To get something out of the way right here up front, I'm a staunch supporter of Barack Obama's and have been since he gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Where I may differ from a great number of Democrats out there is that when a whole lot more people were supporting John Kerry, John Edwards, or whoever else in 2004, I was campaigning for a former Republican, General Wes Clark (who could make an outstanding VP for Obama). Don't get me wrong, I'm a full-on Yellow Dog Democrat (rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican), but I think the things that separate the parties most fundamentally in the US isn't ideology, it's populist doctrine. The Republicans for a long, long time have represented the interests of big business and ignored the needs of the poor and disadvantaged. The argument frequently used against Barack Obama's candidacy is that he isn't experienced enough to lead the US in the more and more complicated arena of foreign policy. The only documentary I've found out there gives the American public a better chance to look at Obama's character and capabilities as a diplomat abroad. Bob Hercules and Keith Walker's Senator Obama Goes to Africa runs right around an hour, but don't let that discourage you from giving it a look. This film was made in 2006, before Obama had formally declared his candidacy for President, and if anything, I think it could very well have been an influential trip in that respect. The most nutritious part of Senator Obama for me was the relatively unvarnished look at the candidate, unlike any of the advertisements or video clips being circulated by Obama's campaign and supporters or that of his primary opponents up to this point. Obama presents the erudite, energizing intellectual option, the truly enlightened American who doesn't have the historical baggage of Gore, Hillary, and others. I only hope the new generation of Democratic candidates don't just latch on to his coattails, but emerge from similar circumstances as Obama: not independently wealthy, but well-educated. The wonder of the film is that it allows you to follow along and get a sense of how much "the real deal" Obama is as someone who can go overseas and command the respect of the world on top of understanding the issues affecting all of us, third world up to the superpowers. Similarly to when I wrote about Al Franken's transformation during the runtime of All Franken: God Spoke, from entertainer to junior statesman, Obama makes a transformation here. Different from Franken's transformation, Obama as a junior Senator realized on this trip the great need his country and the world had for him at this point in the course of human events. It was this trip, I'm convinced, when Obama realized that the alleged "cult of personality" was a charge made in jealousy by others and that he would run a campaign like no one has, possibly ever. I imagine we won't see as clean an observational portrait of Obama until after the election in November. Everything is going to be quite blatantly slanted, whether for or against. I like docs that really dig in and make an ideological statement, but I'm glad this one didn't. Instead, the filmmakers decided to sit back and observe, a much wiser choice, and it makes this film stand out amongst all the advertising that's out there. First Run Features is the exclusive distributor of Senator Obama Goes to Africa and it is currently available from their website. First Run also put out One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, which Jeff liked a lot. This thing would make a lot of scratch if it were available through on-demand download services people are using to put video on all manner of digital devices, especially after he wins the nomination.

This standout from The Weinstein Company is among the best single-disc releases of the year thus far, featuring not only the much more fleshed-out Unrated Cut of the film, but supplemental materials that aren't just there to fill space like so many other DVDs. I really detest the SEXY UNRATED UNCUT marketing design on the cover and spine, but that's the only qualm I have with the whole thing. I thought the theatrical poster would've made a great cover, and having SEXY UNRATED UNCUT on the spine makes it look like it's glorified softcore porn to a guest who sees it on my shelf. The Feature My interview & writeup on the movie's history to the present can be found here. George Hickenlooper's new cut of the film has additions and re-edits littered throughout (all noted painstakingly in the commentary track). The extra detail strokes lent to Edie and (moreso) Andy make this a definitively better version of the film. More scenes of Bridget and Andy together lets you see him interpersonally communicating with someone other than Edie, and that (among other additions) makes all the difference in painting him as a more empathetic character, squashing critical nitpicks of how "detatched" and "cold" he came off in the Theatrical Cut. Yes, he's both of those things at certain points, but that how it should be. This version just frames it all better. Sienna Miller should never be underestimated, and since I first saw her in Alfie, I knew there was a lot more behind the pretty young woman on screen: a thoughtful, reactive talent who only needs good material to play with. You never see a blank "I'm an actor in a movie" stare, she's always present and thinking actively as the character. When other actresses of her generation are nominated for Academy Awards, it's a shame and a crime she wasn't up for one this past year, or the film been held for contention in the coming year. I think she could have won if people had seen this movie and not been barraged by tabloid trashing. It's trite to say someone "disappeared into" a role, so I'll say Guy Pearce just plain is Andy Warhol for every second he's on-screen. There's no Willy Wonka caricature of the artist, just who he was as a vulnerable human being. He must be one of the hardest working people in the business to make it all look so effortless and fluid. He imbues Andy with a sensitivity and authenticity that I have yet to see applied to the character on-screen, and doubt I'll see again anytime soon. Hickenlooper's supporting cast, including Jimmy Fallon and Hayden Christiansen, break from typing forced on them by the studios and what they're known for. No one sticks out like a sore thumb (quite the contrary), and the atmosphere they engender feels just right. Jump over to the interview for more on them. Supplemental Materials All the extras are worth watching, even the trailer, which you probably didn't see in theatres or on TV in the first place. Feature Commentary w/ George Hickenlooper George covers a lot of ground, pointing out new scenes, new edits, talking through the timeline of events the picture went through from beginning to end, and relating stories like the day Sienna auditioned (good cold reading is an auditioning actor's best weapon). He gives due credit to Harvey Weinstein for making the finished picture possible. He acknowledges a fair amount of give and take, saying this is as close to a director's cut as he could get, but makes it clear there was no Harvey Scissorhands of old present. Deleted Scene with or without Director's Commentary This one scene between Andy and Edie is a great example of many scenes improvised in-character based on documented conversations, recorded phone calls and the like. A great example of a deleted scene that gives an added perspective to the final film. Featurette: The Real Edie A succinct set of interviews with people seen in the closing credits talking more in-depth about Edie and who she was, including Factory veterans, George Plympton, and Edie's brother. Featurette: Making Factory Girl This making-of fills in some of the few gaps in George's feature commentary with contributions from the cast. Much more worthy of viewing than the EPK garbage on most discs. Guy Pearce's Video Diary This was my favorite part of the supplementals. Guy Pearce carried a camcorder around throughout filming, from the initial shooting through the reshoots in late 2006. You see Sienna cutting up before takes and Jimmy Fallon and others engaging in the kind of camaraderie behind the scenes that indicates why the film turned out well in the end: everyone had fun and liked working with each other. Everyone made scale, they weren't doing it for the money. You can hear the concern in his voice when the camera fades up on the start of additional shooting. Insightful for those interested in the process behind making movies and enjoyable for anyone who has worked as a part of an artistic ensemble. Sienna Miller Audition Tape George relates in the commentary that Sienna saw her audition sides for the first time the moment she walked in the door. This is the audition tape she made after rushing in due to a flight delay without a shred of the amount of preparation she expected to have. Watch this after listening to the comment track and it'll be yet more interesting. Buy it

In 1965, Edie Sedgwick left school in Cambridge and went to New York City. While there, she met Andy Warhol, became a cultural icon, and quickly succumbed to the temptations of fame and the indulgent excess that goes with it. The story of the film's production is almost as fascinating as the period of Edie's life it portrays. "Even before we started shooting, the tabloid buzz had already killed us." -director George Hickenlooper I spoke with director George Hickenlooper last week about the film and the DVD coming out this Tuesday, which features a thoroughly reworked and enhanced cut of the movie. We talked about portions of the movie's history covered in various places, from the rumors and speculation to the final perspective he can now offer on the film in retrospect. There are mild to major spoilers throughout, so the short version is: go buy the DVD. A review of that will follow shortly. I would have included it here, but it's long as it stands. The journey of Factory Girl was plagued by setback after setback, starting with the casting of the lead. When George first met Sienna Miller, he had no idea who she was. GH: "All of a sudden, everyone's saying 'oh, you cast Jude Law's girlfriend because she's Jude Law's girlfriend?', which wasn't the case at all. I didn't know she was Jude Law's girlfriend when I auditioned her. I just knew was that she was this fun, talented actress from Keen Eddie.

"I didn't even read the tabloids until we got into making this movie, when I ended up in them. So, that's where it started and then Sienna had to drop out because of this play and then I cast Katie Holmes, and then a week after I cast her, she started dating Tom Cruise... I thought, 'wow, this is a great added bonus!' and then a week later (laughs) she drops out of the movie 'well, I guess not!' (laughs). Then I went back to Sienna, basically begging her 'hey, when your play's up, can you do this again?' and she was like 'sure!' MC: "One of the things I think the film does and does well, I think, is put actors in roles, regardless of the size, that we don't often see them in, like Jimmy Fallon. I don't know if many people even caught Don Novello (Father Guido Sarducci) playing Hayden's character's manager. I mean Hayden himself, people know as the guy from the new Star Wars movies and that's it. GH: "It's far more interesting to me to see people when they are... you know, a little bit broken and that goes for actors too, and I think that can really work into how you play a character. And I think there's no film it's more appropriate to do so in than Factory Girl, which is partly about how Andy Warhol worshipped the iconography of famous people. So, that's why I wanted to sort of pepper it with these faces that you knew but you hadn't seen them in this context, and I think you just have to go in there without that prejudice. Take Saturday Night Live out of your mind, take Star Wars out of your mind and look at these performances in a vacuum. MC: "Hayden is a really fine actor, and I wish people would judge him on a more objective basis. GH: "You know Star Wars is that huge monkey on his back. He didn't really have a director on that movie. I mean, George Lucas is a genius, but he's not really an auteur. He's not really an actor's director, that's not his strength. Hayden's a great actor, but he needs that direction like any other actor...I mean, Natalie Portman isn't even good in Star Wars. MC: "A lot of people don't come off as good as they really are in those movies. Going back to Jimmy for a second, I particularly liked what you did with him in this picture because I thought when I saw him in Almost Famous, that was going to be the only time I'd get to see him do something other than what he was "typed" for. GH: "He's a very good dramatic actor, he's a very good comedic actor, he's very versatile. I'm about to do this other picture, it's a thriller, and I'm hoping to cast him in that. It'd really be against type, he'd be the bad guy. MC: "Please do. When he turns on Edie, it's vicious and cold. Completely unexpected based on what you've seen him do elsewhere. GH: He's in this picture for Holly Wiersma (producer on Factory Girl) called Rocket and apparently he's quite good in it. MC: "So before you started shooting you were set back just in casting Sienna, but then did you get pushed further back to work around her theatre schedule? GH: "Well, we delayed the shooting initially because we still didn't have all of the money together. That was a long, long, ongoing process that is unfortunately what led us to Louisiana, because no one else was going to finance the movie.

The Grind

GH: "There was a gentleman's agreement that I would have a few days in New York to shoot, and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. My producer, Holly Wiersma, never really trusted them from the beginning, and one of the reasons she brought Harvey into the picture was they weren't keeping their word on a lot of things, and they basically just kind of hid from everyone. They hid from me, they hid from Holly, they hid from Harvey for three months during the summer. "I was getting furious, because we were trying to get this film out before the end of the year, since we all thought Sienna deserved Oscar consideration. So I kind of took the bull by the horns and showed the picture to Jeff last August, under the condition that if he didn't like it he wouldn't write about it, and he really liked it and wrote that piece called "Derby Girl". That got everybody's attention. That's what suddenly got Harvey, but Harvey didn't have the negative, they hadn't finished turning the negative over to him yet...all kinds of details that I'm really not privy to...finally after a few weeks, LIFT started talking to Harvey again. "By then I was saying "look, we've gotta get this thing done. We've gotta start shooting again in the next two weeks, because I'm not gonna have enough time in the cutting room to get this thing ready for a December qualifying run. [LIFT] were like "yeah, yeah, you don't know what you're talking about"-- MC: "They obviously didn't have any concept of the timeline movies are made on.... GH: "They had no idea what the process was like, and sure enough, I didn't wrap until December 11th. I had about four days to cut all this material. I literally should have taken all the dailies and put them in a blender and say, "okay, this is Factory Girl". MC: "Which would've made it look like an actual Warhol film at that point. (laughs) It'd be six hours long... GH: (laughs) "I mean, I had 30 new pages of material I shot and 35 pages transcribed of documentary footage I shot...over an hour, hour and a half of new material I had to cut in to a movie that was already 90 minutes long. Then balance it, and massage it, let it evolve...

The Big Push

The pressure was to get the movie out the door so they could meet the awards deadlines, but each day brought further and further diminishing returns. MC: "So at the point it was screening.... GH: "BAFTA saw a different cut than the Hollywood Foreign Press saw, than what the National Board of Review saw, than the Academy saw...then even after we made the Academy cut ...this is something no one really knows, even after we were making the Academy screeners, we were still making changes. We knew if we had gotten nominated, we would be disqualifying ourselves. I've never actually told anyone that because we knew knew the film wasn't finished and you know...at some point it was just "pencils up", you know, this film has to be in theatres in two weeks, and...there's really nothing more you can do. The Academy screenings that happened, the run was projected on video with a temp mix. I mean, it was just crazy." "Everybody saw radically different cuts....the rumors started compounding, because it was like "well this person's seen it, and I haven't seen it". When we had the L.A. Critics' screening, it was one version, and when it was time to show the N.Y. Critics, we pulled it. We didn't want to show them the same thing we showed the L.A. Critics, because we had another 48 hours to make it that much better. We were saying it was incrementally 'just so' much better based on the number of hours we had to work on it. MC: "So you could fly back and forth to each coasts to see the editing process on the movie... GH: "It's the closest I've ever been to live television."

Death and Rebirth

With screenings being pulled left and right, and the film's continued editing after most contenders had long since locked final cuts, Factory Girl looked more and more like a trainwreck to be avoided or ignored. Many critics would not see past the controversy swirling around it and used the words "troubled" and "rough" in their reviews, relying on the instinct to pounce at any sign of weakness. The movie opened and made few waves, and come nomination time, Sienna had been out of the running for weeks thanks to the negative buzz. She recently appeared on Letterman in conjunction with promoting Interview with Steve Buscemi. Referring to playing Edie while showing a tattoo, I could swear I detected a hint of disappointment: most people in the audience didn't know what she was talking about. She gave one of the great performances of her or anyone's lifetime, and she looked resigned that no one would ever see it (we'l see about that). I loved so many parts of the movie, I assumed I would have to wait years to see a director's cut where George had the time to breathe in composing the final film. I first got in touch with George thanks to Jeff Wells, who I'd asked about finding a way to see the "Derby Girl Cut", wondering what else was out there. After an introduction, George agreed to let me see what came before the mad rush of 2006. There were new chunks of scenes and longer takes that were nowhere in the then-final cut. Shortly thereafter, he let me know he would soon have big news. GH: "Then what happened was in March, Harvey called me up...I had no idea why. I thought he was going to grumble about the movie not performing well, and he basically said 'hey look we just didn't have the time to get this right, why don't you go back in the cutting room' and he hooked me up with Kevin Tent who had been one of the editors, up in New York. Kevin, you may know, cut Sideways, About Schmidt...basically everything Alexander Payne's done. We spent about a week in a cutting room here in L.A. just massaging the film, and basically...it's not exactly a director's cut, but it's basically what I would have done if I'd had another month in the cutting room. MC: "Given the footage you had-- GH: "Yeah, and I liked a lot of the footage we had, I really did, and it's pretty close to what the movie would have been, because the cut you saw didn't even take into consideration a lot of New York footage, because we hadn't shot it yet by the time I put that one together [in August]. MC: "There were little bits...for example, Mary-Kate Olsen's brief appearance wasn't in the theatrical cut. GH: "It is restored in the new cut. In fact, you're going to see a lot of what we did in that cut on the DVD, and then you're gonna see a lot of stuff you've never seen at all. MC: "Among the many things Page Six and others took to the bank, the sex scene bears mentioning. Between the Derby Cut and the Theatrical Cut, one of the major differences I saw was there in particular. GH: "What happened there was in the original version I was shooting, Hayden didn't want to take his clothes off. I mean, it was January, it was freezing outside. He was like "look, it's obvious it's cold outside, you can see our breath...we're not gonna fuck with all our clothes off outside, it doesn't make sense". He and Sienna felt they did it in a way that was convincing and real in the context of the weather conditions, and I totally signed off on it. There was a sweetness to it and an innocence to it. "Then Harvey's view was that the scene needed to be much more intimate and much more sexual, and I can see that. I like the sex scene as it stands now. I like the old one too, but they happen at different points in the film now. The first one happened right after the conversation on the pier. the much more intimate one happens later after they've gone into the cabin. I think what's nice about the new sex scene is that it happens after her monologue about Minty and Bobby dying while they're sitting near the fireplace, and it serves as a kind of healing process after the loss of her brothers, whereas before it was more of a throwaway. MC: "Something I really liked was her delivery in the new cut... it didn't feel actor-ly, it was just spilling out of her head and she was letting herself become really vulnerable with this guy. GH: "I agree completely."

The Love Story

MC: "Another thing I wanted to get into was how Edie and Andy interact, and whether there's more in there." GH: "There is." MC: "I felt like the theatrical cut...well, he could have come off to some as cold and unsympathetic." GH: "Yeah, I could go off for an hour on that. I can say that...I never thought of Andy Warhol in iconic terms. There are two ways to go in making a biopic: if you approach your subjects iconically, you come at it from the outside in, or, you try to dig down underneath the iconography to the human being below. I was most interested in making a very visceral film that looked at a concentrated period in Andy's life, this point where he was very vulnerable to a woman. "A gay man who would put himself on the line for his love of this straight woman. The gay man who is completely beaten up by his mother emotionally about getting married to a woman and having children, and finally the man who became so bitterly angry and viciously jealous when this woman turned to another man and being abandoned. I mean, he was in love with her, it was the one heterosexual relationship that he had, but he couldn't consummate because that wasn't his sexuality. "I wanted the film to feel like you were present...that you were there at that moment in Warhol's life where he wasn't looked up to and was still seen as a very minor artist. He was extremely petty and small-minded, and Edie elevated his career and lent a public persona to him. "A lot of critics beat me up over that, but a lot of critics don't do their homework and just know Andy Warhol as the second most important artist of the 20th Century, and when they see this petulant child, it doesn't measure up. They're not looking at him contextually at that point in his life. It's almost like critics were expecting this cookie cutter presentation of "look at me, I'm Andy Warhol, the second-most important artist of the 20th Century". "I mean, if you look at I Shot Andy Warhol or Basquiat ...those performances are good, but the characters are written like caricatures. I didn't want Warhol to be a caricature. I knew it'd be controversial and I knew I'd get beaten up over it, and I did. You know, fuck 'em. They're wrong. you can quote me on that MC: "I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier in regards to the casting: either you go the way everyone says you should do it, or you do it the best way for the material. What I couldn't agree with in the reviews I was reading was how all these people were seeing Andy as so cold. I can certainly wrap my head around how they wold perceive him as this detached character the way the theatrical cut portrayed him, but maybe there was some more stuff you didn't get in on the first pass, I dunno--- GH: "No, no, you're right on the money, totally, and Guy Pearce would love you for saying that, because you know, Warhol wasn't cold and mean, he was hurt. He was very vunerable, and what he did was detach himself because he didn't know how to reconcile his feelings. The New York Times said I put it in Freudian terms, and I do." MC: "That was the relationship." GH: "Freud was right. Andy was abandoned by his mother, she didn't accept him on his sexual terms, he had problems with intimacy because of that, and when he got hurt, he just removed itself. It's very clear at the end Andy did feel remorse for Edie. Bridget Berlin played a phone call for me that she recorded between her and Andy around 1969 when Edie was wandering around New York strung out on heroin, and Bridget said "you should do something" and Andy said "she was so beautiful, why would someone so beautiful want to do that to themself?" We took that phone call, and it became the second confessional. "And it's funny, now I'm remembering, that earlier cut I showed Jeff, the one you saw, Guy and I were worried Andy was coming off cold, and he wasn't being represented the way we intended and that's why we shot that second confessional scene there at the end, which does humanize him, and it's based on a real phone call." MC: "The scene where Andy brings Edie home to mom, that's what sympathizes him for me, where this woman has mentally blocked herself from seeing anything other than this girl being who Andy's going to marry." GH: "Edie lived in such fear of abandonment, that it was important to her for everyone to get along. That was part of her naivete, that she thought everybody could just be together and get along. I've been in that situation myself, as the child of divorced parents. That's how Edie and Andy could connect, they were this sort of yin and yang. "They both had different relationships with their parents, but they fit perfectly as opposites because they were both searching for the same thing. then again, they were destined to abandon each other because that's how the cycle works, it's what they're used to on a primal level."

The Final Product

GH: "You know that additional stuff with the psychiatrist? Sienna read all of that off cue cards. It was the last day of shooting...we were so under the gun. I had been up for 24 hours writing new material. She literally sat down in makeup watching the assistant director write her lines on cue cards because she didn't have time to memorize any of it." Watching the movie, you have no trouble believing she could do something like that. Sienna Miller is no mere starlet, she's here to stay. For that matter, Guy Pearce is the real definition of a leading man: the guy who does his job better than everyone else but doesn't rub it in their faces. We did the interview contained in this piece before I'd seen the new cut, and after seeing it, I feel like I've seen the whole thing for the first time. Whether you're a moviegoer who saw the film in its theatrical run or a critic who saw one of myriad awards season cuts, this is another animal entirely. Many portions of the film exist in whichever version you've seen, but this is how they fit together properly. The only version on DVD is the new Unrated Cut. The Theatrical Cut is nowhere to be found, and if it were my first time watching the film I'd prefer to not know it existed in the first place. There are a couple small things I still miss from old versions of the film, but the other changes more than make up for them. It isn't often that the best "extra feature" on a DVD is the film itself, but that's certainly the case here. Don't get me wrong, the extras are excellent, rounding out a disc that is worth buying day-and-date at full price. The reason I've been following this movie & story in particular over the last four months (while uprooting my life in the process) is that even though I recommend countless movies each year to friends and acquiantances, there aren't many that capture this much of my attention. I think this is an Important Film as a learning tool for aspiring directors and actors, and as a sterling example of How to Do a Biopic Right, among other things. I didn't pursue this because Jeff Wells wrote about liking it and he runs the site, or because I'm friends with anyone involved in making the film (I'm no one). I went after what I knew deep down was a good movie waiting for the right time to be seen. Four months ago I thought I'd get a sort of anthropological look at how the film fell apart and what it might have been, and I'm glad to have been wrong. What has emerged at the end of nearly two years of on-again, off-again shooting, rewriting, and re-editing is one of the best films of 2007, regardless of how many versions there have been or how it was painted, cornered, and killed by TV, online, and printed press. If you believe in real cinematic art, this will be one of the few movies that does it right this year.

Trailers like the one for Moliere are made by the studio, but now feel like they're a joke when we hear that "The Shining Revisited" voice. Romain Duris from The Beat That My Heart Skipped plays the French Bard.

Thanks to my compulsive Upcoming DVD-watching, I see that this week saw the release of a Blue Collar Comedy Tour/Blazing Saddles two-pack. The latter they like for all the wrong reasons, primarily that it's a movie where people still get to hate on black people with "those words". The most redneck two-pack...ever.

Have directors lost all their power? Will or can DVD save the auteur? Julie Taymor's Across the Universe is who-knows-where in editing limbo prior to release. Alec Baldwin's Shortcut to Happiness, formerly The Devil & Daniel Webster is seeing release in no major cities and then probably showing up on pay-cable, re-cut and re-titled, with Baldwin's name removed. We've heard the reasons given by studios or executives to directors for not just pushing minor cuts, but slicing gaping wounds in movies over the years: "It's just too long" "It's not commercial" "It won't win any awards" "Audiences won't get this" DVD has provided a reprieve for some that have received this backward handling from the studio machine. The most prominent DVD Director's Complete Version to date is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, lavishly treated to a 3-disc collector's edition by the Criterion Collection. DVD has more frequently over time given a new life to films formerly crippled by studio slashing and burning, most recently for Payback as well as Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven.

Payback and Heaven

It took eight years for the Helgeland's version to get to anyone's screen legally. Bootlegs have floated around since the controversial re-shooting and re-editing of the film took place at the behest of star Mel Gibson. There were pieces of the original movie lodged in the Theatrical Cut I enjoyed but the new edit, Payback: Straight Up, represents the rock-solid picture people knew it was underneath. Everyone should believe by now that Ridley Scott can direct movies capably, right?  Not 20th Century Fox, who chopped 45 minutes or so out of the movie, which died a quick death for what was supposed to be their end-of-summer epic.  It immediately sank the stock of Orlando Bloom and everyone associated with the film, as it was classified by many as something like Cliff's Notes on The Crusades. It was not substantive, not patient enough with the source material, had a female love interest who kind of dropped off the radar after a limited interlude, and the hero spends about three seconds deciding he's gonna go on a dad-gum Crusade by golly. I enjoyed Almost Famous in its theatrical cut, but the Untitled Director's Cut adds enough extra "oomph" to really justify the extra minutes of runtime.  Why shave off time your audience could spend enjoying the movie enough more to recommend it to people rather than tell them to wait for DVD, or much worse...skip it?

The Downside

Then again, there is something to be said for constructive criticism helping shape a movie such that people will respond to it.  Donnie Darko became a massive hit as released, and many die-hard fans prefer the original cut to the director's cut released a couple years ago.  Oliver Stone can't manage to recut Alexander into workable shape no matter how many passes he takes (four at last count?).  I expect he'll change his mind and decide he'll take another swipe and call the next on the For Real, Seriously This Time Folks, I'm Done With the Fucker Now Edition. I don't think there's much to say about George Lucas' retooling of his original 3 Star Wars movies that hasn't already been said, but all the big-time fans seem to just want access to the versions of the flicks they saw way back when.  There was an episode of the Simpsons that urged this, for crying out loud! No one is saying he isn't allowed to recut them and squirt CGI all over them, just that they want the versions they love.  Spielberg almost made the same mistake with the DVD release of E.T., and decided in the end it was best to balance his additions with the movie everyone wanted on DVD. I wonder what Elizabethtown would have been like if Cameron Crowe hadn't been unceremoniously shit upon based on a film festival cut. Who knows when we'll see the version of Southland Tales that Richard Kelly wants us to, or if we'll have to wait. There are some films where the footage is plain lost and gone forever. The Magnificent Ambersons will never be seen again in Orson Welles' original cut, burned in a studio fire. The Other Side of the Wind may be put together by Peter Bogdanovich in something approximating Welles' original version, now that the Shah has let go of his grip on it. Here's hoping. Welles' The Big Brass Ring script came into being thanks to Bogdanovich protege George Hickenlooper bringing it to life. If there's such a thing as karma, George is living proof. 17 July 2007 brings the release of a completely new director's cut of his previously recut, reshot, and rushed out the door Factory Girl, restoring final authorship of the film where it belongs. According to reporting from head honcho Jeff Wells, early December saw last-minute reshoots of the film and literally a few days later, The Weinstein Company pushed a cut in front of the National Board of Review so they could jockey Sienna Miller for an Oscar nomination. The rushed to market cut of the film that arrived in February of this year was good, but not the version the director wanted. Thanks to DVD, the world finally gets the cut that would have come out in cinemas had the film and its production staff been given the proper time to put it together. An advance review of the DVD and interview with the director are forthcoming, so stay tuned.

Through a series of tweaks to my column, I've lost a few long-ish entries that I was holding on to and planning to post today. The blessing and the curse is this: I'm now forced to quickly recompose them in much leaner versions. I'm back for real this time folks. AT&T DSL, overtime at work, and not getting enough sleep are roadblocks no longer.

My pronounced absence has been the result of a chaotic (in the frustrating way) and life-changing (in the resoundingly positive way) relocation from the pit of North Florida to the great wide open of Central Texas. I'm now finally settling in to the laid-back, cool-as-can-be Austin vibe, and I like it a lot. I've got all I need here, the love of my life, a great job with a great company, and every cinema I could ever want to have within driving distance. I'll be back in the saddle again this week, so expect my multiple postings a week to resume shortly. The only tease I have is this: guess what movie about Edie Sedgwick is getting an improved Director's Cut when it hits DVD in July?

Frank Langella has won the role of Nixon in Ron Howard's upcoming film of Frost/Nixon. Michael Sheen, of this week's DVD-released The Queen will also reprise his role from the stage.

Ferrell's at his best when collaborating with Adam McKay, and this brilliant short video is a great example of why that's true.

Sour Jackie Chan's tempestuous rhombus! My lung is sparkling like a tower! This line and many more come from this Will Ferrell Movie Generator.

Nikki Finke reports that Harvey Weinstein is planning on re-releasing the Grindhouse features separately in the US in a few weeks, cut longer as they will be in Europe. This means you have a limited time to see the original configuration as a double feature.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. offers his father's words from 40 years ago in an entry today on the Huffington Post. What does this have to do with film? Nothing, really.

The list of candidates to replace the retiring Bob Barker includes top picks Mark Steines (Entertainment Tonight), George Hamilton, and Mario Lopez. Reuters also lists Todd Newton, Mike Richards (Beauty & the Geek), and John O'Hurley as other guys up for it. Personally, I'd back John O'Hurley. He's got personality, class, and presence. How is he not in the "top three" (no offense to the other guys)? I watched the show with my grandfather Deyoe (my mom's side of the family, raised a family on a farm in Kansas). He watched it every day without fail, as older dudes do. One day when I was four, he had a quiet heart attack toward the end of the day's episode, sitting right next to me. I've never really been able to watch a show of The Price is Right all the way through since. I didn't really know what was going on at the time, but I get this feeling of dread right toward the end. I enjoy watching pieces of it at a time, usually when I'm home visiting my younger brother, who fixates on game shows of any sort. Every time it rolls around to the Showcase Showdown, I have to pop over to another channel. Funny thing is, people will actually poke fun at this when I share it with them. Usually, people think I'm joking or outright lying about it having happened, or they defer to humor because it makes them uncomfortable. I find the people who ask "really?" in a particular tone after I tell them tend to be better friends. Boy this got serious and pensive and QUICK. I need to go find a funny wire story to comment on....

Below is an interview with Mike Binder earlier this week about Reign Over Me and what he's looking to take a crack at next. There's some interesting info in there about the fate and future of The Search for John Gissing and a bookend/companion to The Upside of Anger. MC: Where did the idea come from? Mike Binder: I just wanted to do a piece about the people that still wander the streets after these major tragedies of our time after the 24-hour news spotlight goes on to the next one. They go over to Katrina and the Tsunami and leaves Oklahoma City behind. I remember when 9/11 hit feeling really bad for the people of Oklahoma City because everyone was so... just blanketing all that affection on the survivors and victims' families of 9/11. It was almost like, y'know, well I thought okay, maybe these Oklahoma City people, they're done, they're over, you know? Their time is up in terms of getting help, getting assistance and sympathy. So I thought...I was just thinking about that type of people...the families. You know, it's such a horrible thing to have in your life. MC: Contrary to the way some of the publicity stuff came across, to me it's not a movie that is all about 9/11. Of course, that's the inciting incident to the story, but it's principally about grief and these two guys reconnecting and bonding. The thing I like most about is that at it's core it's about moving on and getting past the grief. Binder: You know, I never saw it as a "9/11 movie". I saw it more as a movie about communication and I just...you know, you can't control how these things come out and what the publicity looks like. You can stick your two cents in there as much as possible but, boy I tell ya, you gotta leave that stuff up the the gods. MC: There's a game that recurs as a theme in a constructive way that I'm not used to seeing in a lot of movies, Shadow of the Colossus. Binder: Isn't it a great game? MC: For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a game where you play as this guy who has to climb these gigantic bad guys and knock them down. Where did that game come into the process? Binder: I wrote a game into the movie. I was just gonna make up a game and then Jeremy Roush, one of our editors, turned me on to Shadow of the Colossus, and I showed it to Sandler, who said "man, this such a good game for this". MC: Some of the footage you got of those guys (Cheadle & Sandler) playing looked like it was just these two guys playing a game and messing around. Something more real than you get in a lot of what comes out these days. Binder: They were. They played off each other really well when I just let them go like that. MC: Something I've tried to convince friends of is that this isn't what they want to call an "Adam Sandler Movie" just because he's in it. At least some of the critical notice Adam's gotten on this, I wish he'd read. He said in the Q&A at SXSW that he doesn't read any of it. Binder: None of it. MC: I understand where he's coming from, but... Binder: I think it's horrible to read any of that stuff, especially for an actor. I mean I hardly read any of it. I like the sites, you know, I like Hollywood Elsewhere, and I like Cinematical, and...uh, Movie City News, and I like Harry Knowles' site, so I can't help but read those because...that's just what I read! But y'know, you can't read the other stuff man. First of all, there's too many opinions...especially about my movies. My movies are the kind that one guy loves, and another guy hates. Which, y'know, I'm kinda proud of. They're not really for everybody...but Sandler is a guy...either you like the smell of Sandler or you don't. There's no inbetween. You know, people hate some of the shit he's done over the years and they love debating him. For him, reading up on the news and how people react to him would be a mistake, because he's stayed an original. You hang out with him, and his comedy is just so natural. MC: That's the thing, I don't think the dramatic strength he's shown here and in Punch Drunk Love didn't show up out of nowhere. It's been there all along, he just hasn't had many opportunities to show it off. I think he's surprised a lot of people with what he can do. Speaking of, did you catch him hosting Letterman? Binder: Yeah, I was there! I was with him, we were all flying around the country together. MC: Cheadle name-checked Stubbs BBQ in Austin. Binder: They tried to go back into this routine they did...we all went to dinner at Stubbs the night I met you (at SXSW) and they were trying to get into this riff that they do a lot, they put these riffs together that are really funny. They couldn't get wind with it on Letterman, y'know what I mean? It was one of those "it was funny if you were there" at Stubbs that night, but they couldn't get the picture in their minds across to the audience. It ended up being a good hit for Stubbs, but it wasn't a great piece of comedy. MC: It was a noble attempt that bombed, but hey, they sang Endless Love, and that saved everything. Binder: That was great, wasn't it? MC: I thought it was hilarious. Binder: It's all over YouTube. MC: What kind of stuff are you looking at putting on the DVD for Reign Over Me? Binder: Oh, the guys did a great improvised song when they did the jam session scene, so we'll put that in there, but I'm not gonna put any deleted scenes in, I'm not gonna do a lot. I don't like doing it anymore, I think it gets in the way of the movie. MC: What's happening with The Search for John Gissing? I've heard stuff about a DVD for that... Binder: I'm gonna release it myself on DVD, right on my website, here in about a month or so. MC: It was another SXSW movie. Binder: Did you see it there? MC: No, I didn't start going until a year or two later, but everyone I know who saw it liked it a lot. Binder: I'll send you one, we're making a bunch of copies. We're shipping them right out of here, just do-it-ourselves. I made the movie and I liked how it came out. It did really well at festivals, but the only distribution I could get was like "well, we'll put in three theatres and then we'll own it forever". I mean, I had a lot of my own money in it. I raised the money independently, and I was almost gonna just go do a couple weeks of reshooting, but then I started doing Mind of the Married Man. I got it all together and did another season of Married Man, and then I left to go do Upside of Anger and I finally just said, you know what? I'm never gonna get those reshoots done, it's sitting on the shelf, so I rewrote it where I woulda done the reshoots, and I called it The Multinationals, and I actually fixed it. I think there's a great premise for a really great international comedy in there, and I'm gonna remake the whole thing completely, with new actors. MC: Is that what you're doing next? Binder: No, I don't think I'm gonna do it next. I think the next thing I'm gonna do is this movie I wrote called The Emperor of Michigan. MC: What's that about? Binder: Well, it's kinda like a bookend companion piece to The Upside of Anger. It's a father and four grown sons, and the father is kind of a lost soul guy and he's been traveling around the world with this young woman...the mother died years ago, and the father just kind of lands back in these four sons' laps. I really like it a lot. I'm gonna shoot it in Michigan...Birmingham, Michigan, where I'm from, and I wrote it for Owen Wilson, but he jumped ship on me. MC: Got anybody lined up for it? Binder: Not yet. The father's more like Pacino's age, someone like that. MC: So hopefully Emperor of Michigan or the John Gissing rework next? Binder:I'd like to do [Emperor] next, but I just finished Reign Over Me basically, and I've been sick as hell, so I don't know. That's what I would like to do next. I want to do some writing, make some money, 'cause you know the way I do these movies, I do them pretty cheap. The Multinationals probably after Emperor of Michigan. I'm gonna put out the Gissing DVD and then I'm gonna put out a book I'm working on called Crafting the Comedy. It's actually a series of four books, the first one I've got finished. It's interviews with screenwriters, just conversations. It's Woody Allen, Judd Apatow, it's got just about everybody that's done any comedy. MC: You looking to do any more acting? Binder: No, I'm not gonna do that anymore. It drives me crazy. You just sit around for all these days on end, and especially after being a director. As a director, you're right in the middle of a storm and your days go by so fast, and then you get on someone else's set when you're acting, and you look at your watch and it's goin' backwards. It's hell. MC: Hey, I know you've got a meeting, I don't want to take up too much more of your time. Binder: Listen, thanks for the interview. MC: Thank you Mike.

Perez Hilton posted the first photos of Depp in costume as Sweeney Todd here.