We feel really bad about spotlighting Michael Jackson in three spots on our “Creepiest Kids’ Movies List” yesterday. If we had known he was going to die of cardiac arrest within hours of that post’s publication, we would have maybe limited his presence to one included film, if any at all.

To make up for the dishonor, we now would like to spotlight the connection he had to cinema through his collaborations with great filmmakers. Due to his talent, success and financial status, he was able to work with a number of important directors, both in movies and in music videos. Some were already prominent when MJ hired them; others were strictly music videomakers who would go on to significant feature filmmaking careers. Some collaborations were also better than others, so we’ve ranked them in order from worst to best.
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This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Michael Jackson, according to all major media outlets, has died.

Earlier today, David Poland wrote a post titled Death is the Ultimate Disinfectant, in which he noted that most of those memorializing Farrah Fawcett (whose death was announced earlier today) have conveniently chosen to forget “more than a decade of bad public behavior and questions about mental health.” One can only imagine what kind of “disinfectant” will be needed in the coming days, now that it has been confirmed that Michael Jackson has indeed died.

Though mainstream media outlets initially reported that the performer (and, arguably, the inspiration for the kind of gawking that the modern gossip monster has risen to accommodate) had gone into cardiac arrest, the LA Times, and virtually everyone else, are now reporting that Michael Jackson has died. MSNBC announced the news by breaking into a report about how, just last week, Jackson was training with Lou Ferrigno.

Last fall, I wrote a piece on Michael Jackson Thrill the World, an event Alamo Drafthouse in Austin that combined a boozy sing-a-long to Jackson’s epic videos with a “Thriller” dance lesson. As, I wrote then, “Watch three or more Michael Jackson videos back-to-back-to-back and, whatever you think of the man or his music, it’s impossible to deny that no pop star has ever really tried to top him in terms of sheer scope. And even when he’s very, very bad, he’s compelling.” On that note, let’s revisit one of his many collaborations with legendary filmmakers after the jump.
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“What has happened to our family? We were so promising!”

So ponders one elder member of the artistic clan at the center of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro –– and so, one imagines, the film’s detractors will be eager to snark about the director and his filmmaking progeny. FFC is oft-mocked for having whored himself out to studios in the 90s, only to squander the generosity of an indie arm with his pretentious “return to personal filmmaking,” 2007’s Youth Without Youth. As for the younger Coppola generation, Roman went from making highly-cinematic music videos to directing the promising mod homage CQ, but has since apparently done little but shoot second until for his dad, sister and Wes Anderson. After winning an Oscar for the beyond-slight Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola made a personal gesture of her own with the masterfully stylish Marie Antoinette — which subsequently dropped her from the favor of much of the critical class.

Marie Antoinette is a useful film to talk about in the same breath as Tetro, not because they’re similar in terms of means of production (they’re not: the former was a studio-funded biopic banked on North American stars that was considered a disappointment when it failed to build on Lost’s box office and awards tally, the latter a self-financed, self-distributed late-career experiment that can substantively please or disappoint only its maker), but because the finished projects nonetheless share a common DNA. Both films are so drunk on the melding of disparate cultural references (for the daughter, corset porn and Gang of Four; for the father, partner dance musicals and Fellini) that they read as dewy confessions from the filmmaker, feature-length love letters to their own aesthetics, the specific things they personally think are beautiful.

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In a bit of an about-face, after issuing a press release announcing his intention to decline an invitation to screen his Tetro out of competition at Cannes, Francis Ford Coppola has agreed to allow the film to open that festival’s non-competitive Director Fortnight sidebar. For that reason and many more, the Fortnight lineup is terribly exciting: new movies from Josh and Benny Safdie, Pedro Costa and Hong Sang Soo will screen alongside Lynn Shelton’s Humpday and the still distributor-less Sundance comedy I Love You Phillip Morris. The full lineup, including shorts, after the jump.

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While I very much appreciate the invitation, this is an independent film, self-financed and self released, and I felt that being invited for a non-competition gala screening wasn’t true to the personal and independent nature of this film. More important than Cannes, our team can focus all our time, energy and resources into the U.S. release this June 11th

Above: in a statement published on Mike Jones’ Blog, Francis Ford Coppola explains why he’s not going to bring his next film, Tetro, to the Cannes Film Festival next month. Remember, the one that inspired him to vlog about the brilliance of Vincent Gallo?  The phrasing of the statement makes one wonder if Coppola’s indie spirit would have remained as paramount if Tetro had been invted to compete…

Same family, very different headline: FFC’s daughter Sofia has inked a deal to make her fourth film. Somewhere is described in Variety as a “dramedy” in about “a bad-boy actor stumbling through a life of excess at the Chateau Marmont. With an unexpected visit from his 11-year-old daughter, he is forced to reexamine his life.” Stephen Dorff plays the father, Elle Fanning plays the daughter. Sounds potentially unwatchable!

A site for Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming, Argentina-shot, Vincent Gallo-starring Tetro has launched, complete with a video missive from the director himself. In the clip, Coppola says the film “deals with almost mythic proportions,” calls Gallo “really quite a brilliant man”, and promises more video in the near future. Bated breath, etc.

The Independent published some choice excerpts a couple of days ago from Notes on a Life, the recently published collected journals of Eleanor Coppola––wife of Francis Ford, mother or Roman and Sofia, and co-director of the making-of-Apocalypse Now doc, Hearts of Darkness. The book was already on my shopping list, but it’s moved up a bit in urgency now that I’ve read the excerpt about how Eleanor struggled to define herself in the mid-70s, while her husband was out winning Oscars and she was pretty much just expected to stay home with the kids.

Eleanor met artist Lynn Hershman (now Hershman-Leeson, she directed the excellent post-9/11 paranoia doc Strange Culture) through Roman’s nursery-school car pool, and the two moms became partners in conceptual art crime. Francis went out of town one weekend, and the girls threw a party where Eleanor moved her husband’s five real Oscars from a display case, and replaced them with her own five, keychain sized consolation prizes, apparently given to the wife of every Oscar winner. Then they had guests peel potatoes and, inspired by a Joseph Beuys quote, made everyoe decide whether or not their potato was art. It sounds like typical, 70s California stuff, but apparently Francis was not amused. From the book:

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• Ostensibly looking to replicate the success of their existing, cinema-inspired period series, AMC is planning to spin a series off of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film, The Conversation. The original is topical, says producer Erik Jendresen. “Watching The Conversation today is fascinating in light of the Patriot Act. But this is not a series that’s blatantly making a statement; it will still be very true to the original vision of the character.”
• Another day, another name for the Inglorious Bastards call sheet. This time it’s B.J. Novak from The Office.
• Meryl Streep will continue her midlife career resurgence as star of glossy chick coms by toplining the latest effort by Nancy Meyers. She’ll play a woman at the center of a love triangle with two men.

Legendary six-time-Oscar-winning make-up artist Rick Baker joined stars Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt to bring us the first footage of Universal’s new version of The Wolfman. And it’s a period piece.

Highlights:

- The origins of the remake stem from Del Toro’s Lon Chaney Jr. fandom.

- It looks like “Francis Ford Coppola’s The Wolfman”

- Of course, Anthony Hopkins would be more welcome as Van Helsing again

- At least it will likely be R-rated, as it looks quite bloody

- Baker honors Stan Winston by labeling his death “the end of an era”

- Blunt is apparently into two-headed dudes

Check out the full liveblog transcript after the jump.

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Yesterday, in response to David Gordon Green’s talent being (presumably) wasted on Pineapple Express, I brought you my picks for the 5 worst directorial sellouts of all time (or, as I should have titled it, 5 Worst Attempts at Mainstream Success). And now, as promised, are my picks for the best, because occasionally a great filmmaker can take a seemingly sellout gig and deliver a masterpiece.

1. (tie) The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) - Everyone should know that Francis Ford Coppola didn’t want to make the first Godfather film. He wanted to make smaller movies, such as The Conversation, which he was able to make at Paramount only because he directed The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. I prefer the film he wanted to make, but there is no denying his first two Godfather films were worth Coppola’s time and, more importantly, ours. …Read more

• It’s that time of year again: Mr. Skin counts down the Top 20 Movie Nude Scenes of 2007. Marisa Tomei takes the top slot (that’s punny, right?) for her work in Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead. The Mr. Skin crew were either really impressed with how well she’s aged since My Cousin Vinny, or they just couldn’t resist the alliterative treat that is “topless Tomei-toes.” I know I can’t. [Via Rex]
• Matt Dentler traces Frownland’s road to victory: “It was almost precisely a year ago that I fished Ronnie’s film out of the submissions, put it on, and was instantly hypnotized. For all those filmmakers out there who feel you have to have “connections” and “legacy” to get attention or noticed, Frownland is proof against that.”
• There are two new trailers for Youth Without Youth, and Chris Thilk is wholly unimpressed with both.
• Vulture points to an MP3 on Zeon’s Music Blog of “Teen Horniness is Not a Crime”, sung by Sarah Michelle Gellar in character as Southland Tales‘ ambitious porn star Krysta Now. Zeon’s verdict is that it’s “not very good [but] it’s supposed to be a joke anyway so maybe it is intentionally crappy.” Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can resist a lyrical couplet like “‘Cause these statistics do not lie/Just ask those nerds who shot up Columbine/They weren’t getting laid/No.”
• The Onion A.V. Club is hiring.

Some of these links still date back to before the weekend. What can I say? It took a couple of days to make it all the way through my feeds. Only freshies tomorrow, I promise.

• John Brownlee offers a sneak peak at Ghostbusters 3, the videogame-only continuation of the saga, featuring a script by Dan Ackroyd and the voices of Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. “Will Ghostbusters 3 be a worthy successor to the franchise? It’s still too early to say, but early game footage of Ghostbusters 3 has leaked out, and it looks incredible.” That footage is embedded above. The footage has been removed from YouTube. Boooo.
• We’re sure Ronnie Bronstein is very excited about his Spirit Award nomination, but Frownland is also up for an award at the Gothams, the New York-centric film awards put on by Find Independent’s former parent company, IFP, which takes place tonight. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough already, Michael Tully has declared, “if Frownland doesn’t win the Gotham tonight I will eat my iPod.” Of course, we’d rather see Ronnie win, but should the iPod eating actually go down, I’ll try to get photo evidence.
• What’s this? High praise for Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, which was almost universally dismissed at the Rome Film Festival? Hmmm. Jurgen Fauth says: “I know, I know — there’s nothing duller than listening to other people’s dreams. And yet… the shared fantasy Coppola created from Mircea Eliade’s novella weaves a strange magic, mysterious, playful, philosophical, and loopy with romance. I’d like to hold on to that gossamer enchantment for just a little while longer, privately, before it’s time to take out the stainless steel critical apparatus and cut this one open.”
• Speaking of Coppola, The Playlist weighs in on FFC’s One From the Heart: “This neon, highly stylized break-up film might be a failed experiment, but man, is it one of the most pretty failures to look at ever.”
• Ray Pride passes along exciting news: David Cronenberg is writing a novel. Says Nicole Winstanley, the Penguin Editor who nabbed the rights, “I wrote David Cronenberg several months ago to inquire about whether or not he’d consider writing a novel. His films demonstrate a deep understanding of the human condition that could translate into fiction brilliantly.”
• “Noah Baumbach is one relentlessly bleak filmmaker, and that’s not a compliment,” writes Daniel Carlson at Pajiba. “It’s not that his films are necessarily evil, or even completely off-target; rather, one of the things that makes Baumbach so slippery is his habit of stumbling onto moments of slight emotional truth in the middle of a film completely devoid of it.”

• Francis Ford Coppola accuses Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro and Jack Nicholson of being old, rich, and lazy. While opening up another bottle of wine on his estate and noodling with his first film in ten years.
• Hannah Takes the Stairs is playing the London Film Festival. Xan Brooks has a mixed review: “Hannah Takes the Stairs is a film that showcases much of what is good about independent American cinema: its naturalistic, free-form rush comes embroidered with the sort of casual epiphanies that a bigger production would have either ironed out or ignored altogether. But it is also prey to much that is bad.”
• Ang Lee has trimmed “7 or 8 minutes” from the version of Lust, Caution set for Chinese release, but the film has yet to pass that country’s censorship board, and the longer the release is delayed, the greater the potential damage from piracy.
• A release date and title for the Wolverine spinoff has been set. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to be directed by Rendition/Tsotsi helmer Gavin Hood, comes out May 1, 2009.
• Three new scribes have joined the exclusive New York Film Critics Circle: Melissa Anderson (Time Out New York), Elizabeth Weitzman (NY Daily News) and Steven Snyder (New York Sun).

• 16 films are set to world premiere at the Rome Film Festival, including Francis Ford Coppola’s aforementioned Youth Without Youth, and Noise, a comedy starring Tim Robbins. Also noteworthy: the Tom Cruise/Robert Redford vehicle Lions for Lambs will play Rome first, thus scooping AFI.
• Speaking of Coppola, the filmmaker’s office in Buenos Aires was burglarized this week. The perps allegedly “subdued a collaborator of the filmmaker and stole a camera and computers,” one of which contained the script for Coppola’s next planned project, which was set to be shot Buenos Aires with Matt Dillon in the lead.
• The Mill Valley Film Festival will host the U.S. premieres of Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream and Things We Lost in the Fire, as well as a number of special events, including a performance of Shostakovich’s original score by the Marin Symphony alongside a screening of Battleship Potemkin; and a concert of Bob Dylan covers following a screening of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. The musicians for the latter event have not yet been announced, but I’d put money on an appearance from Pavement vet Stephen Malkmus, who ghost-sang for Cate Blanchett in the movie.