Cinematical

This one's a little heartwarming, folks, especially if you're predisposed (as I am) to admiring pretty much everything about the Pixar company.

Last fall, a young woman named Courtney saw the WALL-E teaser -- the one where Andrew Stanton talks about the meeting in 1994 where the story was first conceived -- and was reduced to a puddle of tears by its adorableness. Seems she has a soft spot for robots, and in particular for lonely, child-like, wide-eyed robots. So she videoed herself watching the trailer on her computer, knowing it would have the same effect on her again, and then she posted the video on her blog and on YouTube. (We've got it here after the jump.)

The video made its way around the Internets, as these things do, and Courtney began to get e-mails from people within the Pixar family who had seen it and appreciated her enthusiasm. Then one of the film's producers sent her a Pixar jacket as a Christmas gift, along with a note thanking her for the video.

And then they invited her to the film's wrap party in San Francisco.

For everyone who's ever watched a bad movie and thought, "If this is what they produced, I wonder what they threw away?," the Village Voice has found an answer. In an amusing and fascinating article posted today, reporter Tony Ortega says he and a buddy accidentally stumbled across a recycling bin full of paper from Harvey Weinstein's office -- and not just from the office, but from Weinstein's own desk. Ortega proceeds to tell us all the juicy details he learned about the daily work of a movie mogul.

So what is Harvey Weinstein throwing away? Lots of copies of screenplays, naturally, as well as daily sheets (prepared by an assistant, no doubt) listing phone calls he needs to make or return. As you might imagine, the roster of people seeking Weinstein's attention is staggering, with actors, agents, lawyers, producers, and reporters all vying for his time. Michael Moore called him on April 25 and Weinstein didn't return the call for over a month. I'd say being able to ignore Michael Moore for a full month is the very definition of power.

Strangely, Weinstein's e-mails are printed out for him to peruse. (Maybe he gets eye strain from looking at a computer monitor? Maybe he just likes wasting paper?) There were some pretty interesting tidbits in the copies he tossed, including lots of stuff about the Weinstein-produced Project Runway, if you're into that.

Good heavens, do I ever love Gillian Anderson. Not just for her work as the iconic Agent Scully on a million seasons of The X-Files, either, though obviously that's a big part of it. Did you see her in The House of Mirth? Or making a cameo in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story? Or playing a small role in The Last King of Scotland? No on all counts? Well, take my word for it, then. She's wonderful. My heart leaps within my breast whenever I see her in anything. It could be arrhythmia, but I prefer to call it love.

She's about to star in The X-Files: I Want to Believe, as you know -- but what about after that? Well, Variety brings us word that Anderson's production company has bought the rights to a 2004 biography of Martha Gellhorn (whom you've never heard of, but hang on), and that Anderson will produce a film adaptation and play the leading role.

So who is this Gellhorn person? Only one of the most prolific war correspondents of the 20th century, that's all. She covered just about every global conflict between the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, a career spanning 60 years. She was married to Ernest Hemingway for a while and had countless affairs throughout her life, usually with married men. She was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. The U.S. Postal Service put her on a stamp earlier this year. Her life has all the makings of a good biopic -- war, romance, tragedy, Roosevelts -- and since Anderson already has plenty of experience playing skeptical women who must deal with difficult men, I say she's a natural. Of course, that could just be the heart palpitations speaking.

We reported several weeks ago that Tom Cruise was all but confirmed to play the U.S. president in The 28th Amendment, a thriller that was to be directed by Phillip Noyce and co-star Denzel Washington. But now Variety has delivered a hold-your-horses on that story, saying Amendment is being set aside in favor of something else: an espionage thriller called Edwin A. Salt.

This one will star Cruise as a CIA agent accused of being a traitor. He has to go on the lam long enough to clear his name, find the real bad guy, etc.; you know the drill. The film has been in the works as a star vehicle for Cruise for some time, with Terry George and Peter Berg at various times attached to direct it. (The screenplay was written by Kurt Wimmer, author of the recent flop Street Kings.) Now it looks like the reins will go to Noyce, who previously made the action flicks Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.

The 28th Amendment sounds fine, and no doubt it will still get made with a different director and co-star for Denzel. But I really like the sound of Edwin A. Salt. Noyce is a very solid director, with 2002's double-whammy of Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American still looming large in my memory, and he's generally made serious, respectable films (Sliver notwithstanding). We don't know yet how Cruise's troubled Valkyrie will turn out, but Edwin A. Salt -- a heroic role guided by a smart director -- could be a wise move for his next project.

One of my favorite documentaries last year was Crazy Love, about a New York couple named Burt and Linda who have been together off and on for 50 years despite some serious setbacks, e.g., the time Burt hired a man to throw lye in Linda's face and blind her. These are people who should hate each other -- she for the way he physically harmed her, he for the way she nags and pesters him now -- and yet they are in love. And yet I, a normal person, remain single. Life is bizarre and unfair, that's the message I got from the film.

Crazy Love did well enough for a doc, but of course a non-doc would reach wider audiences. So now Variety reports that the doc's director, Dan Klores, will make his narrative debut writing and directing a fictionalized version of the story for HBO Films. There's no announcement yet on whether it will premiere on HBO or open theatrically, but either one is a possibility. Crazy Love premiered at Sundance, as have many other HBO Films productions, and sometimes the level of success on the festival circuit determines whether it goes to theaters or straight to cable from there.

If Timur Bekmambetov is the Russian David Fincher, then Wanted is his Fight Club: bloody, brutal, funny, lightly satirical, and all about a nobody who shakes himself from his reverie and becomes a real man. There aren't many deep themes here (not as many as there are supposed to be, anyway), but who cares? The stylized violence and unapologetically ludicrous action sequences are the selling point, and Wanted delivers those by the blood-soaked truckload.

Wanted is about a Chicago office drone named Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) whose life is so insubstantial that he gets zero hits when he Googles himself. But like Neo before him (only played by an actual actor, rather than a plank of driftwood), Wesley is rescued from his drudgery by a secret organization that wants to tell him who he really is and what his destiny can be. That's right, the Mormons.

No, kidding. The group is known as The Fraternity (but they let girls in, too), and it began a thousand years ago when a group of weavers decided that weaving was boring and they should become assassins. Today the group is run by Sloan (Morgan Freeman), with headquarters hidden in an actual textile factory. Every guy in the place is tough and mean, a real brute of the loom, if you will, and they show Wesley the ropes of shooting people from a distance. That's right: Wesley snipes. (That concludes the pun portion of this review.)

A bit of math tells me that after this weekend, 2008 will be halfway over. But here at The (Mostly) Indie Film Calendar, we prefer to think that 2008 has only halfway begun. There are still six months left to participate in the many cool film-related events that happen every week outside the nation's multiplexes! If you know of something coming up -- special screenings, retrospectives, mini-festivals, etc. -- send me a link! My e-mail is Eric.Snider (at) Weblogsinc (dot) com.

This week, even if WALL-E is what you've always Wanted, try to make room in your life for these...

INDIE THEATRICAL RELEASES

• Gunnin' for That #1 Spot is a doc about the nation's top high school basketball players competing in a tournament -- and the film was directed by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, so you know it's hip. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg gave it a rave review at Tribeca. It opens today in places where basketball is big, just in time for the NBA draft: New York, L.A., Phoenix, Portland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.

• Finding Amanda stars Matthew Broderick as a TV producer who goes to Las Vegas to convince his niece (Brittany Snow) to enter rehab. Our Erik Davis tried to find something nice to say about it at Tribeca but was unsuccessful. Opens today in NYC, L.A., Chicago, Boston, Philly, D.C., San Francisco, and Palm Desert, Calif.

After the jump, more indie theatrical releases, plus the city-by-city list of special events....

Sure, the third Jason Bourne film was called The Bourne Ultimatum, which sounds pretty final. And sure, the author of the books, Robert Ludlum, only wrote three of 'em. But when everyone's having a good time and -- especially -- making money and earning Oscars, why stop the party just because the trilogy is finished? Quadrilogies are the new trilogies.

The guys at IESB.net were on the red carpet at the genre-oriented Saturn Awards the other night, and they managed to snag a few words with Frank Marshall and Pat Crowley, producers of (among many other things) the Bourne series. Marshall re-confirmed that a fourth film is definitely in the works, saying, "Hopefully we're gonna be shooting next summer for a release in 2010."

The video at IESB also has Marshall explaining, "There was a fourth book written, but it was not by Mr. Ludlum, so we're probably going to take our own direction." He and Crowley both observed that Jason Bourne has not been to South America yet, and that that's where they're thinking the next adventure will be set.

Paul Greengrass, who directed the second and third Bourne films, is back onboard, and so is Matt Damon. So far, there has been no announcement of who's writing the screenplay. Whoever it is might want to brush up on his Spanish, though.

With the film industry so busy that even the art houses are having trouble finding room for the indies they want to show, some execs are starting to look at more creative ways of getting their movies seen. That's why the Weinstein Co. is handing over one of its products to IFC Films, which will release it later this year in theaters and -- on the same day -- through Video-on-Demand, right into people's homes.

The movie is Elite Squad, a Brazilian drama about police corruption that won the top prize at Berlin in February and comes from a great pedigree: it was directed by José Padilha, who made the fantastic documentary Bus 174, and co-written by Bráulio Mantovani, who wrote City of God. (Cinematical's Scott Weinberg reviewed it mostly favorably at Tribeca.) It's the kind of foreign film that would normally do pretty well on the U.S. art house circuit, if the art houses weren't already overcrowded at the moment.

So the Weinsteins -- who actually helped produce the film, rather than merely buying the finished product at a festival -- have made a deal (with unspecified terms) with IFC Films. IFC will release it in a few theaters at the same time that it becomes available through IFC's Video-on-Demand service. Our Christopher Campbell wrote an excellent summary of this practice, known as "day-and-date," in April. Basically, day-and-date helps non-blockbuster films get seen by more people.

Were you aware that when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences presented the Oscars every year, the results were being determined without considering the opinion of Jet Li? It's hard to believe, I know. They haven't been consulting Diablo Cody (pictured), either! Well, that egregious oversight is about to be remedied, as Li, Cody, and 103 others have been invited to join the AMPAS and become voting members.

Among those whom you'll be able to blame the next time something dumb like Crash wins Best Picture are Gore Verbinski, Doug Liman, Allison Janney, Judd Apatow and Sacha Baron Cohen -- assuming they all accept the invitation, of course. Almost everyone who's invited is grateful for the honor, but a few do decline, and a few more simply fail to respond to the invitation before the deadline.