaining parts of the movie. It's got some of the best comic animation ever to come out of the studio, combining the energy of the Warner Brothers/MGM studios with Disney's technical finesse.

Spectacle Cinema - Zenith Or Nadir?

LA TIMES: THE BIG PICTURE/ PATRICK GOLDSTEIN
'300': It's just a movie -- or is it? Call it a grand, vivid spectacle -- nothing more, nothing less.

DON'T tell the critics, but "300" is a new kind of action movie, a clever synthesis of the stylized epic storytelling practiced by Peter Jackson in "Lord of the Rings" and the stop 'n' start fast-motion cutting of the Wachowski brothers' "Matrix" series. Let's call it Hyper Cinema. "300's" entire visual environment — its billowy wheat fields, its stormy gray skies, even blood that miraculously evaporates before it hits the ground — is a fabricated universe, created by 1,300 effects shots generated in a computer after the actors have gone home.

It's a gamer's view of the world that film critics don't relate to because they seem to have forgotten the kick they got from reading comics as kids. When I went to see "300" last week, the theater was full of scruffy guys who looked like they spent a lot more hours playing Final Fantasy X11 or God of War II than working out at the gym. In an era when it's increasingly difficult to reach young males, "300" offered a vivid spectacle of glistening pecs — as one admirer put it, "Ray Harryhausen crossed with Leni Riefenstahl" — that couldn't be replicated at home.

"We took a singular idea and went all the way with it, which I think resonates with audiences," director Zack Snyder, whose only other feature was a remake of "Dawn of the Dead," said on the phone from London. "It gives you that feeling that made you go to movies in the first place, as in 'Holy [smoke], that was awesome!' "

Populated with unknown actors, the retelling of the gory battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC was airily dismissed as hokum by America's leading critics.

Where the fanboys saw an easily identifiable theme — "me and my buddies are gonna band together and kick some butt" — critics spied pandering trash. The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris called "300" "action porn." The New York Times' A.O. Scott said " '300' is about as violent as ' Apocalypto' and twice as stupid." And the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter, dripping with disdain, exclaimed, "Go tell the Spartans that their sacrifice was not in vain; their long day's fight under the cooling shade of a million falling arrows safeguarded the West and guaranteed, all these years later, the right of idiots to make rotten movies about them."

Those idiots grossed $129.2 million in just 10 days. And Snyder says he wasn't perturbed by the nasty reviews. "Nah, I love 'em, they were funny," he says. "The reviews were so neo-con, so homophobic. They couldn't just go see the movie without trying to over-intellectualize it."

The critics were disturbed by a host of issues, not the least being the film's macho belligerence, cartoonish lack of interest in history and racial stereotyping of Xerxes' Persian hordes as dark-skinned, decadent club queens. But a key reason critics reacted so harshly is because they have been trained to value realism over fantasy, whether it is the stoic drama of Clint Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima" or the cool psychological precision of David Fincher's "Zodiac," which has flopped at the box office, despite critical raves.

"Zodiac" had everything a critic could love. It was smart, full of context and armed with a compelling narrative about an obsessive search for an enigmatic killer. Unfortunately, Fincher is a filmmaker who has little interest in what audiences — or studio executives — think about his movies. He makes them for himself.

In contrast, Snyder's "300," with its Xbox ethos, is a movie made for a generation of visual sensation seekers. Critics are largely shaped by the aesthetic of the cinematic past, which is why you often get the feeling they've been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new world they describe as coarser, more superficial and less intellectually stimulating than the golden age of their moviegoing youth.

The complaints are almost always the same. "It's an epic without a dream," said one critic. "The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea from your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps." Those words were written 30 years ago by Pauline Kael, reviewing "Star Wars."

If anyone knows how late critics come to the party, it is Fincher, whose breakthrough 1995 thriller "Se7en" was roundly dismissed by many of the same top critics who were "Zodiac's" biggest admirers. The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern called it "ponderous," Time's Richard Schickel dubbed it "twaddle" and Newsweek's David Ansen described its style as being a cross between "a Nike commercial and a bad Polish art film."

Now that his work is more familiar, Fincher is considered an old master, at least compared with a nervy upstart like Snyder. As it turns out, the two men's backgrounds are surprisingly similar. Fincher, who is only four years older than the 40-year-old Snyder, began his career at ILM doing optical effects on George Lucas films before directing a series of commercials and music videos for everyone from Aerosmith to Paula Abdul. Snyder had a similar career path.

"I'm part of the 'Star Wars' generation — it's what made me want to become a director," Snyder says. "Blade Runner," "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Excalibur" — films he saw in his mid-teens — are the ones he cites as big influences.

It's obvious that Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" series has served as an influence as well. "300's" deformed hunchback, Ephialtes, who betrays the Spartans, is uncannily reminiscent, both in physical form and in moral ambiguity, to "LOTR's" Gollum.

Snyder has learned that film is a subliminal art, in the sense that he uses his visuals to supply the film's emotional underpinning. In "300," the sky is always dark and unsettled, as if to signal the bitter bloodshed to come. "We tried to make the sky reflect the emotion in the movie, which you can't do in a regular movie," he says. "That's what is great about this kind of green-screen filmmaking. It's not just the actors who matter. Every element in the frame supports the emotion of the moment."

Sadly, our critics, who seemed content with hooting at "300," have lost touch with what makes movies different from other art forms. Hollywood's mass-audience films are not a literary or an intellectual genre. Never have been, never will be. They are built around visuals and emotion, the two elements that "300" used to capture the public imagination.

No one understands this better than 13-year-old Tristan Rodman, who saw "300" (with his dad, since the film is R-rated). "I guess the critics have not liked the movie for the same reason that the majority of people in America did like it," he told me. "Most people just went to see it. Not for the acting or the story, which was just OK, but for the spectacle."

Tristan got a great thrill from seeing "300." And whether you're a critic or just a fanboy, isn't that what people have always gone to the movies for?

"The Big Picture" appears Tuesdays in Calendar. Questions or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.

After Ten Years, Francis Coppola Returns To Directing

VARIETY: Inside Move: Coppola tackles 'Youth'
Film is director's first since 1997
By ANNE THOMPSON

The new United Artists led by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner is in talks to acquire "Youth Without Youth," Francis Ford Coppola's first film since 1997's "Rainmaker." Move would reunite Coppola with Cruise, whom he cast as an unknown in his 1983 pic "The Outsiders." UA had no comment.

Coppola adapted, produced and directed "Youth Without Youth" from the 1976 novel by Romanian-born religious historian Mircea Eliade. Coppola screened the film on Feb. 22 for friends in the Bay Area, including Carroll Ballard and George Lucas.

He showed the pic to individual distributors in Los Angeles on Friday and over the weekend. Reaction has been mixed, but several distribs were pursuing the project, being shopped the old-fashioned way by Coppola attorney Barry Hirsch.

Inspired by his daughter Sofia to make a low-budget personal film, Coppola may have skipped the festival route of selling the movie after witnessing the stir that her pic "Marie Antoinette" faced at Cannes last May.

Financed independently with foreign pre-sales from Pathe Intl. and funds from Coppola's own winery, the $5 million film, which Coppola shot last winter in Romania, stars Tim Roth as a 70-year-old who is struck by lightning and suddenly gets younger and more brilliant. His quest: to understand the origin of language and consciousness. By movie's end, he and the love of his life (Alexandra Maria Lara) are literally speaking in tongues. Bruno Ganz also stars, and Matt Damon makes a cameo appearance.

"Youth Without Youth" is both "intellectually challenging and emotionally remote," said one acquisitions exec at a studio subsid. Another distrib likened the film to an arty "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Date in print: Tue., Mar. 20, 2007, Los Angeles

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Awesome! When you spend $5 million, making a profit gets a whole lot easier. Taking risks is easier too, I would imagine. Good for him!

James Frawley Interview

SFGATE/THE POOP: Q&A - "The Muppet Movie" director James Frawley
Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email)

When we decided last month to go forward with The Poop Presents: "The Muppet Movie" (at the Cerrito Speakeasy this weekend; noon and 3 p.m. on Sat.; 2 p.m. on Sun.), I wanted to interview at least one person connected with the film.

James Frawley was at the top of my list, and not just because he directed the movie -- he gets bonus points for being behind the camera during more than half of the episodes of "The Monkees."

I got his e-mail from an old friend who works at the Director's Guild of America, and Jim wrote back the next day. He was in the middle of a directing job, but gave me some time on the phone early this week.

The Poop: Here's the most important question. How did you get Kermit the Frog to ride a bike?

James Frawley: Every time I show the film -- whether it's to film students at USC or UCLA or I'm going to a festival -- that's always the first question: How did Kermit ride the bicycle? And my stock answer is: I put him on a three-wheeler until he got his balance, and then I put him on the two-wheeler.

TP: I'm looking at your IMDB entry. You started out as an actor, and then all of a sudden you're directing "The Monkees."

JF: I was an actor in New York, and I had studied with Lee Strasberg and The Actors Studio and I did Broadway and off-Broadway, but at the same time I was very interested in photography. ... I picked up a 16mm camera and I shot two short films and edited them myself. They won a lot of awards and attracted the attention of Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, two young producers in Hollywood at that time. Because I had been an improvisational actor and done a lot of comedy, they thought I'd be a perfect combination to direct "The Monkees."

TP: How did you get "The Muppet Movie" job?
JF: Jim Henson had seen "The Monkees" and liked my work on that, and seen some other television that I had done. He knew that I had been an actor, and thought that I was the right combination for The Muppets. He flew me to London where they made "The Muppet Show." We met, and we had an immediate connection.

TP: Why didn't they direct it themselves?

JF: Up until that time they had never shot film. They had only shot tape, and they had never shot outside the studio. So (Henson) knew that he needed somebody who was a filmmaker and knew what to do with the camera. And he felt pretty good about my sense of humor. It seemed like a good combinations of talents for his Muppets. I had a very childlike approach to my work, and the Muppets fit in well with that.

TP: You also directed the pilot episode of "Ally McBeal." It seems like you specialize in blending fantasy and reality.

JF: You're absolutely right. I'm very comfortable with things that are of another world, or are not real. I've always enjoyed things that were quirky and off the beaten path.

TP: How did you approach directing "The Muppet Movie"?

JF: I had seen the show on the air, but I had no idea how they did it. So I learned the technique of Muppet performers -- they use cameras to watch themselves perform, and sets had to be built six feet off the ground, so the floor could be taken up and they could work from underneath.

TP: How was "The Muppet Movie" different than "The Muppet Show"?

JF: They had never been shot outdoors, or in car or real locations, and we pretty much had to invent it as we went along. Every shot had never been done before, because nobody had taken Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy and Kermit and put them in a Studebaker. It's the same thing that Peter Jackson had to do on his ("Lord of the Rings") films. None of that had ever been done before in the style that he did it.

TP: It doesn't sound like it was fun all the time.

JF: We just had to approach it like an adventure, and have the confidence and humor and good will to know that you can't make a mistake. And there was such a sense of comraderie and love and community that Jim Henson and his people brought to the work. I had no choice but to embrace it and let it carry me along.

TP: Was there one scene that was the most challenging?

JF: You have to figure that you had four grown men under the dashboard of that Studebaker. Fozzie Bear was operated by two people, Kermit was operated by somebody else and then Miss Piggy by somebody else. They had to have video imaging of what they were doing, so they could watch their own performance as it happened. And then we had a little person in the back of the car, steering and driving. We had a video camera on the nose of the car so he could see where he was going.

TP: Jesus.

JF: (Laughs) That was the most challenging. And all it looks like when you see the movie is a pig, a frog and a bear driving down the road.

TP: What was it like working with all the guest stars. You were a pretty young director, and you're on a set with Bob Hope and Milton Berle and all these other legends?

JF: They were all a pleasure to work with. We agreed to have them one day and one day only. They agreed to do it because they loved the Muppets. Some had more belief in the Muppets than others, but they were just a joy. Richard Pryor had a great deal of fun. And Jim Coburn was a friend of ours.

TP: What about Orson Welles?

JF: Orson Welles was just a joy. He had a history of magic and he knew that the Muppets were a form of magic and he knew every character's name. He even knew we had changed the color of somebody's hat.

TP: Our readers almost unanimously picked this movie as our blog's first children's film presentation. Do you get excited that people still appreciate your work.

JF: I'm so flattered and thrilled that you chose "The Muppet Movie." It's my favorite movie in my career. I wish I could be there this weekend to see the reaction.

Posted By: Peter Hartlaub (Email) | March 02 2007 at 03:30 AM

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Thanks to the PuppetVision blog for the link!

Captain Marvel Still 'Alive', Developing Movie Anyway

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: Team Captain: August writing NL's 'Shazam!'
By Borys Kit - March 9, 2007

John August has been hired to pen "Shazam!" New Line Cinema's adaptation of a DC Comics series featuring Captain Marvel. Peter Segal is attached to direct and also is producing with Michael Ewing.

The comic book series focuses on Billy Batson, a teenager who becomes the superhero known as Captain Marvel when he utters the magic word "Shazam!" The name is an acronym for six gods and heroes of the ancient world as well as their attributes: the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Aries, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury.

Writers on the long-gestating project include William Goldman and Bryan Goluboff.

Segal approached August because of the scribe's track record of combining big spectacle with characterization in such movies as "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Big Fish." August, who recently started reading the trade paperbacks that compiled the "Shazam!" series, was intrigued.

"It's a unique opportunity to do a comic book movie where the character in it actually read comic books," said August, who has started writing the script. "What's terrific about the character is that he looks like this superstudly superhero but is really a 13-year-old boy. And to approach everything that is great about a superhero movie from a 13-year-old boy's perspective was a unique way in."

August sat down with noted DC Comics writer Geoff Johns for "idiot checking," making sure the filmmakers' approach to the character was consistent with what fans love about him. "I think we're going to be able to be really faithful to the mythology and yet make it completely transparent for people who have no idea who the character is," August said.

Chris Godsick and Michael Uslan ("Constantine") are executive producing.

Gregory Noveck is overseeing for DC Comics. Mark Kaufman and Daryl Freimark are overseeing for New Line.

August, who wrote and directed the Sundance Film Festival favorite "The Nines," is repped by UTA and attorney Ken Richman.

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Thanks to I Watch Stuff! for the tip.

Man! The studios are falling all over each other to get their superhero properites into development. I guess the eye is still on "Spider-Man" box-office and not the "Superman Returns" budget. Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to the fact that the "Spider-Man" films were pretty expensive too, and that "Ghost Rider" is doing well.

A friend of mine reminded me that the success of the TV show "Heroes" might be a big part of the current comic movie craze. That makes total sense to me! I'd forgotten all about that.

Children To Stop Reading Another Book Series In Favor Of Viewing Aggressively Marketed Films

Spielberg’s DreamWorks moves to bring cartoon hero Tintin to the big screen
By RAF CASERT - Associated Press Writer

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — It was a quarter-century in the making but then again, nothing is easy for cartoon heroes such as Tintin.

Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, a division of Viacom Inc., has committed to produce at least one movie about the adventures of the intrepid Belgian reporter, said Nick Rodwell, head of Moulinsart NV, Tintin’s commercial studio, on Thursday.

“After 25 years, they finally said, ‘OK, let’s go,”’ Rodwell said of the protracted talks with Spielberg. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rodwell said the Hollywood company will go into preproduction for a movie, which should appear in theaters in about two years.

It wasn’t clear whether the film would be cartoon animation, computer animation or a movie with actors, or which of the 24 cartoon books of Tintin’s adventures would be picked.

“If movie No. 1 works, we will continue,” Rodwell said.

Talks about a Hollywood movie on Tintin, who saves the lives of countless people and makes sure criminals end up behind bars, have long stalled on financial issues and production questions.

The first plan surfaced just before Tintin’s creator, Georges Remi, aka Herge, died in 1983. Even at that time, Remi, one of the world’s foremost cartoon strip authors, delighted in Hollywood’s interest.

“If Steven Spielberg wants to make a Tintin film I cannot imagine anything better,” Rodwell said of Remi’s thoughts, and he fully realized that a movie adaptation might well change the way Tintin looks.

“Let’s see what he comes up with,” Rodwell said.

Tintin books have sold 220 million copies worldwide and have been translated in 77 languages.

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Well, we'll have to see what develops. I know Spielberg's been interested in making a Tintin film for a long time, so it makes sense that he'd land it eventually. I'd love to see a 2-D animated feature, but I have a feeling that's the least likely of the options (i.e, 2-D animation, live-action, or 3-D animation). The graphic novels are beloved all over the world (and rightly so), but I wonder if they're too violent for a PG-13, family-friendly American film.

Oscar Night: The Departed Leaves The Podium With Gold

NY TIMES: ‘The Departed’ Wins Best Picture, Scorsese Best Director
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and SHARON WAXMAN
Published: February 26, 2007

HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 25 —Twenty-six years and seven snubs after his first Oscar nomination, for “Raging Bull,” Martin Scorsese finally felt the warm embrace of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Sunday as he was named best director and his murderous mob thriller “The Departed” was named the best picture of 2006.

“Could you double-check the envelope?” Mr. Scorsese quipped after silencing a raucous standing ovation of whistling, whooping academy members.

“I’m so moved,” he said, accepting the directing prize. “So many people over the years have been wishing this for me. Strangers — I go into doctors’ offices, elevators, I go for an X-ray — they say, ‘You should win one.’ ”

Forest Whitaker won best actor for his performance as the cunning, seductive and savage Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.”

“Receiving this honor tells me that it’s possible,” Mr. Whitaker said. “It is possible, for a kid from East Texas, raised in South Central L.A., and Carson, who believes in dreams, who believes them in his heart, to touch them and have them happen.”

Helen Mirren took best actress for her performance as a traditional monarch in a modern world in “The Queen.”

“For 50 years or more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle,” Ms. Mirren said. “I salute her courage and her consistency, and I thank her, for if it wasn’t for her, I most certainly would not be here.”

Graham King, the only of three credited producers permitted to accept the best-picture award for “The Departed,” said, “To be standing here where Martin Scorsese won his Oscar is such a joy.” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo Del Toro’s magical-realist fantasy set in 1944 Fascist Spain, received Oscars for cinematography, art direction and makeup at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony, but fell short of its ultimate prize, best foreign-language film, which went to “The Lives of Others,” from Germany.

Jennifer Hudson, the “American Idol” reject-turned-star of “Dreamgirls,” was named best supporting actress, giving two of the four acting awards to African-Americans. And Alan Arkin, the cranky, heroin-snorting grandfather in the bittersweet family comedy “Little Miss Sunshine,” won best supporting actor.

“Little Miss Sunshine” also won for its original screenplay by Michael Arndt, a former assistant to Matthew Broderick who had to wait seven years for his script to be produced. “When I was a kid my family drove 500 miles in a van with a broken clutch,” he said, explaining the source of his inspiration. “It ended up being one of the funnest things we did together.”

On a night in which several top awards came as no surprise, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary featuring Al Gore on global warming, won best documentary feature.

“I made this movie for my children,” said the director, Davis Guggenheim, his arm on Mr. Gore’s shoulder. “We were moved to act by this man.”

Mr. Gore took his moment in the worldwide spotlight to underline the film’s message. “My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis,” he said, adding that the “will to act” was a renewable resource. “Let’s renew it,” he said.

That film also won best original song, for “I Need to Wake Up,” by Melissa Etheridge, upsetting “Dreamgirls,” which had three songs in contention. Holding her Oscar aloft backstage, Ms. Etheridge quipped that it would be “the only naked man who will ever be in my bedroom.”

In a twist, “The Lives of Others,” which examined the Orwellian police state that was East Germany, won in something of an upset. The German director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, thanked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California “for teaching me that the words ‘I can’t’ should be stricken from my vocabulary.”

The awards for Mr. Del Toro’s movie came on a night in which his and two other films by Mexican directors were up for a total of 16 honors. One of them, “Babel,” won for its original score by Gustavo Santaolalla, who also won last year for “Brokeback Mountain.”

“Happy Feet” was named the year’s best animated feature.

Accepting for best supporting actor, Mr. Arkin said that “Little Miss Sunshine” was about “innocence, growth and connection.” His voice cracking, he praised his fellow actors, saying that acting was a “team sport.” He added, “I can’t work at all unless I feel the spirit of unity around me.”

William Monahan won best adapted screenplay for “The Departed,” his transplantation of the movie “Infernal Affairs” from Hong Kong to South Boston.

An Oscar also went to Thelma Schoonmaker, the longtime editor to Mr. Scorsese. She saluted Mr. Scorsese for being “tumultuous, passionate, funny” as a collaborator. “It’s like being in the best film school in the world,” she said.

“Dreamgirls,” nominated for eight awards, the most of any film, also won for sound mixing. But Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto,” whose three nominations were caught up in the tempest caused by the director’s drunken, anti-Semitic rant last summer, was shut out.

Ellen DeGeneres made her first appearance as the host of the movie industry’s annual celebration of itself, on a night expected to have its share of pregnant moments. Three filmmaking titans — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola — presentedthe award for best director.

Ms. DeGeneres said it had been a lifelong dream of hers to be host for the Oscars, rather than to win one. “Let that be a lesson to you kids out there: Aim lower,” she said, sounding a theme for the evening’s opening, which was designed to honor the many nominees, 177 in all, rather than focusing on the winners.

Ms. DeGeneres repeatedly ventured into the audience, at one point getting Mr. Spielberg to take a picture of her with Clint Eastwood, “for MySpace.”

And in a choice full of irony for industry insiders, Tom Cruise, who was thrown off the Paramount lot last summer by Viacom’s chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, gave the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount chairwoman who retired during a shake-up by Mr. Redstone two years earlier.

Backstage, Ms. Lansing said she had not known that Mr. Cruise was going to give her the award. “I saw him at an Oscar party a few days before, and he was sort of cold to me,” she said. Onstage, she said, he had whispered in her ear: “This is an honor. I really wanted to do this, you know how much I love you.” Ms. Lansing said she believed Mr. Cruise, who had a rough year before taking over management of United Artists, would be back to pick up an Oscar for directing or producing within five years.

Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer, received an honorary Oscar from Mr. Eastwood, who starred in the spaghetti westerns for which Mr. Morricone provided the unmistakable music.

The program began with a bouncy montage, directed by Errol Morris, of interview snippets with nominees reciting, among other things, the number of times they had come close to winning an Oscar. “Zilch,” said Peter O’Toole, of the number of times he had won.

Will Ferrell and Jack Black, leading members of Hollywood’s comedy rat pack, did a song-and-dance number bemoaning the paucity of comedic talent among the Oscar nominees. “I guess you don’t like laughter,” Mr. Ferrell sang. “A comedian at the Oscars is the saddest, bitterest, alcoholic clown.”

John C. Reilly, a past Oscar nominee, then stood up in the audience to remind them — in song — that he had been in both “Boogie and Talladega Nights.” All three then crooned that they hoped to go home with Helen Mirren, a best-actress nominee, who is in her 60s.

Breaking with tradition, the show’s producer, Laura Ziskin, best known for the “Spider-Man” franchise, rejiggered the lineup of awards to leave the marquee categories — best actor, actress, director and picture — for the end of the night. The first half of the show was front-loaded with technical and craft categories: art direction, makeup, sound editing and mixing, costume design and visual effects.

“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” won for visual effects; “Letters From Iwo Jima” took sound editing; “Marie Antoinette” picked up costume design.

The director Ari Sandel won best live-action short film for “West Bank Story,” a spoof on “West Side Story” with feuding Palestinian and Israeli falafel stands. “This is a movie about peace and about hope,” Mr. Sandel said. “To get this award shows that there are so many out there who also support that notion.”

The award for animated short went to “The Danish Poet,” written and directed by Torill Kove.

Mr. Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, a nominee for best actor (“Blood Diamond”), announced in the middle of the telecast that the program had offset its carbon emissions by buying energy credits. “This show has officially gone green,” Mr. DiCaprio said.

The Oscars adopted other conservation measures this year, such as using recycled paper for the Oscar ballots. “We have a long way to go, but all of us, in our lives, can do something to make a difference,” Mr. Gore said.

But Mr. Gore did not throw his hat in the ring, as the producers of his film, among others in Hollywood, had hoped he might. Asked if he had a major announcement to make, Mr. Gore said: “With a billion people watching, it’s as good a time as any. So my fellow Americans, I’m going to take this opportunity, here and now, to formally announce” — and the Oscars orchestra, right on cue, drowned him out as if he had droned on a second too long.

The Academy Awards capped a season in which the conventional wisdom has often been wrong, and actual wisdom has been in short supply. The big question before the nominations was how many Oscars “Dreamgirls” might win, and what film could compete with it for best picture. The only question after the nominations was, What happened to “Dreamgirls”?

Many theories were advanced, including misguided marketing and an abundance of hype, but the film’s director, Bill Condon, cut to the chase: “Maybe the Academy saw five films they liked better.” Whatever the reason, the film’s elimination left the race wide open to an array of films that took very different routes to the nomination.

“The Departed” rode a wave of box-office success and a plan to keep Oscar hype on the down-low, partly because many in the industry felt it was time to recognize the director Martin Scorsese’s lifetime of excellence. “Little Miss Sunshine,” a new take on the family road-trip movie, which won four Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, was a film that no one in Hollywood seemed to want to make, but it connected with audiences to the tune of more than $94 million in worldwide box-office receipts. “Babel,” by contrast, left United States audiences cold while doing good business abroad, but connected with critics and was rewarded for a global, ambitious story by winning best dramatic feature at the Golden Globes.

“The Queen,” a small movie that managed to do everything right, managed to ride one of the year’s more remarkable performances — Ms. Mirren as a traditional monarch in a very modern world — to broad critical recognition. And after “Flags of Our Fathers,” another would-be Oscar hopeful, met with indifference, Mr. Eastwood and his studio, Warner Brothers, decided to release the film’s twin, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” before year’s end — and were rewarded with a best-picture nomination.

This appeared to be the most ethnically and linguistically diverse batch of film nominees yet, appropriate enough given that Hollywood’s foreign revenues now eclipse the domestic take by a significant margin. The Oscar slate included several films shot largely in languages other than English, most notably Mr. Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” in Japanese, and Mr. Gibson’s “Apocalypto,” in Maya dialects.

“Babel,” from the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, spanned three continents and five languages — Japanese, Berber, Spanish, English and sign — and two of its actresses, Rinko Kikuchi of Japan and Adriana Barraza of Mexico, received nominations. (Three films by Mexican directors were up for a total of 16 honors.)

Warner Bros. Considers Making A Justice League Movie

VARIETY: Justice prevails for Warner Bros.
Studio eyeing DC superhero team feature
By PAMELA MCCLINTOCK
Posted: Thurs., Feb. 22, 2007, 10:00pm PT

DC Comics super-team Justice League is heading for the bigscreen.

Batman may meet up with Superman on the bigscreen after all -- along with Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash and all the rest of DC Comics' biggest names.

Warner Bros., with its major appetite for fresh franchises, is looking to make a feature based on super team the Justice League of America, hiring writing duo Kiernan and Michele Mulroney to pen the script.

It's the first major action the studio has taken on the project.

Feature film is bound to include some combination of DC's most iconic superheroes, although the studio wouldn't confirm which ones they might be. It's unlikely that the studio and DC Comics, a division of Warner, would opt to feature second-tier characters.

Since its inception in 1960, JLA has featured almost every major hero in the DC Comics universe, although the core team has largely remained the same: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter.

The heroes typically band together to fight alien menaces or groups of supervillains.

"The Justice League of America has been a perennial favorite for generations of fans, and we believe their appeal to film audiences will be as strong and diverse as the characters themselves," Warner prexy of production Jeff Robinov said in announcing the hiring of the Mulroneys.

In taking on the ambitious project, Warner faces several conundrums.

Now that the Batman and Superman film franchises have been revived, does the studio go after Christian Bale ("Batman Begins") and Brandon Routh ("Superman Returns") to star in a Justice League pic? Studio is also trying hard to bring Wonder Woman to the bigscreen.

To a large degree, casting will depend upon the story arc for the JLA feature and at what point in the superheroes' lives the plot takes place.

Warner also must deal with myriad producers working on the Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman franchises.

Studio dropped its efforts to make "Batman vs. Superman" in order to focus on relaunching "Batman" and "Superman" as individual properties, which it has done.

Filmmakers Chris Nolan ("Batman Begins") and Bryan Singer ("Superman Returns") are each on board to helm the next installments in the two respective franchises. Nolan's "The Dark Knight" is eyeing a 2008 release and the next "Superman," 2009.

The potential payoff of bringing JLA to theaters can't be ignored by Warner, which turns out more tentpoles than any other studio.

Comicbook fans have long clamored for a movie version of JLA, and word of the Warner project is certain to be a hot topic at New York Comic Con, which unspools today in Gotham.

JLA has spawned several cartoon TV series, including 1960s and '70s show "Super Friends" and current Cartoon Network skein "Justice League Unlimited" from Warner Bros. Animation.

The Mulroneys -- Kieran is the brother of thesp Dermot Mulroney -- caught the attention of studios around town with their rewrite of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" for Fox.

Other screenplay projects include "On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction," "Paper Man" and "Worst Case."

Kieran and Michele Mulroney are repped by Creative Artists Agency and Management 360.

(Ben Fritz contributed to this report.)

Not Content With Apes Remake, Fox Moves On To Earth

FIRSTSHOWING.NET: The Day the Earth Stood Still Being Remade for 2008 - Confirmed!
February 21, 2007 by Alex Billington

Apparently Box Office Mojo, the best website for all things box office earnings, has updated their schedule for summer 2008 and included a listing of The Day the Earth Stood Still to open on May 9th, 2008 (one week after Iron Man). The original is a sci-fi classic 1951 movie about an alien and a robot that land on Earth to try and save the world from being destroyed. IMDB doesn't even have a listing for this remake, but Box Office Mojo claims it's being produced by Fox, fast-tracked for a spot in 2008's busy summer.

Is this real? We don't know yet, but we'll put in some requests with Fox to find out. I can bet if it is real, it's going to be directed by someone who will give all sci-fi geeks quite a tingle. This movie is a very well-known classic and I don't think they'd risk screwing up a remake - like The War of the Worlds, another 50's classic, fortunately they did a pretty good job with that. Updated inside!

Update: Fox confirmed with us that this is true and the date is correct, meaning a The Day the Earth Stood Still remake is definitely underway for summer 2008!

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The original's one of my favorite science-fiction films, so you can bet I'll be giving this a miss. Wouldn't a restoration/re-release be a lot cheaper? I think the Cold War paranoia'd still resonate.

Life After Rings At New Line

NY TIMES: For New Line, an Identity Crisis
By SHARON WAXMAN
Published: February 19, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 18 — For six weeks in 2005, Robert K. Shaye, the founder and co-chairman of New Line Cinema, lay in a coma in a New York City hospital, fending off death from a sudden infection.

He survived, narrowly, and over many months quietly made his way back to health, a dizzying and unexpected turn for one of Hollywood’s mavericks.

Now Mr. Shaye, 67, is back to what he has done for nearly 40 years, running New Line, a midsize studio in a world of competitive behemoths, at a time when the company, owned by Time Warner, has been beset by rumors of dysfunction and executive change, and bedeviled by a slate of unsuccessful films in 2006.

That too is an unexpected turn for a studio that three years ago capped the phenomenally popular “Lord of the Rings” series with a best picture Oscar for the last installment, “The Return of the King” — a first for the studio.

Since then, according to both Mr. Shaye and Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the president of Time Warner, the studio has been financially successful, earning more than $100 million every year for the last three, largely in revenue from previous hits that continues to stream in through DVD and other post-theatrical sales. “New Line is very profitable,” Mr. Bewkes said in an interview. “We’re making money hand over fist.”

But in Hollywood and on Wall Street, some question the focus at New Line. After the success of “Lord of the Rings,” some had expected the studio to pursue a more ambitious agenda than the urban comedies and horror films of its past. That might have included pressing ahead with “The Hobbit,” from the “Rings” author J. R. R. Tolkien, to which New Line shares the rights.

Instead, Mr. Shaye has been trading insults with the “Rings” director Peter Jackson, while the studio has struggled to find a new breakout hit.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as financial crisis, even if they had a bad year,” said Harold L. Vogel, an entertainment analyst. “It’s more like an identity crisis. It’s a fair question: where do you go from here? Everyone has the same problem, whether you’re 90 or you’re 20. And they’re facing it now with a little more emphasis.”

If critics have observed that the studio seems distracted, there may be good reason. Mr. Shaye’s illness, the seriousness of which was not disclosed to the public before now, apparently derailed the studio for a portion of 2005 and affected the slate in 2006. And last year he took time to direct his own movie, “The Last Mimzy,” a family-oriented science fiction adventure (co-written by New Line’s president of production, Toby Emmerich) that will open in theaters next month.

In an interview in his office in Los Angeles last week, Mr. Shaye said that he had as much enthusiasm for running his studio as ever, and said he believed that this year’s releases would do well. “I started this company in 1967,” he said. “I still come to work every day. I still have the same passion I had then.”

Mr. Shaye acknowledged his disappointment in the studio’s performance in 2006, with duds like “Snakes on a Plane,” which cost $33 million to make and took in only that much in domestic theaters despite higher expectations, and “Tenacious D: ‘The Pick of Destiny,” the Jack Black comedy with a budget of less than $20 million, which took in a scant $8 million in domestic ticket sales.

“After last year I will take a more considered approach to the green-light process,” he said. “I will act as more of an adversary, or critic, of the decisions advocated by others.”

But he said the studio would continue to aim for its traditional zone of comedies and genre films, with a couple of highbrow dramas and one or two big-budget bets, in the range of $100 million and above.

For this year, those big bets include “Rush Hour 3,” the next in the successful series of martial arts comedies, and “The Golden Compass,” a fantasy adventure with special effects and a budget of $150 million, a potential new franchise for the studio.

The studio has also secured a $350 million line of credit in a financing deal with the Royal Bank of Scotland, giving it a financial cushion.

Mr. Shaye spoke in detail for the first time about the illness that almost killed him two years ago. In March 2005, he said he suddenly came down with a lethal form of pneumonia, from streptococcus A bacteria, similar to a rare illness that precipitously killed Jim Henson, the “Muppets” creator, at age 53 in 1990.

On the advice of a doctor, Mr. Shaye checked into NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and was placed in a medically induced coma in the intensive care unit for six weeks. (In his film “Mimzy,” Mr. Shaye names one character Dr. Sherman, in tribute to one of his caregivers.)

He emerged from the coma and after two months in the hospital, he was permitted to go home to his Manhattan residence. Even then he took many months to recover, unable initially to walk for more than two or three minutes at a time, and slowly taking up work again.

But Mr. Shaye says he thinks more clearly now than he did before his illness. “It’s difficult to explain, but I have a clarity of thought and, I believe, of reason, which was one of the gifts” of his illness, he said. And, he added, “I certainly appreciate the normal functioning of life a lot more.”

One thing that has not been blunted by illness is Mr. Shaye’s temper, which flared last year when he was asked about a lawsuit filed by Mr. Jackson over profits from “The Lord of the Rings.”

Mr. Shaye, criticizing what he called Mr. Jackson’s “arrogance” and calling the director “myopic,” told Sci-Fi Wire: “I don’t care about Peter Jackson anymore.” He added, “He wants to have another $100 million or $50 million, whatever he’s suing us for. He doesn’t want to sit down and talk about it. He thinks that we owe him something after we’ve paid him over a quarter of a billion dollars.”

Asked about the remarks last week, Mr. Shaye said that he made the statement “in a moment of emotion” but did not regret it. “I regret losing a friend,” he said, as he showed a visitor a Gandalf sword that Mr. Jackson had sent him as a gift, before the lawsuit.

A representative for Mr. Jackson declined to comment.

But the ill will has held up plans to make “The Hobbit.” Without specifically saying he would not make the film with Mr. Jackson, Mr. Shaye made it plain that he had no interest in working with difficult filmmakers. “Some directors are impossible,” he said. “Are there a few people I wouldn’t work with? Yes, but I won’t name names.”

And he would not comment on reports in the news media that the “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi had been asked to direct “The Hobbit.” He said, however, that although there was no workable script yet for the film, he intended to release it in 2009.

The Hollywood rumor mill has worked overtime in debating the future of New Line, which has had to justify its existence repeatedly over its 40-year history. Some people have questioned, for example, why the studio that made Will Ferrell’s breakout hit “Elf” in 2003 has not made other movies with him.

Until now. This month New Line began production on “Semi-Pro,” starring Mr. Ferrell; Mr. Shaye said that Mr. Ferrell had not found material he wanted to make at New Line until now, and chose not to make a sequel to “Elf.”

And although the studio is now part of Time Warner, current and former executives said that it continues to operate much like a family. Mr. Shaye, the father figure of the group, described his partnership with his co-chairman, Michael Lynne, this way : “I’m emotion. He’s reason.”

But as in a family, some producers and agents complained of confusion in their business dealings with the studio. Several said they had made deals with Mr. Emmerich or another executive at the studio, only to have Mr. Shaye redefine the terms later.

An executive connected with the coming film “Rendition” said the same thing happened on that project, a big-budget production under way in Morocco, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep. Weeks after the producers closed the deal with the studio, said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his business relationships, Mr. Shaye came back to them and placed additional conditions, like finding a financing partner.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Emmerich disputed that account, saying that Mr. Shaye had reservations about the script from the start.

Still, some agents and producers point out that the loose atmosphere at New Line can also lead to daring decisions, like the one that led to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Mr. Shaye denied that any executive changes were in the works, and said that Mr. Emmerich would continue to run production, while Russell Schwartz would continue to run domestic marketing.

Mr. Bewkes, the Time Warner president, said that he regarded the three years of success with “Rings” to be an anomaly — albeit one that brought in well over $3 billion in revenue to New Line.

“The business they’re in is a combination of all those ‘little titles,’ which add up to a steady stream for the indie business, and occasional but pretty regular big commercial franchises, like ‘Rush Hour,’ ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘The Golden Compass,’ ” he said. “I feel confident about New Line’s future.”

And Mr. Shaye, whose contract is up in 2008, seemed to fully agree. “It’s never business as usual, because the business is unusual,” he said, adding, “but we’d rather work on movies than anything else — every one of us.”

New Bee Movie Trailer

I still like the live-action part better, unfortunately. Judge for yourself...

The Host Trailer

This looks pretty interesting. Apparently, the formaldehyde dumping is based on a real case of U.S. military negligence in Korea. Bonus points for the archery!

Whiteout Graphic Novel Coming To The Big Screen

VARIETY: Sena to direct 'Whiteout'
Action-thriller is first Dark Castle film
By PAMELA MCCLINTOCK
Posted: Wed., Feb. 7, 2007, 7:02pm PT

Dominic Sena will direct Kate Beckinsale in action-thriller "Whiteout," the first movie to go into production under Joel Silver's new Dark Castle Entertainment genre label.

Warner Bros. will distribute the pic, based on Greg Rucka's 1999 comicbook miniseries of the same name. Scribes Jon and Erich Hoeber are adapting for the bigscreen.

Dark Castle Prods., a unit launched last fall within Warners-based Silver Pictures, is backed by more than $240 million from 15 different investment firms. Coin will be used to finance 15 pics over the next six years, with Warners distribbing the entire slate.

Silver has sole greenlight authority under the terms of the deal. He also has full creative control. Film budgets are expected to be in the $15 million-$40 million range.

"Whiteout" is set to begin lensing March 5 in Montreal.

Story revolves around a lone U.S. marshal (Beckinsale) stationed in Antarctica who is drawn into a shocking murder investigation. With only three days until winter, she must solve the crime before the continent is plunged into darkness and she is trapped with the killer.

Producers are Silver and Dark Castle co-prexy Susan Downey. Dark Castle co-prexy Steve Richards, Don Carmody and Rucka are exec producers, while David Gambino is co-producing.

Beckinsale, who appeared in 2007 Sundance entry "Snow Angels," was most recently in theaters with "Click," opposite Adam Sandler, and horror-thriller "Underworld: Evolution." Later this year, she'll be seen in "Vacancy."

Sena's credits include "Gone in 60 Seconds," "Swordfish" and "Kalifornia."

What Might Have Been

A Night At The Museum, written by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon, based on the book by Milan Trenc; directed by Shawn Levy.

So many effect-laden stories fixate on spectacle and current sensations, it's refreshing to see a film that attempts to extoll the wonders of exploring the past. While many of these ideas (visually and otherwise) have been examined in other movies - Jumanji, Jurassic Park, and The Indian In The Cupbord are among the many echoed here - it's still a thrill to see history literally come alive.

It's the story of New Yorker Larry Daley (Ben Stiller), a divorced dad who's still trying to find his direction in life. His son Nick (Jake Cherry) loves him dearly, but is starting to lose patience - Don, the new dad, may be a dreamless dork, but his stability is beginning to look appealing. Much to Larry's dismay, Nick now understands the concept of a "fallback" plan, since playing hockey is losing its appeal. Larry's current job is in the past tense, and he needs a new one - and fast - before he loses his apartment and his family's confidence.

Desparate, he takes a job as a night watchman for the local museum - one of those cavernous, east-coast style museums that seems to contain everything. The curator (Ricky Gervias in full-throttle officiousness) is downsizing the security staff, and they need one man to do the job of three (Bill Cobbs, Dick Van Dyke, and Mickey Rooney). Why not? Larry doesn't even bother to read the instructions that his predecessors left for him. He can hang onto his lease, and it seems harmless enough.

Except, of course, it isn't. Thanks to a magical Egyptian tablet, the entire collection comes to life at sundown - from the enormous Tyrannosaurus skeleton down to the tiniest figurines in the dioramas. Everyone's dying to get out of their glass cases, so Larry discovers he's got to play substitute teacher to a jungle's worth of wild animals (including the ubitquitous mischevious monkey), explorers, soldiers, cowboys, cavemen, and other various and sundry squabbling figures from history. Like us, the figurines and statues can be prejudiced against their fellows, isolated in their cases from each other, and sometimes themselves. It's affecting to see Sacagewea sealed behind glass, yearning for a larger world.

The first night is a complete disaster, and the instructions are destroyed. Larry sticks to his guns, though, mainly for his son - cramming his head with history from the library and internet, gradually learning how to connect with his charges. It's not without mistakes along the way - the tablet has a quasi-vampiric hold over the inhabitants; if they remain outside when the sun rises, they crumble to dust, lost forever. Along these lines, the tablet also has had a Coccoon-like rejuvenating effect on the elderly guards - this wrinkle is what drives the third act's Time Bandits-style uprising.

Larry discovers that he does have the spark of greatness within him, and ultimately helps to protect the museum and its inhabitants from the forces of evil and selfishness. The action sequences are fine, but it's genuinely touching to have Teddy Roosevelt tell you that you have what it takes. Who wouldn't want that?

This is a terrific, inspiring concept, but unfortunately the script isn't up to delivering on its full potential. There's plenty of great plot elements and some nice heartfelt moments, but the order and proportions seem off. The internal logic of the story isn't thought through carefully - characters have difficulty communicating when it's necessary (as with Attila The Hun), while others are not only fluent, but become translators in other instances (as with the Egyptian king). Additionally, the magic tablet can be conveniently turned off and on at will; and as with other story elements, abilites are added to the tablet as they become useful. Little Nick's future (as a hockey player or otherwise) falls to the wayside, as well as the fate of Larry's tenuous bond with his ex-wife. There's some huge missed opportunities as well - a friend of mine pointed out that you could bring any toy, stuffed animal or figure to the museum, and once they crossed the threshold, they too would come to life at night.

Young children will be thrilled by the set pieces (I know I would've loved this film when I was ten or so), but with a little more thought, this film could've been amazing, treating our inner adults as well as our inner children. And that's truly a shame.

Go See Venus

Anita and I saw it tonight, and we loved it! It may not be my favorite film of the year, but it's way up there.

It's so refreshing to see a film with strong, compelling characters - flawed people trying to connect with one another. Feelings, not bludgening technique. Check it out!

Review to come...

The Astronaut Farmer Trailer

For whatever reason, someone's decided to make a feature film version of the Salvage 1 television series. Somehow, I don't think we'll be seeing this on a double bill with Who Killed The Electric Car? anytime soon.

PS - Here's far more that you'd ever want to know about Salvage 1.

More Iron Man Movie News

This may be the armor design for the upcoming Iron Man feature, purportedly designed by Stan Winston Studios, and owing a heavy debt to Adi Granov's current comic work. It looks great, but I do long for Gene Colan's '60s/'70's version, even though it's not nearly as cinematic. I just like those simple shapes! I'm sure it has a huge amount to do with it being the first version that I saw as a kid.

Word has it that Gwyneth Paltrow has signed on for the film. I'm trying remember who the female lead was in the comic. Pepper Potts? Yup - thanks, Wikipedia!

PS - I know that's not a Gene Colan cover - but it was the best unobstructed drawing of that design.

PPS - Thanks to the i like toys blog, the Hollywood Reporter, and screenrant.com for the articles, and to Nick Simon's Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index for the vintage Iron Man cover!

No Real News On The Simpsons Movie

LA TIMES: SNEAKS 2007 - Yellow but not mellow
Pretty much all we know about 'The Simpsons Movie' is: It'll be funny.
By Michael Ordoña, Special to The Times

NOT even threats of visits by Sideshow Bob or Fat Tony and the boys could wheedle many details of the upcoming "The Simpsons Movie" out of the series' powers that be. Fans can only speculate on what kind of treatment it will get — there's the bloated, inflated episode route (think "Star Trek: The Motion Picture") or the movie as extension of the series option ("The X-Files").

Specifics remain as closely guarded as the identity of the state in which Springfield is located. (Geography enthusiasts: the city has a gorge, an ocean port, a volcano and a desert.) "I can't really tell you much," said director David Silverman, "other than the Simpsons will be in it. Springfield will be in it; it's not being shot in Vancouver. Very few animals were hurt in the shooting of this film … a couple."

Speaking from their sanctum sanctorum (an unremarkable writers' room with a poster of dozens of the show's characters on the wall) on the 20th Century Fox lot, executive producers James L. Brooks, Matt Groening and Al Jean vacillated between stoking expectations and throwing them in with the kindling.

"We're doing things we never could have done on the series," said Brooks, who won his 19th Emmy last year. "Obviously, there's that much more manpower brought into it, and hopefully we're telling a story that requires this length."

"Pixar movies are so good," said Jean, "we want to live up to that too."

"No, we're not going to look as good," Brooks hastily added with a laugh. "Don't go away thinking that!"

Although all three stressed the importance of a strong emotional component, they made clear that their intentions were still sufficiently low-falutin.

"We want to make people laugh," said "Simpsons" creator Groening. "Not that it's a role model in content, but the 'South Park' movie was proof that you could do a movie that didn't have the greatest animation but was really funny from beginning to end."

The notion of a big-screen version of America's longest-running sitcom has been around since at least its third season. But because of the talent drain caused by Hollywood's animation boom and the insistence of the show's brain trust on complete control, it wasn't until a couple of years ago that the idea gained any real traction. The show has generated billions of dollars in revenue and has become culturally iconic, to the horror of some — former President George H.W. Bush once said, "We're going to keep trying to strengthen the American family, to make them more like 'The Waltons' and less like 'The Simpsons.' "

The film's release, scheduled for summer, will roughly coincide with the TV show's 400th episode and the 20th anniversary of America's favorite insanely dysfunctional family's debut on "The Tracey Ullman Show." (The show's run "is beyond my wildest dreams. And I have really wild dreams," Groening says.)

The honor and burden of directing the highly anticipated film version falls to Silverman, whose credits include some of the "Ullman" shorts and the series' first episodes as well Pixar's "Monsters, Inc."

Since Silverman was one of the only experienced animators at the show's inception, Groening said he "invented a lot of the rules on how to draw the characters. Like Bart has, I don't even know, 13 spikes or 11 spikes? And Marge's hairdo is nine eyeballs tall."

From the movie's production hub at Film Roman in Burbank, the wild-eyed, enthusiastic Silverman lacked only a lab coat and soda-bottle glasses to complete the mad-scientist persona.

"I thought it should be basically Panavision as opposed to American widescreen," he said. "If you're going to go from roughly a square format to a feature, let's really go for it, let's go for it as wide as possible."

The director also highlighted that, although the look would still be identifiably Simpsons, small additions like tone shadows would provide new dimension for these "big yellow characters."

It may just be compression madness from the upcoming deadline — culminating a year of physical production as opposed to six months for a single TV episode — but they seem almost giddy at the challenge of meeting fan expectations.

"People have had a lot of dreams of what this might be, over 18 years," said Jean in an unconvincing deadpan, "and I think it will match or exceed all of them."

"I'm not sure we can live up to our secrecy," said Brooks.

"I think it'll be a cultural experience somewhere between 'Sgt. Pepper's,' the record, and 'Sgt. Pepper's,' the movie," said Jean.

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Now that's a funny sound bite! It's cool that David got to sign his own name to his drawing, too.

Speaking Of Adaptations

SCREENHEAD.COM: The Unfilmables: A List of the Hardest Novels to Film
January 11th, 2007 by eoin

With the release and critical success of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, an adaptation of a novel once considered impossible to film, what better time to look into the process of adaptation. Most movies these days are based on literary sources. Which is ironic, considering the increasing lack of interest in books these days as opposed to the spoon-fed thoughts offered by Hollywood.

While many novels can be almost directly translated to screen, especially pre-20th century novels such as Jane Austen’s gossip columns, more recent novels can prove difficult. There have been bad novels turned into good films (pretty much everything Hitchcock Made, The Godfather), and plenty of dull adaptations of good books (Dune, The Unbearable Bore of Being in a Cinema to Watch This). There’s also a few oddities, such as Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre self-referential adaptation of ‘The Orchid Thief’. But despite the film industry’s frenzy in snapping up adaptation rights, there remains a few novels many fear.

Below are what I consider to be the most difficult novels to adapt, and who, if any, is fit to do that job.

Ulysses - Considered to be the greatest novel ever written, Ulysses is ripe with obscure references, wit, and a style of lyrical writing that makes the book better said than read. There have been two Irish films, one in 1967 and other recent version in 2003, called Bloom. Both are utter failures, and the best they can do is have passages read over the basic action in a desperate attempt to maintain James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing. It’s the cardinal sin of adaptation. A true adaptation of this novel would have to substitute the written associations and wordplay with a solely visual language, allowing the power of the image and editing to represent the novel’s essence. I should also give Joyce’s last novel ‘Finnegans Wake’ a nod for being the most unfilmable novel of all time, despite this.

If anyone can do it: Quentin Tarantino has displayed a habit of… just kidding. If the novel does truly require a focus on imagery as opposed to the word, then Wong Kar Wai has proven his ability for doing just so. In The Mood for Love was a simple story about forbidden love, explored in the most luscious of ways. It’s sort-of sequel 2046 was even more abstract, a rough circle around the idea of first love unregained filmed in the most mesmeric and sensual of ways. Unconvinced? Then check this out.

Cat’s Cradle - Although most of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels are unfilmable (That didn’t stop Alan Rudolph from making the horrendously bad Breakfast of Champions), Cat’s Cradle is one of his best, and most manic. The book’s narrator is researching the man who helped invent the atom bomb, and ends up discovering a substance that could spell the end of humanity. Richard Kelly, writer and director of Donnie Darko, adapted the book for Leonardo Di Caprio’s company Appian Way, but the project seems to have been dropped. Probably because it’s bloody UNFILMABLE.

If anyone can do it: Go on, give it to Kelly. Despite early reviews condemning Kelly’s new film Southland Tales, Donnie Darko was quite entertaining, and in some ways embodied the Vonnegut spirit.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle - Hugely popular Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has penned nothing but odd novels, but his best is his most peculiar. It follows Toru Okadu in his attempt to find his missing cat, and then missing wife. Instead he finds psychics, oddballs, a well that transports him to a hotel room, shared dreams, and a damn spot he just can’t get rid of. Every time the novel appears to be gaining narrative momentum, it turns and twists surreal corners. I’ve only read the English translation, but this unsolvable mystery is utterly engaging, and possibly the best book of the last 50 years.

If anyone can do it: Initially I thought of David Lynch, but homeboy Beat Takeshi has proven his desire to take on all types of film, from comedy, violent cop drama, a mix of both, tap-dancing Samurai flick, and powerful parables. So why not have the country’s best film-maker make its best novel?

The Third Policeman - Another Irish novel (what do you expect, when Freud said the Irish couldn’t be analysed?), this one was recently name checked by hit TV series Lost. It was a clever attempt to get people to furiously read it, for it has little to do with the confounding show. Although more conventionally written than Ulysses, it’s far more insane. Its narrator commences a journey to find a black box, supposedly containing money of the man he, and friend Divney, killed. The narrator (and his soul Joe, whom he often converses with) wanders into a police station, and thus enters a world of wordplay, bicycles becoming people (and vice-versa), a stick so pointy you only have to think of it to be hurt, and other bizarre trinkets and characters, leading to a damning twist. While hilarious, Flann O’Brien’s book contains little of the three-act structure, instead revelling in the asides, footnotes, and distractions, making it unappealing for Hollywood.

If anyone can do it: Spike Jonze is a man willing to film anything, plus the oddball humour of Being John Malkovich may suit the novel’s wit. When Tim Burton was good (well over a decade ago), I would have loved to have seen his grotesque sets. But please, please, do not let M. Night Shyamalan anywhere near it, lest he make another 90 minute preamble to a twist.

100 Years of Solitude - This astounding piece of fiction resists the camera because it lacks any central character. Rather, it charts a century of a fictional South American town and its several generations of families. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel is passionate, amusing, slightly satirical, and often surreal. Characters will fly past windows waving hello, and no one bats an eyelid. One character disappears from the novel by suddenly floating up into the air. It’s no wonder that this is one of the few books in this article that no one has even attempted to film.

If anyone can do it: It’s a toss between fellow Spaniards Pedro Almodovar and Julio Medem. Almodovar is more touching and his early films were fun, but I feel Medem is the better film-maker. The latter’s films are often literary in story, but manage to combine that with a sensual style of visualisation that makes films such as Sex and Lucia and Lovers of the Arctic Circle so wonderful.

Remembrance of Things Past - Also known as ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (which makes it sound like a Jules Verne yarn), Marcel Proust’s contribution to the world of literature is so difficult to film as it’s so damn long. The novel is divided into seven books, each one long enough alone! Although I’ve only managed to read the first two books, the entire volume seems to be autobiographical, about a sickly young man who aspires to be a writer, despite the distraction of 19th Century society. Proust’s novels incorporate the idea of scents, sounds, and certain objects pushing associated memories to the fore. Probably more suited as a TV serial, there have been a few films, mostly adapting one of the books. The best is Time Regained, starring Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich.

If anyone can do it: The closing moments of Terence Malick’s New World displayed the kind of editing that can summarise years in seconds with aesthetic brilliance. He’s the man for such a mammoth, ethereal task, though half of it would probably be shots of trees.

Metamorphosis - Strangely enough, Kafka can be done, as seen in Orson Welles excellent The Trial. But Metamorphosis is even more difficult for its protagonist, Gregor Samsa, awakens to find himself a giant insect. The story concerns the reaction of his family, as they move from horror to endurance, to an unjust disgust that permeates all thoughts. There’s been plenty of attempts to adapt this symbolic tale, the best being animations. However, this highly insular tale has yet to have a definitive celluloid version.

If anyone can do it: For a while David Lynch had threatened to make it. Considering the unforgettable effects seen in his first feature, Eraserhead, plus its highly symbolic story, he is without doubt the man for the job.

The Confederacy of Dunces - This one has a rich history of failed attempts to adapt to screen. For decades producers have bidded for rights for this book (which its author sadly never saw published, committing suicide due to publishers’ lack of interest. His mother persisted until it became the classic it is today). Actors have been lined up to play grossly overweight pretentious protagonist Ignatious Reilly, including John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley, all of which failed. Steven Soderbergh came close to filming a version, with Will Ferrell as Iggy, but it ultimately fell through due to production problems. Personally, I feel Soderbergh lacks humour in most of his films, and would fail to do the story justice.

If anyone could do it: A few years ago, I would have deemed the Coen Brothers fit for any filmic task. Lately, I’ve started to hate them for their dull, off-the-mark, comedies. Still, if they can do The Big Lebowski, they could easily represent the brilliance and delusion of Ignatious, as well as the madcap characters that surround him.

Any Thomas Pynchon Novel - Camera-shy Thomas Pynchon (seen here in his cartoon form in The Simpsons) is known for writing novels that are partly brilliant, partly baffling. Usually incorporating seemingly unconnected story strands that only link in the most cosmic of ways, Pynchon’s complex way of writing often makes his novels impenetrable. His most accessible is ‘The Crying of Lot 49’, a sort of conspiracy novel that never gets solved, with a 3-act play thrown in the middle for fun.

If anyone can do it: I’m not sure how anyone could even try to extract a story out of epic tomes like ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. Nicholas Roeg springs to mind, with films like Performance and The Man Who Felt to Earth, being both confusing, visually verbose, and at times quite lofty.

Don Quixote - The original “modern novel” has had many TV and film adaptations, with versions reaching back to the early 1900’s. But once again there is no definitive version. The 1947 Spanish Don Quixote is considered to be the best, although I would love to see the 2000 TV adaptation where Jonathan Lithgow played the deluded knight of La Mancha. Orson Welles spent most of his life trying to make a version, but failed to complete it. The problem with adapting this novel lies in the fact that its best moments are often the extensive sub-plots, most of which are ripe for films in themselves.

If anyone can do it: My heart still hopes that Terry Gilliam will make the version that looked so enjoyable in Lost in La Mancha, the documentary about the movie never made, and the greatest tragedy in modern times.

The Atrocity Exhibition - It’s only a matter of time before JG Ballard becomes the new PK Dick, with his socially aware sci-fi novels being snapped up for development, including latest novel ‘High Rise‘. However, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ remains his most experimental. Essentially plotless, it endeavours to portray the impression modern society and mass media has in our private lives, our psyche, and our sexuality, and acted as a precursor to his popular and depraved ‘Crash‘. Ballard even suggests that readers should not start at the beginning and finish at the end, rather select random passages. Yet, an attempt has been made to film it. In 2001 Jonathan Weiss completed a version of the book, which was apparently approved by the writer himself, but unsurprisingly failed to make a name for itself. Click here to see a less than impressed review, and here for a wonderfully tense interview with the director about his film, the relevance of Ballard, and the role of the critic in independent cinema.

If anyone can do it: Darren Aronofsky has proven his ability to create ponderous cinema, and his intense vision would work with the power of Ballard’s writing. UK music-video director Chris Cunningham would also be appropriately passionate. Those not familiar with his work should check this out.

Catcher in the Rye - This is partly here because while reclusive author JD Salinger (pictured top) lives and breathes, this seminal novel will never go near the silver screen. In fact, each new print of Catcher in the Rye contains a hidden device that causes TVs and DVD players to explode when placed too close. But even when Salinger’s reign over his work fades, I still deem this book very difficult to adapt. It’s charm is in the adolescent thoughts of main character Holden Caufield, who acts with delightful bitterness, while secretly spotting the “phonies” all around him. It’s an incredibly difficult task to capture this in cinema without resorting to the laziness of including a voice-over.

If anyone can do this: At first I thought of Ang Lee and his adaptation of ‘The Ice Storm’. But I would love to see Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach highlight the humour of the novel. Both have proven their ability to combine hilarity with the literary, especially the latter’s touching The Squid and the Whale.

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable - Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of novels rival Ulysses in their difficulty to film. Yet while there’s ways of representing Joyce’s rich text on screen, achieving the same for these novels is next to impossible. Even Beckett on Film, a series of adaptation of his plays, turned out to be a failure of sorts. Molloy does contain characters, Moran and Molloy, but soon it seems their identities and stories merge into one. Narrative begins to crumble away in Malone Dies, in which a man’s attempts to retain identity through telling stories constantly crack open, until we’re left with The Unnameable, a long monologue that only hints at the concept of character, until it eventually “can’t go on”. How on earth could anyone adapt a novel that fails to have a character?

If anyone can do it: While I honestly believe this is impossible to adapt to screen, if a gun was put to my hypothetical head I’d consider either Woody Allen or Ingmar Bergman. Bergman has spent decades making musings on concepts like transient identity. Yet Woody Allen has often done similar, but injected a vast amount of humour, both physical at philosophical, into them. And that’s exactly how Beckett makes his novels so enjoyable, there’s always something to laugh at while staring into the abyss of nothing, of nowhere.

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I'm surprised that William Burroughs isn't listed here at all, though maybe Cronenberg's version of "Naked Lunch" made the rest of Burroughs' books seem less daunting.

Cranking Up The Avatar Hype Machine

NY TIMES: Computers Join Actors in Hybrids On Screen
By SHARON WAXMAN
Published: January 9, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 8 — James Cameron, the director whose “Titanic” set a record for ticket sales around the world, will join 20th Century Fox in tackling a similarly ambitious and costly film, “Avatar,” which will test new technologies on a scale unseen before in Hollywood, the studio and the filmmaker said on Monday.

James Cameron’s last huge-scale film was “Titanic,” known for Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, rising waters, a sinking ship and 11 Oscars.

The film, with a budget of about $200 million, is an original science fiction story that will be shown in 3D even in conventional theaters. The plot pits a human army against an alien army on a distant planet, bringing live actors and digital technology together to make a large cast of virtual creatures who convey emotion as authentically as humans.

Earlier movies like “The Lord of the Rings” series did this on a limited scale, as in the digitally designed character Gollum, whose performance came from the actor Andy Serkis, while others like “The Polar Express” have used live actors to drive animated images — so-called motion capture technology.

But none has gone as far as “Avatar” to create an entirely photorealistic world, complete with virtual characters, on the expected scale of the new film, Mr. Cameron said in a telephone interview.

“This film is a true hybrid — a full live-action shoot, with CG characters in CG and live environments,” said Mr. Cameron, referring to computer-generated imagery. “Ideally, at the end of the of day, the audience has no idea which they’re looking at.”

Jim Gianopulos, a co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, said that he expected theaters to update their facilities to accommodate the 3D demands of the film. “This will launch an entire new way of seeing and exhibiting movies,” he said.

“Jim’s not just a filmmaker,” Mr. Gianopulos added, referring to Mr. Cameron. “Every one of his films have pushed the envelope in its aesthetic and in its technology.”

The making of “Titanic,” Mr. Cameron’s last full-blown Hollywood feature, was the stuff of movie legend. Released in 1997, the film went far over its planned cost to become the most expensive production that had then been made, creating stunning visual effects with a combination of live action and computer graphics. But it also went on to become a historic success, taking in a record- breaking $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office and winning 11 Oscars, including the award for best picture.

Mr. Cameron said he had taken care to avoid the problems he encountered on that, his last gargantuan production, and was already four months into shooting some scenes by the time Fox gave final approval to the project on Monday. The shoot has been largely secret, in a building in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles.

“I’ve looked long and hard at ‘Titanic,’ and other effects-related things I’ve done, where they’ve drifted budgetwise,” he said. “This has been designed from the ground up to avoid those pitfalls. Will we have other pitfalls? Yes, probably.”

Mr. Cameron has already devised revolutionary methods to shoot the film, and expects to create still more methods to bring to life the vision of a completely photo-realistic alien world.

For its aliens, “Avatar” will present characters designed on the computer, but played by human actors. Their bodies will be filmed using the latest evolution of motion-capture technology — markers placed on the actor and tracked by a camera — while the facial expressions will be tracked by tiny cameras on headsets that will record their performances to insert them into a virtual world.

The most important innovation thus far has been a camera, designed by Mr. Cameron and his computer experts, that allows the director to observe the performances of the actors-as-aliens, in the film’s virtual environment, as it happens.

“It’s like a big, powerful game engine,” he explained. “If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale. It’s pretty exciting.”

Sam Worthington, a young Australian actor, has been named to play the lead, a paralyzed former marine 150 years in the future, who undergoes an experiment to exist as an avatar, another version of himself. The avatar is not paralyzed, but is an alien: 10 feet tall, and blue. Zoe Saldana, another relative unknown, has been chosen as the love interest.

“We could do it with make-up, in a ‘Star Trek’ manner — we could put rubber on his face — but I wasn’t interested in doing it that way,” Mr. Cameron said. “With the new tools, we can create a humanoid character that is anything we imagine it to be — beautiful, elegant, graceful, powerful , evocative of us, but still with an emotional connection.”

Mr. Cameron is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s foremost innovators, and he has been waiting to make the film, which he wrote more than a decade ago, while technology catches up to his vision. He began experimenting with these new filming techniques about 18 months ago, he said.

But he disputed the notion that the galloping pace of filmmaking technology has threatened the traditional role of actors or the emotional grip of a good story.

“There’s this sense of bifurcation, that really true artistic, cutting-edge filmmakers make these indie pictures, and that CG films are these clanking machines,” he observed. “I’ve tried to fight to inhabit both spaces. There’s a way to take all these technical tools and have them come from a place where the artist is still running the film. It’s not easy.”

While recognizing that it is was an expensive project, Mr. Gianopulos said that something like “Avatar” was precisely what the theatrical movie business needed in a time of stiff competition from video games and lavish home entertainment systems.

“What audiences are looking for, especially in the theater, is a unique experience,” said Mr. Gianopulos, whose studio also distributed the “Star Wars” series by George Lucas, though it does not own those films. It will fully own “Avatar.”

He added: “There is nothing as unique as what this film will be, as spectacle, as a presentation of a completely original world, in its presentation and its technology.” He said he expected the movie to become a series, and the actors were signed up to accommodate sequels.

The live-action shoot with actors will begin in April, with major effects being done by Weta, the filmmaker Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based effects company, which created the effects for his “Lord of the Rings.” The film is scheduled for release in summer 2009.

*************************************************************************************

I guess if the starting budget for my film was $200 million, I'd start promoting it two years out, too. Still, the money will be on the screen, that's for sure!

I still think Mr. Cameron should've boomeranged and made something really, really small - a "My Dinner-With-André"-style film. I'm not sure you can out-scale "Titanic", though it looks like he's going to try.

Tracy Teasers Are Ready For Viewing!

Remember that film I worked on over a year ago? Well, Dan's been working away on it, and the first teaser clips from Tracy are ready to go! You can see them on the film's MySpace page, or at the Caveat Productions blog. Take a look! The "parent" clip is especially funny.

I'm not in any of the clips, but I play Justin Pooge, Tracy's biggest fan!

UPDATE (1/18): The MySpace page now plays the Imagination Station (Tracy's TV show) theme song!

Doin' The Rudolph Shuffle

Happy Feet, written by Warren Coleman, John Collee, George Miller & Judy Morris; directed by George Miller.

Computer technology continues to advance in filmmaking, creating vivid tableaus with a staggering amount of detail. It's unfortunate, then, that the stories beneath the polish are increasingly wispy. In the case of Happy Feet, the latest bid for the family filmgoing box office, it's basically Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer inflated to staggering proportions. Does a simple story of a plucky misfit penguin really need to begin with a cosmic zoom from outer space?

Swooping through hordes of singing waterfowl, the camera focuses on two crooning lovers - Memphis (Hugh Jackman) and Norma Jean (Nicole Kidman) who fall in love, conveniently, during mating season. It's not clear why Elvis and Marilyn are evoked here, beyond the fact that their personalities (as well as their romance) are plug-and-play. Before long, Mama's off to find food, leaving Dad with egg duty. Since most of this is covered more effectively in March Of the Penguins, it's shorthanded here. Even Memphis' accident - he drops his egg, but recovers it before it freezes - evokes little in the way of drama. Happily, it still hatches when the weather breaks, but something is amiss. Little Mumble (as he's later called) taps and shuffles his webbed feet incessantly, to the horror of the others.

We learn that all the singing is critical to cartoon penguins - it's how they express themselves, especially to prospective mates. Not only does this have nothing to do with real penguin behavior, it robs Mumble's quirk of any real contrast. Why is dancing anathema to singing penguins, aside from the fact that it'll dovetail into a love duet with Mumble's childhood friend Gloria later on? Rather than stick with the misfit angle, it turns out that penguins are superstitious - they think Mumble's tapping is affecting the local fish population - it's low, and folks are hungry and worried.

At any rate, the motley bunch of arbitrary ethnicities soon send Mumble out on his own tiny ice floe, just like Rudolph. He then finds new friends in a distant community of Latino penguins, led by feisty, diminutive Ramón (the voice of every secondary character in animation, Robin Williams). Some shtick ensues, and the film then takes a turn into Ferngully: The Last Rainforest territory.

They've all run across evidence that there's more to the region than the local flora and fauna, so they troop off to learn more from the local playboy/guru, Lovelace (also voiced by Williams). He's evasive, but we eventually learn that, yes, Man has entered the forest. A nearby oil refinery is the real culprit, not tap dancing. How can Mumble - netted up for his trouble, and now ensconced in a Sea-World-esque aquarium - convince men not to overfish in the region? Naturally, by the very thing that made him an outcast. We don't really see, though, how his dancing convinced the zoo owners - Mumble simply returns home with a tracking device on his back. Once the trackers spot the entire community desperately tapping in unison, the U.N. lowers the boom, and equilibrium is restored. End on a shot of our happy planet.

Computer penguins can be appealing, but they've got nothing on the real thing. The production is lavish - the cloud work is lovely, the oil refinery is a wealth of rusty patina, and the sense of scale is impressive - but the story has little emotional weight or cohesion, even for a cartoon. The middle section, where Mumble finds his footing with Ramón, is the most entertaining - Ramón and his friends act the most like real penguins, waddling about with their flippers in mid-air, and Mumble towers above his new pals with an endearing gawkiness. The animation positions itself between anthropomorphism and realism, with mixed results. The voice work, aside from Mr. Williams, is mostly marquee value - the leads bring little to the dramatic or musical proceedings.

Happy Feet is a step up from the awkward Babe: A Pig In The City, but it's dispiriting to see George Miller seem so at-odds with filmmaking after the vitality and confidence of his Road Warrior pictures. His prediliction for harsher tones and blunt rhythms seems out of place in children's films (even Lorenzo's Oil suffered from it). There's been a few live-action directors (Miller, Zemeckis, and Besson come to mind) in recent years who seem to have been seduced by the wealth of control animation can offer. Unfortunately, just because you can make a thousand penguins sing and dance, doesn't mean you necessarily should.

Life Sucks, And So Do Your Dreams

Pan's Labyrinth, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro.

The story of a child's journey through a fantasy world has a long tradition, both in literature and film. There's dozens of variations - The Wizard Of Oz, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Peter Pan, the Harry Potter series, The Neverending Story, Labyrinth, The Phantom Tollbooth, Tideland, and many more. It's a difficult genre, as many of these stories are episodic, and wind up a treat for the eyes, but a disappointment for the mind and heart. Pan's Labyrinth, from the look of its early trailers, promised to apply a unique perspective.

Young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) accompanies her stepfather Capitán Vidal and mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to a remote outpost in Spain. Carmen is pregnant, but in the tradition of evil step-parents, he cares little for his wife or step-daughter, focusing completely upon his military manuvers and his soon-to-be-born son.

As you might imagine, Ofelia is a bookish dreamer, and it isn't long before she encounters fairies (disguised as large, chattering mantises) who lead her to the titular maze. There she learns from an ancient satyr that she may be the princess of an underground kingdom. In order to prover her worth, she needs to complete three tasks, each of which are hidden in a mysterious tome.

The civil war in Spain is over (for the most part), and for the time being the fascists have the upper hand. There's a band of insurgents sequestered in the woods, though, and the Capitán has taken it upon himself to stay until all of them are exterminated. In fact, he seems to see little value in human life in general, callously torturing and murdering anyone whom he suspects may be a rebel. The insurgents seem to know quite a bit about the outpost, so one of the main objectives is to discover where their information is coming from.

It's an interesting concept to intertwine these two ideas, but the execution is something else again. The film seems lopsided, heavily favoring the military informant plot over Ofelia's quest. It's a grim, gory exercise; Mr. Del Toro subjects the audience to a high degree of violence - several on-screen shootings (in the face), cheeks are slit open and later sewn shut, noses are battered to a pulp. Carmen's pregnancy is perilous, perpetually teetering on the brink of a bloody miscarriage; and if there's anything pretty in the film, you can be sure it'll be filthy and ruined soon enough. To be sure, this is in the tradition of many original fairy tales, which are far darker than their modern incarnations. While I'm all for grit in my storytelling, the filmmakers go so far here that it feels inappropriate and gratuitous.

This might have worked if the fantasy sequences functioned as an escape for Ofelia and the audience, as they do in its spiritual counterpart, Brazil. But they don't - they're more imaginative, but just as unnerving and disgusting. There's no real contrast in tone between the stories - in spite of the richness of visual invention, neither world seems inviting or attractive. None of the fantasy characters have much in the way of personality - they seem to exist primarily as thresholds to be encountered. There's not much to be gained by performing their tasks, either - Ofelia's experiences have little impact on her 'real' life, and any consequences of navigating the maze seem disconnected from the rest of the story.

Mr. Del Toro can have trouble with pacing, and it's a big problem here as well. The tone and intensity of the film are difficult enough, but it's also a two-and-a-half hour story that feels like three. Like many films these days, I think it'd be better told in two.

Ultimately, Pan's Labyrinth seems to be reaching for religious parable - a bludgeoning life of tears, with the promise of eternal reward. But it's not at all subtle with that goal, but rather a grueling journey with little to delight along the way.

Cynical Appraisal: Should do gangbusters with the Hot Topic crowd.

Epithets And Slurs In Current Comedy

NY TIMES: Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: December 17, 2006

THE predilections of Sebastian Venable, the gothic ghost who haunts Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” were so unspeakable that they essentially went unspoken in the text of the play. Dark hints about his taste for young men bloom all through the lyrical foliage of Williams’s dialogue, but the actual subject of homosexuality is never explicitly mentioned.

Nobody would have called the doomed poet a gay man, although that’s what all the tortuous innuendo essentially amounts to. The play, which was teamed with a curtain-raiser actually called “Something Unspoken” when it had its premiere in 1958, was written in an era when the word “gay” had not come into common parlance, and the word “homosexual” had a clinical and disreputable ring. (The “something” in “Something Unspoken” was lesbianism, by the way.)

The coyness about the subject in “Suddenly Last Summer,” written by a playwright who was famously uncoy about matters of sex and sexuality, firmly dates the play. Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights. But as “The Little Dog Laughed,” “Regrets Only” and “Borat” have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback.

In “The Little Dog Laughed,” Douglas Carter Beane’s Hollywood satire at the Cort Theater, the central character, a ruthless female agent played with verve by Julie White, uses the following terms, among others, to refer to her client, a closeted gay movie actor: “that pansy,” “Mary” and “Miss Nancy,” “little fairy Tinkerbell” and “little fruit.” Coining her own variation on derogation, she calls another character “St. Francis of the Sissies.”

At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.

Little notice has been taken of Mr. Beane’s comic exploitation of what is, in other contexts, called hate speech. But he seems to be aware that he is treading on tender turf: how else to explain the agent’s opening announcement that she’s a lesbian? Her sexuality then disappears until a passing reference in the last scene. But it’s enough to inoculate her (and perhaps him) against accusations of homophobia: she’s on the team, so she’s allowed, and we’re allowed to chuckle. (For the record, Mr. Beane is an openly gay man.)

The play raises a question that has been brought to the forefront of the cultural chatter recently in another context: Who is and is not allowed to use — and to laugh at or milk laughs from — derisive names for minorities? On a Broadway stage, Ms. White is warmly applauded for tossing out those nasty words. At a multiplex near you, Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a fictional anti-Semite, has ’em rolling in the aisles. But Michael Richards, also an entertainer, repeatedly uses a derogatory term for African-Americans in a stand-up act that queasily devolves into a fit of pique, and his offense makes headlines and cripples his career, possibly for good.

Is it all about context? Certainly Mr. Richards’s ghastly rant was not a scripted piece of entertainment, nor was it designed to provoke a discussion of slang and semantics. In savaging a heckler, he used the word the only way it was once used: as a weapon meant to demean and hurt. (Likewise, Mel Gibson got into trouble for his anti-Semitic rant because it appeared to be an expression of personal animus.) But at some point in his tirade Mr. Richards also tried to frame his attack as a political challenge. Muttering grimly in response to the audience’s obvious displeasure, he said, “You see, there’s still those words, those words.”

Lenny Bruce was the first comic to start a conversation about “those words” on the nightclub stage. In one of his most famous, and controversial, routines, he asked if there were any African-Americans in the house — using the usual offensive term. He went on to run down a litany of bigoted epithets. His point was that by keeping the words taboo, we unwittingly preserve their power to hurt. He ended the bit by suggesting that if they were allowed to fully enter the cultural conversation, their batteries would go dead.

History has proved him to be at least half right. Gays and blacks took the language meant to demean them and put it to sly new use when speaking among themselves. Lately, as attitudes have relaxed, it has become easier for the rest of America to join the parties. (The character of Jack in the popular sitcom “Will & Grace” was pure minstrelsy, but by the time he minced onto the airwaves, in the context of a gay-friendly show, his dizziness and effeminacy hardly raised an eyebrow.)

What is disappointing about Mr. Beane’s flippant use of provocative language in “The Little Dog Laughed” is how provocative it isn’t. Mr. Beane is not pushing boundaries to get his audiences to examine their own prejudices, or jolt them into an awareness of its lingering prevalence in the culture. He’s just pushing the classic put-down button, used to garner laughs on sitcoms — and in life — from time immemorial.

Because he knows his audience is overwhelmingly made up of the gay and the gay-friended, Mr. Beane can safely use words that in other contexts would still call down opprobrium. But it doesn’t make the humor any smarter, and as the snipes kept coming and I stopped counting, the barking of those words in viperish tones began to push a few of my buttons. (Let’s just say that, as a gay man, I don’t look back on my suburban junior high school years with unalloyed fondness.)

“Regrets Only,” the new comedy by Paul Rudnick at Manhattan Theater Club, similarly exploits our new comfort with old stereotypes for some easy laughs. (Mr. Rudnick is also an openly gay playwright.) The plot turns on the notion that a Manhattan wedding would be stopped in its tracks if the city’s gay men went out on strike. No flowers, no one to pin the baby’s breath in the bride’s hair and tell her she looks fabulous. Mr. Rudnick includes lawyers and doormen and elevator operators in his legions of gay protesters, but mostly the humor turns on the sudden absence from the city’s working populace of florists and hairdressers and dress designers, occupations that haven’t made for clever antigay jokes since the days of “Match Game.”

Wrapped in a comfy pashmina of preachment about the issue of gay marriage, the conceit is hardly going to offend, but the general mediocrity of “Regrets Only” suggests that Mr. Rudnick may have played with gay stereotypes a little too long: the play has far fewer good gags than his riper efforts in this sphere, like “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” and the short solo plays “Mr. Charles of Palm Beach,” about a quintessentially queeny cable-access host, and “Pride and Joy,” about a matron from Massapequa laying claim to the title of “most accepting, most loving mother of all time, bar none.”

For a dose of truly discomfiting — and provocative — comedy trading on man’s universal tendency to sort by group and sneer at the guys in the other camp, you’ll have to look not to the stage but to the movies, where a certain boob from Kazakhstan reigned this fall. In contrast to the tame, middlingly funny and rather retrograde flavor of “The Little Dog Laughed” and “Regrets Only,” the often uproarious “Borat” has the harsh sting of just-distilled vodka.

Mr. Cohen is himself Jewish, so Borat’s smiling anti-Semitism is a con mostly used to seduce the clueless rednecks and drunk frat dudes. But I wonder what would happen if Borat trained the cameras on a cross section of the audiences delighting in his easy evisceration of the all-American boob. Do the millions of people in on the Borat joke really think they’re immune from even the smallest trace of bigotry? Unless they are among the unlucky few who meet Mr. Cohen’s next alter ego, they may never have to acknowledge their laughter’s unfunny origins.

When we are done laughing at Ms. White’s nasty cracks and Borat’s victims, and clucking at Mr. Richards’s freakish tirade, we should recognize the uncomfortable truth of that peppy homily sung in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q”: “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.”

There's... Some Need To Fear, As It Turns Out

A poster and still from the live-action Underdog movie. Why do I look for this stuff? It just winds up annoying me. At the very least, shouldn't the tag line be, "There's no need to fear"?

This is the toughest consequence of current film technology - it often seems to encourage a thudding literalism that crushes the whimsy from so many stories. What a shame.

Thanks (I think) to I Watch Stuff!

Latest 300 Trailer Rages, Thunders, Hacks Its Way Onto Internet

Another of Frank Miller's graphic novels is being adapted into a movie - this time, by director Zach Snyder. I have read the comic, and the trailer's certainly slick, but it seemed familiar for some other reason. Then I remembered - it looks like the first part of one of those Marine Corps 'tradition of greatness' recruitment commercials. You know, the ones that try through sheer cock-rock bad-assery to make you sign up before you realize you'll wind up on a chopper to Iraq.

Faith And Other Intangibles

Miracle On 34th Street, written by Valentine Davies and George Seaton; directed by George Seaton. (Spoilers abound, because I can't imagine that anyone who can read this hasn't seen this film yet).

It's the classic story of kindly Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn), a Macy's store Santa who firmly believes that he really is Santa Claus. Hard-bitten Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara) and her level-headed daughter Susan (Natalie Wood) don't buy it for a second. But is he telling the truth?

As long as there's been Christmas (and Christmas movies), filmmakers have struggled to capture that feeling many of us associate with the season. Like many other subject matter, Christmas is a high-wire act, and audiences are more often than not subjected to a dunking in treacle. What is it, then, that makes this film so effective? Why has this story thrived for almost sixty years, surpassing the inevitable remake and imitations with nary a blemish?

The obvious answers are true: it's extremely well written, directed and performed. Everyone in the film is tremendous, and naturally Gwenn and Wood are the standouts. It's impossible to imagine anyone being a more convincing Santa than Mr. Gwenn, and young miss Wood's acting is expressive and touching. It's a real challenge to make literal-mindedness and pragmatism appealing, and her success seems effortless.

Like many great movies, every choice feels as if there were no other option. Imagine setting this at a store in the midwest. The writer easily could have done so, but by setting it in New York City, the iconic heart of tough-minded me-first cynicism, the sentimentality has fertile ground in which to bloom.

That's reflected in the script again and again with a salty, grounded edge to amost every character decision. Parade manager Doris Walker (Maureen O'Hara) doesn't simply choose Kris because he's kind-hearted and a dead ringer for Santa - she grabs him off the street in desperation because the Santa that she hired is passed-out drunk. It's also echoed in the skepticism of almost everyone that Kris comes across. Everyone likes him, but they're pretty sure he's a bit of a nut. Kris is so good in the parade, though, that he's quickly hired as the flagship Claus for the store.

Things are allowed to continue as they are - Kris 'plays' Santa at Macy's - with no one needing to seriously question his identity. Business is booming, and as long as Kris isn't seen to be a danger to anyone, his 'eccentricity' gets a pass. Even a huge potential misstep - Kris begins to recommend products from competing stores to customers - transforms into a goodwill epidemic among the retail chains. Naturally, this balance doesn't last long.

Kris make a friend with Alfred, a young janitor who loves playing Santa for the kids, too - but both he and Kris fall victim to the Macy's employee screener, Granville Sawyer (Porter Hall). Literal-minded to a fault, Mr. Sawyer believes that Kris is deranged, and will cause harm if his delusion is threatened. But the straw that breaks the reindeer's back is when Sawyer begins to psychoanalyze Alfred, convincing him that his love of being Santa is the result of a guilt complex in his childhood. This infuriates Kris to such a degree that he clonks the would-be Freud on the head with his cane - and that's all the ammunition that Sawyer needs.

He sets in motion commitment proceedings, an action even the hard-boiled Macy doesn't want to take. But it's too late. Fortunately, Santa has a lawyer - Fred Gailey (John Payne), who lives near Doris. While both Fred and Kris have ulterior motives concerning Doris and Susan - Fred wants to get to know Doris better, Kris wants to introduce Susan to imagination and faith - the script does the tricky job of keeping our sympathy.

Another great choice is to make Kris' first (literal) defender an adult - another stong contrast to the typical watery-eyed moppet who believes, believes, believes from the first frame to the last. Additionally, Doris and Susan are the last to make that emotional shift.

The stakes are high, too - Kris isn't simply going to be fired and sent packing out into the snow. If this case is lost, he'll be committed to Bellview asylum for good. We get a little taste of how broken and unhappy he'd be when Kris weakens and deliberately fails the psychiatric exam, effectively committing himself. His faith in his fellow man is shattered, but fortunately lawyer Fred Gailey (John Payne) convinces him to keep fighting - deftly setting up the courtroom sequence.

Fred take the best path a lawyer could use - he pressures the prosecutor to prove that Kris isn't Santa. No one wants to say there's no Santa on the stand, for a variety of savvy, unsentimental reasons. The prosecutor doesn't want to crush his son's dreams of Christmas. Mr. Macy won't, because he doesn't want to make headlines as the man who planted a fake Santa in his flagship store in the heart of the shopping season. The judge doesn't want to drop the hammer on Kris, either - he wants to run for public office soon, and there's lots of voter alienation hanging in the balance. Eventually, though, the hearing reaches the inevitable - the judge is duty-bound to require concrete proof from the defense. Where could that possibly come from?

That proof - delivered when a couple of postal workers send fifty thousand letters to the courthouse, helping Fred prove his case that Kris is the "one and only" Santa Claus - is a choice made simply to help clear out the dead letter office. It's a choice that could have been terribly maudlin if both mail workers had melted in light of Kris' plight - but with that opportunistic shade, it's so entertaining that we buy it whole-heartedly. Of course, it's also beautfully set up by having little Susan (Natalie Wood) first write her letter of support when things look darkest.

The theme of faith is endlessly reflected in the script. Doris needs to have faith in love (Fred), Susan needs to have faith that Kris will bring her special gift, Kris has faith that Fred will prevail, and everyone, as we know, needs to have faith in Santa Claus.

Before I Forget

Last Friday, I went to a screening of The Queen sponsored by the San Francisco Film Society, which is a fictional version of how the royal family dealt with the death of Princess Diana. I wasn't at all interested in the subject matter, but Stephen Frears is one of my favorite directors, and he was appearing afterwards for a Q&A. I wasn't sure I'd ever have another opportunity to see him, so off I went.

Happily, The Queen is a really good movie. Regardless of its literal accuracy, you really feel like you were there when it all happened, like you're peering into a secret world. There's a strong emotional spine at the center of it - a public family struggling to reconcile their private grief with a very public one. It's a unique situation where age-old protocols are useless, and the royals have to make things up as they go along. Even if we can't directly empathize with this, Mr. Frears gives it an emotion that's clear and touching.

The Q&A was pretty painful afterwards, but Mr. Frears was personable and funny. Naturally, I invited him the visit the studio, but (as I expected) he was leaving for Los Angeles the next day. Since I'm a big autograph dork, I had him sign my DVD of Dangerous Liasons - the movie that introduced me to him as a director.

Silence Still Golden In Animation

FILM
By CHARLES SOLOMON
LOS ANGELES

CALL them “cellphone films”: in “Chicken Little,” “Madagascar,” “Hoodwinked” and other recent American animated features, the characters chatter incessantly, as if they’re trying to use up their last 500 minutes from Verizon. The audience isn’t subjected to this barrage of words and jokes because the characters have something to say, but because filmmakers and studio executives are afraid to let them be quiet.

In “Robots,” eager young Rodney Copperbottom on arriving in Robot City meets Fender, voiced by Robin Williams. All the wonder the audience should feel as Rodney beholds the Erector-set metropolis of his dreams is crushed under Fender’s nonstop shtick. The characters in “Hoodwinked” natter constantly, even as their unfortunate mouth movements reveal inadequacies in the design of their faces. And if the trailer is any indication, “The Wild,” coming from Disney on April 14, with voices by Kiefer Sutherland and Janeane Garofalo, among others, looks like yet another gabfest.

American animation wasn’t always like this. Some of its most memorable moments take place with no one talking: Mickey Mouse dancing with the brooms in “Fantasia”; the Seven Dwarfs weeping at Snow White’s bier; Bugs Bunny riding in as Brunhilde on a white charger in “What’s Opera, Doc?” Animation is often funnier, more dramatic and more powerful when words aren’t distracting the viewer’s attention from the stylized expressions and movements.

Walt Disney often made his artists prepare their storyboards with only pictures; dialogue was added at the end of the process, when they had determined how few words were actually needed to tell the story. In 2001, Joe Grant, who did key story work on “Snow White,” “Pinocchio” and other Disney features, said in an interview: “Walt was a great advocate of pantomime. He would stand in front of the boards and reenact the scene. You could see the reflection of him in the film: his pantomime was beautifully followed through. Today it’s all talking heads.”

During the 1940’s and 50’s, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera won seven Academy Awards for their Tom and Jerry cartoons, done almost entirely in mime. The Warner Brothers director Chuck Jones similarly reduced audiences to hysterics with Wile E. Coyote’s doomed efforts to capture the Road Runner, which took place in a silence broken only by music, sound effects and an occasional “beep-beep.”

In a 1988 interview, Mr. Jones said that he and fellow Warner director Friz Freleng previewed all their cartoons without sound. Referring to the producer Leon Schlesinger, he said: “Leon wouldn’t let us hire anybody to make test reels, so Friz and I both learned how to splice — it was the only way we could get to see a test, but we never saw them with sound. We didn’t want to; we wanted to see if the pictures worked without sound, music or anything else.”

Silence in animation isn’t entirely a thing of the past. Recent films have proved that nonspeaking animated characters can express powerful emotions. When the title character dons a disguise to take her father’s place in the army in Disney’s underrated “Mulan,” her silence heightens the emotional intensity. The audience sees her wince as a sword slices off her long hair — words would be superfluous. But the characters in Disney's “Brother Bear” and “Home on the Range” never seem to stop talking.

Filmmakers in other countries are less intent on filling the soundtrack with verbiage. Sylvain Chomet’s wonderfully outré “Triplets of Belleville” earned an Oscar nomination, although it has virtually no dialogue, and its few words weren’t translated from the original French for the English-speaking audience. In the Oscar-winning “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which comes from Britain, the directors Nick Park and Steve Box show that the mute Gromit can be touching, when he tenderly cares for his giant zucchini, or hilarious, when he is forced to perform bumps and grinds to make a giant rabbit decoy dance.

No one understands the power of silence better than the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, and there are wordless moments of extraordinary beauty and terror in his “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Spirited Away.” But the most famous example of Mr. Miyazaki’s nonverbal storytelling occurs in “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), recently released on DVD in a new English dub.

While their mother is hospitalized, 10-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei move with their professor father to a ramshackle old farmhouse. Late one afternoon, the sisters go to meet their father’s bus in the rainy woods. Time passes slowly: shots of a frog in a puddle and of water droplets slipping from pine needles capture the feeling of a summer storm. Mei falls asleep and Satsuki has to hold her. When Totoro, the benevolent, furry forest spirit, joins the girls there’s no chattering, no fanfare and no song. He just walks up and stands quietly next to Satsuki, watching over her and her sister. The sequence lasts almost seven minutes, but has just over 100 words of dialogue: it’s one of the most magical moments in any recent film, animated or live action.

Pixar’s creative leader, John Lasseter, has often said how inspirational Mr. Miyazaki’s work has been to him and his fellow artists, so it’s not surprising Pixar also uses quiet effectively. When Dash flees the villains in “The Incredibles,” he discovers he’s so fast he can run on water. He flashes an amazed grin at the audience that says, “I’m doing something really neat!,” then takes off even faster. The grin lasts only a fraction of a second, but it makes Dash’s speed a shared experience, rather than a showcase for special effects.

With Disney’s purchase of Pixar, Mr. Lasseter will become the creative head of Disney’s beleaguered feature animation studio. Under his leadership, Disney films may regain the strengths and silences audiences enjoyed under Walt — and during the renaissance of the late 80’s and early 90’s.

For Mr. Lasseter appears to understand a core truth about animation: Its characters are often more eloquent when they’re not speaking than when they are. Their moments of silence remain fixed in the viewer’s mind, long after the nattering in lesser films has faded into the cacophony of daily life.

Maurice Binder-fest

Who is Maurice Binder, you ask? He's the fellow who designed the title sequences for most of the twenty-one James Bond movies. Happily, some obsessive Bond fan has posted all of the openings here. Celebrate the imminent Casino Royale and wallow in well-designed objectification!

PS: You can also see a trailer for every Bond film here.

Thanks to I Watch Stuff! for the links.