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. 

• The Rome Film Festival is shaping up to be quite the Coppola family reunion. Francis Ford has long been scheduled to unveil his long-awaited Youth Without Youth at the event; now Variety reports that his wife, Eleanor Coppola, will debut a new documentary there, a follow-up to Hearts of Darkness called Coda: Thirty Years Later. With mom and dad already on the bill, fest organizers are apparently “hope to get the whole Coppola family, including children Sofia and Roman, onstage” as well.
• IFC First Take has acquired two, semi-high-profile projects: Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore; and Finishing the Game, a “Bruce Lee mocumentary” by Better Luck Tomorrow director Justin Lin. “Because each film sports bankable actors,” writes The Hollywood Reporter’s Gregg Goldstein, “IFC might test whether exhibitors resistant to day-and-date releases will book films also available on VOD.”
• 10,000 famous actresses have joined the remake of The Women, which is apparently shooting already in Boston.
• Vague “schedule” problems have led Disney to postpone the production and release of their third Narnia movie. Luckily, something called G-Force was standing on the sidelines, waiting to take over the May 1, 2009 release date.

I’ve spent much of the morning noodling around on the website for Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film, Youth Without Youth***.Sony Classics bought distribution rights to Coppola’s first film in a decade last March; at the time, Anne Thompson offered this description:

Inspired by his daughter Sofia to make a low-budget personal film, Coppola opted not to take the festival route, preferring to fly under the radar. The indie-financed film, which Coppola shot last year in Romania, is set during World War II and stars Tim Roth as a 70-year-old professor who is struck by lightning, suddenly turns 40 and becomes brilliant. (He also sprouts a doppelganger.) His quest is to discover the origin of language and consciousness. By movie’s end he and his lady love (Alexandra Maria Lara) speak in tongues—sans subtitles…The movie has been compared to an arty Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In keeping with Coppola’s apparent desire to keep the project personal, the web site functions as a kind of scrapbook documenting his inspirations for making the film. There are snapshots of his actors rehearsing, black and white photos of Bucharest, a bio of Mircea Eliade (the author of the novella on which the film is based) and, perhaps most significantly, three “diary entries” through which Coppola works through both his need to return to personal filmmaking, and his desire to reclaim a youthful exuberance for life and work. The diary entries are dated September 2005, so if they’re genuine (in this day and age, no one is above suspicion when it comes to doctored bloggery), they were generated 4-6 weeks before Youth went into production.

In one entry, Coppola explains how he was begrudgingly goaded into inflating one Godfather film into three:

Originally, I didn’t intend to make more than one Godfather film; yet economic forces at the studio were insistent: “Francis, you have the formula for Coca-Cola; are you not going to make more?” But the first film expended most of the arrows in my quiver or, more aptly, the slugs in my revolver. So, the second film had to stretch into new and more ambitious territory to show a few more; otherwise, it would have been weaker than the first. By the time the third arrived, the basic ideas that made the first fresh and excited were all but used up.

The diary is basically a manifesto. Coppola describes his predicament as typical for any aging artist–the temptation to keep draining the well that brought past success is too great, economic safety is too attractive to risk doing anything new. He decides that the only way to break that vicious cycle “is to become young again, to forget everything I know and try to have the mind of a student. To re-invent myself by forgetting I ever had any film career at all, and instead to dream about having one.”I’m not sure I buy the idea of the bright-eyed student risking it all to make a picture about an old man reclaiming his youth, but for the time being, I’ll give Frank the benefit of the doubt. Considering the fact that he could very easily while away his final years living off his wine fortune, you’ve got to throw him a bone for refusing to go down without a fight. Youth Without Youth is currently scheduled to play at the Rome Film Festival in October, before opening here on December 14.

***Not to be confused with The Best of Youth, the six-hour Italian TV miniseries that, when released theatrically in the States in 2005, became the best reviewed film of that year (it swept me up, too, although for the first couple of hours, it was hard to fight the nagging suspicion that I was watching the Italian Forrest Gump.)