“Bad play, Leo.” That’s Gabriel Byrne to Albert Finney in Miller’s Crossing after Finney’s fading crime lord chooses to blow up a situation rather than taking the smart, quiet path through it. Since then that line has stuck with me; it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I see anyone really blow it. So as the credits rolled on Changeling, and well before that moment in fact, there it was. Bad play, Clint.

Changeling is, as Devin already mentioned, a very bad film. It is shrill and dull, and a crushing disappointment. The amazing story encompasses that classic Los Angeles drama of everyday people trapped by power, corruption and fame. It would make perfect fodder for James Ellroy. As the film spooled into it’s last (and fifth) half-hour, I was desperate to see what anyone else would have done with the material; I’d even take DePalma’s lackluster approach to Black Dahlia over Eastwood’s maudlin and empty vision.

True crime material doesn’t come any more lurid or magnetic than the real story behind J. Michael Straczynski’s script. The young son of Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) disappears while she’s at work. Months later, an ‘exhaustive’ manhunt spearheaded by LAPD Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan) turns up a child who claims to be Christine’s son. She disavows the boy immediately, but plays along with his lie at the request of Jones. The LAPD, repeatedly disgraced under the leadership of Chief James Davis (Colm Feore), could use the PR bump, he says. Jones suggests that she’s in shock and that Christine should take the boy home; her reservations about his identity are probably just nerves.

Christine knows that the new kid isn’t her son at all, but the boy keeps his mouth shut as she becomes more desperate for new action by the police. Gustav Brieglev, a preacher (John Malkovich) running a one-man due diligence campaign against LA cops, tries to help Christine get some legit assistance but that culminates in harassment and a shocking imprisonment. Meanwhile, the discovery of a big crime scene at a rural ranch gives Christine’s claims a lot more ammunition than she really wanted.

Eastwood and Straczynski don’t let a single moment go by without emotional embellishment. For instance, when a cop arrives at the ranch to take custody of a runaway the camera lingers on chicken coops, hatchets and axes. That is, just the stuff that would litter a chicken ranch in the ’20s. (And today.) But we don’t see these tools through the eyes of the cop; we see them through the eyes of a filmmaker who can’t let the story build properly, who can’t resist the temptation to heighten every moment, who can’t wait to let an emotional flood loose. Instead of asking us to observe, Eastwood wants us to be tense and scared.

That impatience makes a lie of Eastwood’s measured camera, deliberate editing and quietly tinkling score. The film is an eight-year old boy in a suit: a presentable façade doesn’t hide the fact that it just wants to gibber and fidget and poke, poke, poke you at every opportunity. The stylistic fidgeting is distracting: be prepared to veer from melodrama through thriller, detective, horror and back again. I thought Dancer in the Dark blew up the retro melodrama formula too large, but when Bjork sang while marching her last steps I still caved in. Changeling only numbed me.

All big eyes and tear-stained cheeks, Angelina Jolie is Eastwood’s go-to when he wants to punch us. For Big Moments it’s cries and wails and “I want my son!”. (Over. And over. And over, again.) For suspicion and anger her eyes hide under the narrow brim of a domed flapper hat. For utter degradation it’s the bare bony shoulders worthy of a Chris Cunningham video. She’s almost a lock for an Oscar nod.

Yet I feel like audiences might mistake Jolie’s willing, pliable performance for a great one. Christine’s circumstances are drawn in letters taller than Everest, so no audience can miss the opportunity to realize how terrible and unfair her plight became. Perhaps easier to miss that the character and performance are as frail and hollow as a balloon, as we’re so frequently invited to inflate it with our own outrage and sympathy.

I’ve never been left so cold by a movie this full of wailing and gnashing of teeth. I could sympathize with the plight of a woman staring down a hostile police force, but the particulars of who Christine Collins was and of her particular fight were largely lost; the movie only awakened that latent fear of ominous authority that is so easy to invoke. When a boy faces his terrible crimes I barely stirred. Only Michael Kelly’s relatively human detective and Jason Butler Harner’s grinning, deranged killer fired up any specific reaction.

I hate to see Clint Eastwood miss as broadly as he does here. I hate seeing eager performances misused, and I hate joining in the inappropriate, unwanted laughter as characters suffer onscreen. (OK, that’s a lie. I love that.) Changeling has all the hallmarks of a film made to appeal to a broad, unthinking audience. Watch it clean up come awards time.

We know that George Romero has been filming another chapter in his now long-running zombie series, but details have been scant. Once assumed to be a sequel to Diary of the Dead, that isn’t the case at all. The film (as yet untitled) is almost Romero’s take on the French film Les Revenants. Taking place on an island, this might be a more conceptual zombie flick than most, as it concerns families who must decide whether to destroy the bodies of their relatives as they rise from the dead.

Solution seems obvious, really.

Bloody Disgusting has the first photo from the film, and the image doesn’t require much explanation. It’s small and low-res, so I’m not even going to clip it; just head over there to see the bite.

Quick, how many Tintin movies are Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson making? We’ve been told three for months and months, but unless I missed a low-key announcement (very possible) we’re now looking at only two pictures. That’s what the New York Times says in passing while discussing the financial future of the series.

A couple of months ago I had to ask what sort of world we’d live in if Steven Spielberg suddenly couldn’t get a film made. The problem was Tintin, which Universal passed on co-financing with Paramount. The reasons seem fairly obvious: while the series has a groundbreaking, impressive creative pairing in Spielberg and Peter Jackson, the character has almost no traction with the American public. Selling the films overseas could be a cakewalk; selling them at home would be a strenuous uphill climb.

Now Sony and Paramount are in talks to co-finance the films. Paramount would distribute domestically and in other English-speaking markets while Sony would handle other foreign territories. The implication in the Times is that this deal would preserve the high-paying deal Spielberg and Jackson had originally angled for, or something close to it. (They’d originally asked for 30% of gross receipts.)

With respect to the series being cut from three films to two, I’m doing some checking. The NYT story is by Michael Cieply, who has been blasted in the past for less than perfect factual reporting. He also mentions that Spielberg has already shot footage for the first film in the series, which corroborates other reports that emerged in late summer.

Tim Burton killed Planet of the Apes. His film, while technically profitable, left moviegoers with such a bad taste in their mouths that Fox never bothered revisiting it in a sequel. The franchise, which had seemed poised for rebirth, lay dead for years.

But right now, in the halls of Fox, there is another new version of Planet of the Apes that has been kicking around for the last year. It’s not a sequel to the Burton film, and it’s not another remake of the original. To the general audience it’s a prequel to Planet of the Apes, but for the initiated it’s something totally different.

It’s a remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

Yup. It’s the story of Caesar, the ape who said no, the first ape with speech who started the events that led to a world where monkeys were on top and humans were dumb beasts.

Things are different in this script, written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, which is called Genesis: Apes. Fans will know that Caesar in Conquest is the result of a massive temporal paradox – his parents escaped to 1973 from a far future Earth. Further, Conquest takes place in a dystopian ‘future’ – 1991 – while Genesis: Apes is set in the modern day.

In this version Caesar is the result of a genetic scientist fooling around with the nature of things. When the baby monkey exhibits intelligence and the ability to talk, he takes the cuddly thing home to his wife, who is unable to bear children. Things go surprisingly well for a number of years until Caesar grows up and sees mommy getting attacked. The dutiful son steps in and accidentally kills the attacker.

Here’s where it takes off. In a scene paralleling Charlton Heston in the cage in the original Planet of the Apes, Caesar ends up in custody at an Ape Conservatory where he and the other apes are abused mercilessly. Caesar finds himself a primate without a world – he’s as smart as humans but will never be one of them (and is in fact tortured by them) and he’s initially rejected by his monkey brethren.

You’re on Caesar’s side, understanding where this poor outcast is coming from. But then the script gets really ballsy and, just like in Conquest, Caesar begins a campaign to unite the apes and overthrow human society. And his plan isn’t a Martin Luther King Jr series of marches, speeches and sit ins – Caesar and his apes take to the streets violently.

Again, it’s like Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which brilliantly modeled its ape riot scenes on the Watts Riots that had happened just a few years before. But Conquest was set in a future where America was ruled by a fascist society. Genesis: Apes is set today, in this world. The regime that Caesar overthew in Conquest was made up of bad guys. The Caesar of Genesis: Apes is coming after you.

Maybe this is why the script has been languishing all this time. You just can’t have your hero working to tear down our modern society. It’s too radical! Plus, Fox remains notoriously unfriendly to good genre ideas.

Still, imagine if the film had come out this year. It’s the 40th anniversary of Planet of the Apes and The Dark Knight proved that mainstream audiences are ready for something edgy and challenging. The country is polarized politically in a way that would almost guarantee this film major media coverage and controversy, which would sell tickets. You could probably have liberals and conservatives, whites and minorities completely outraged by this movie.

And it’s the perfect way to get the franchise back up and running. Everybody knows that the Planet of the Apes used to be Earth. Everybody knows that the mute humans are our distant descendants. Everybody knows the Statue of Liberty is buried in the sand. So just skip all that – get to something new. That was one of the major problems with the Burton version, that it tried to recapture the shock of the original, the most spoiled movie of all time. But Genesis: Apes lets us get back into this world of apes and do what the four sequels to the original did – craft great science fiction parables that had gut puncher endings. Only Planet of the Apes had a ‘twist’ ending; all of the others just had ‘Holy shit!’ finales.

It’s likely that Genesis: Apes will sit on a shelf forever and ever, but here’s hoping that somebody at Fox is paying attention and realizes that even Mark Wahlberg can’t keep this franchise down forever.

It’s Halloween, which means that Hatchet and Spiral director Adam Green has another short film online. This year it’s The Tivo, and it’s a tale of terror that springs directly from our modern lifestyle. It also connects into the universe of previous shorts – check out the reference to last year’s film, The Tiffany Problem, at the beginning!

Personal sidenote: I went to high school with the star of this short, Parry Shen. Small world indeed.

Not long ago I talked about Julie Taymor’s upcoming take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Sounds like a great idea, especially switching the lead, Prospero, to Prospera in order to cast Helen Mirren.

But that’s not the most drastic reworking of the story to hit film. Way back when, Forbidden Planet ‘updated’ the play, staging the psycho-sexual action on a faraway planet complete with a robot and everything. An update of that update has long been in the offing, moving from studio to studio like a syphilitic career intern. Now J. Michael Straczynski is tackling the project for Silver Pictures and Warner Brothers.

Forbidden Planet was more inspired by The Tempest than a direct adaptation; the question now is how closely Straczynski will hew to one version of the story over another. And also, given his recent output, whether it’ll be worth a goddamn either way. Let’s see how the final film (assuming we do see it) handles a CGI-rendered version of the beast out of Dr. Morbius’s subconscious. The flickering, line-animated original was so nicely understated and creepy.

We’ve seen a couple of Valkyrie spots already, and each brands the film with a slightly different iron. War movie, thriller, and now Big Important Historical Drama.

The latest and last theatrical trailer spells out the plot in sixty-point letters: Hitler is bad, mmmkay, and we’re going to kill him. This is the trailer to run in front of every other piece of big Oscar-bait this year. It’s heavy on plot and Importance, and thick with the many non-Cuise actors assembled by Bryan Singer: Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson. I like how this version blends in the red line penetrating the map of Hitler’s bunker that we saw in the one-sheet, and I feel that it’ll sell to the people who flock to see Ed Zwick movies, which is exactly the audience the film needs. 

See the new trailer in pretty Quicktime at Yahoo.

Samuel L. Jackson must have discovered that he had a couple of microseconds free in his ridiculous filming schedule, so he made a call to Quentin Tarantino and got himself a spot on the roster of Inglorious Basterds as the narrator.  Shocking, no?  Considering the history of director and actor, and the fact that Jackson will appear in a suppositories commercial if he thinks it’s interesting, no, not really. 

What might be a bit of a surprise, however, is the good people over at The Playlist broke the story that Maggie Cheung has also been cast.  She’ll be playing Madame Mimieux, the French owner of a local Cinemateque that shelters protagonist Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) when she’s being hunted by the Nazis.  While this may seem to be a bit out of place, Cheung is fluent in French, as noted by her work in Clean an Irma Vep.

This, along with recent other casting news, and pictures, is definitely keeping the interest level piqued.

Thanks to Jan for the tip.

I’m not sure that I am happy to report this, but it appears Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire, and Kirsten Dunst are returning to the Spider-Man franchise. Is it to make amends for the poorly received [critically, not financially] Spider-Man 3 and end on a good note, is it money, or do they just love making time-intensive costly movies about CGI fellows ejaculating webs onto strangers?

Honestly… I think it has to be kinda neat to have the keys to kingdom in one of the most robust franchises in history, so I’ll side with good intentions on the still wonderful Sam Raimi’s part.

That said, I’d much rather see the man stretching in new directions and to many readers’ surprise, ones that DO NOT include Spider-Man or Bruce Campbell.

With that in mind, news came out today that the principal [though Dunst is wholly expendable] team is back and they’re bringing Pulizter Prize winning David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole) on board to rewrite the next one.

On one hand, I think a Grit delivery route is about as important as a Pulitzer in the Spidey pantheon and another is that the stakes have been raised in the wake of The Dark Knight and Iron Man [whether you agree with me or not]. Maybe it’s a good call, because the old standard of “Go To” guys (Koepp, Vanderbilt, Etc.) has gotten boring as hell.

This is it for Spider-Man. If they pull it off, the franchise will have legs that’ll make Tina Turner jealous. If not, consider it a thankful bullet in the head of a series facing serious bloat.

I don’t see the downside in this.