• No Country For Old Men opened huge in limited release over the weekend. The Coen Brothers’ “comeback” grossed $42,929 on each of its 28 screens. Meanwhile, Bee Movie rose to first place in its second weekend. Jerry Seinfeld’s cartoon was able to capitalize on a weak slate of debuts, including Fred Claus, which could only manage $19.2 million, and Lions For Lambs, which opened in fourth with just $6.7 million.
• The longer the strike lasts, the better chance low and mid-level Hollywood employees have of getting fired, and anyone who keeps their job can forget about charging incidentals to the company.  Dave McNary lays it out at Variety: “Development staffs are in jeopardy since there are only a few scripts to read. Support staff infrastructure is also in trouble, and the strike is impacting expense accounts, which have been cut to the quick at studios, production companies and agencies.”
• Mickey Rourke has joined the cast of that Nic Cage/Darren Aronofsky wrestler movie.

• Ben Affleck was secretly an auteur, even when blingin’.
• Why The Hills is more like L’eclisse than The Truman Show.
• David Cronenberg–the video tribute.
• Darren Aronofsky has fallen far.
• David Lynch has a shoe fetish.
• Ze Frank returns to assess the writers strike.
• Jack Nicholson talks about the trilogy that he wanted to make but didn’t. No, it’s not Batman.
• Kevin looks at a list of “entertainment geniuses” and finds, “Our priorities are thus: first, drugs, then the Internet, then money, then the Simpsons, then the abolition of racist regimes.”
• Amy Taubin tried to revive the Mumblecore backlash. Karina poked holes.
• On this week’s podcast, we track Tom Cruise from teenage pimp to midlife crisis.
• Kevin wonders if there’s a Bob Dylan that Todd Haynes left out of I’m Not There: corporate shill.
• Lions For Lambs: Tom Cruise puts the media in its place. It’s just as laughable as it sounds.
• Steal a Pencil For Me: A documentary about love in a concentration camp.
• The director of Xanadu complains about boobs on Fox News.

Here’s a look at the notable films that are opening or expanding this weekend, with links, where applicable, to our previous coverage:

• No Country For Old Men: If every Coen Brothers film is never anything less than a perfectly-wrought genre exercise, is it ever anything more? That’s the question that I’ve been grappling with since seeing the Coen Brothers’ ultra-violent revisionist Western. Judging from No Country For Old Men’s almost-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m alone in thinking it’s anything less than a masterpiece. I don’t want to spoil the party–I  do think, just as a thriller, it’s technically above critique–but there’s something about the Coens’ need to turn genre into a joke that, for me, undermines the desperate nihilism of the material. I sometimes wonder if I have something of a Coen Brothers block; I’m compiling my findings to that end and will issue a report before the film hits wide release.
• Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead: Sidney Lumet’s totally serviceable late career comeback has been performing astonishingly well in limited release; this weekend it expands to a slightly-wider 122 screens. Check out our NYFF review here.
• Steal a Pencil For Me: Michele Ohayon’s Holocaust docu-romance opens in New York today and expands in the coming weeks; read our review here.
• Lions For Lambs: With this review and this podcast, we’ve already given Robert Redford’s long-awaited follow-up to The Legend of Bagger Vance more airtime than it deserves.

As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is mostly unsuccessful, but as a statement of purpose on behalf of its co-star and executive producer, Tom Cruise, it’s mildly fascinating. Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him.

You probably don’t need to be reminded that Cruise has had a rough couple of years, culminating in the announcement in November 2006 that he and long-time producing partner Paula Wagner had signed a deal to resurrect MGM’s dormant United Artists. Some saw this as a savvy move for both Cruise and MGM: disappointing box office on Mission Impossible: 3 aside, there’s still no one on the planet with Cruise’s international name-and-face recognition, and as he proved with War of the Worlds, which made $65 million in its first weekend just a scant month after the couch jumping incident, the guy can open the right project regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. But skeptics (myself included) wondered if MGM was just throwing Cruise a bone—if they weren’t doing anything with UA anyway, was handing the brand over really a sure sign of confidence?

The guy had—has–something to prove. With his career at the crossroads, the choice of Lions For Lambs as the vehicle to drive him over the hump is not an immediately logical one. It’s worth noting that Cruise didn’t go looking for politically relevant story to tell—Redford signed on to direct the script, and then called Cruise, looking to cast him. And I may get permanently disinvited from Sundance for saying this, but I’m not sure if Redford fully knew what he was getting into.

…Read more

Tom Cruise’s tabloid covers have lined a lot of bird cages, however we saw something fascinating behind his orthodontic masterpiece smile. Once a Hollywood boy-wonder, in recent years he has deconstructed his all-american persona. Now, with the release of the political thriller Lions for Lambs, Cruise tries his hand as studio mogul, heading United Artists. Will it work? What does the future hold for Cruise? Most interesting: What does a deep look into Cruise reveal about our culture’s progress or lack there of?

 

 FilmCouch 45 [26:38m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch 45

Movies mentioned: Risky Business, Taps, Legend, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky

• While Tom Cruise continued to abstain from publicizing his own politics on the Lions For Lambs press tour, the film’s director and co-star Robert Redford “lash[ed] out against the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” at a press conference in Rome yesterday. “We have lost lives, we’ve lost sacred freedoms, we’ve lost financial stability; we’ve lost our position of respect on the world stage,” said the sometime Sundance Kid.
• “The world’s first user-generated movie” begins shooting this week in London. MySpace users picked the director and some of the stars; Ewan Bremner’s in it, too. Be very afraid.
• I’m not sure exactly what “two-way plug-and-play technology” entails, but the MPAA thinks it puts their copyrights at risk, and they want the FCC to ban consumer electronics manufacturers from making and selling it.

• Lions For Lambs is, according to Dade Hayes, a “remarkably strident political work that takes dead aim at the Bush White House and assails post-9/11 foreign policy.” It’s also the first project to see release from the Tom Cruise-controlled United Artists, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Cruise’s comeback is riding on its success. And yet, it seems as though Cruise the producer hasn’t given Cruise the star (who plays a right-wing senator in Lambs) talking points on how to package his own political views in relation to the film.
• Ryan Gosling gained 20 pounds and grew a beard for the job, and yet, a day before shooting was to begin, he was fired from Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and replaced with Mark Wahlberg. Who wants to put money on what “creative differences” actually means in this case?
• Graphic novel adaptation 30 Days of Night barely squeaked past Why Did I Get Married? at the box office this weekend, earning $16 million to Tyler Perry’s $12 million. Michael Clayton, which has already been written off as a failure by some Clooney haters, held on to the fourth place slot for the second week in a row. Star-studded Oscar bait continued to bomb pretty hard: Rendition opened wide in ninth place, and Reservation Road managed just $2,630 per screen in limited release.

• 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.