Reeling

The 2009 Borscht Film Festival launches tonight

By Miamians, for Miamians: That's the credo behind the 2009 Borscht Film Festival, which will unspool short films made entirely in South Florida by local filmmakers at 7 p.m. Saturday at downtown Miami's Gusman Center for the Performing Arts.

Now in its sixth year, the festival was created by students at New World School of the Arts as a showcase for works created by like-minded aspiring filmmakers. This year, the festival joins forces with the Miami World Cinema Center (MWCC) in Wynwood, the not-for-profit film studio designed to nurture and assist the local moviemaking scene.

At Saturday's event, MWCC will premiere CCCV Stories, five commissioned shorts chosen from more than 100 proposals. Each film is set in a specific Miami neighborhood and tells an only-in-Miami story. Among them: Of Metrorails and Megasaurs, in which Norah Solarzano uses live action and experimental animation to tell the story of a little girl's first visit to downtown Miami; Day n Night Out, set in Liberty City and Homestead, written by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Lucas Leyva, is about a young man and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of his life, and Xemoland, Daniel Cardenas' animated tale of a 7-year-old boy who becomes lost in an imaginary world.

All the winners were directed by local filmmakers under the age of 30. The Cinema Center provided initial $5,000 budgets, which the filmmakers parlayed into bigger budgets by working with local vendors and in-kind donations.

"Orson Welles was 24 when he made Citizen Kane," says Patrick deBokay, founder and CEO of the Cinema Center. "The young are the future of the images of tomorrow. Our center, and this festival, are a way to give young people of Miami the passion and the will to make films."

For more information about the 2009 Borscht Film Festival, go here.

Transplanting ''The Road'' to the screen, carefully

Halfway through the filming of The Road, director John Hillcoat made a difficult decision: No matter what, he was going to remain faithful to Cormac McCarthy's novel about a father and son traveling across a post-apocalyptic landscape -- even if that meant shooting a seemingly unfilmable scene involving cannibals and a fat, juicy baby.

``I fought like tooth and nail to film that scene,'' Hillcoat says. ``I argued `This is what we've signed on for, and we're not going to shy away from a single thing.' And I won. We shot the scene. I even kept it in an early cut of the film. And then I fought like hell to take it out. How ironic is that?''

During editing -- a lengthy process that caused the film, which opened Wednesday, to miss its original release date by a year -- Hillcoat discovered that transplanting the essence of McCarthy's novel to the screen was much more complicated than simply treating it as a script, the approach Joel and Ethan Coen used when adapting No Country for Old Men.

``When you physicalize some of the stuff in the book and put it up on the screen, the movie takes on a different dynamic,'' Hillcoat says. ``My goal was always to stay focused on the father and son, and the more of that horrific stuff you have the more you take the spotlight off their emotional journey.

``I think it's true of all films: You have to work with restraint. It's so easy to get carried away. Actors love to chew up scenery sometimes, and directors get lost in special effects and big action scenes. Film is a powerful medium, and I'm always battling to find the right balance and rein in.

``At the end of the day, the movie still has enough of those chilling things: The cannibal house, the road gangs, the collapsing trees. That's enough, I think. To have any more, the movie would have become about something else.''

 Hillcoat had interpreted The Road as a love story between father and son from the moment he first read the novel in galley form. Producer Nick Wechsler (Drugstore Cowboy, The Player, The Time Traveler's Wife) sent the Australian filmmaker the book on the strength of his previous film The Proposition, a violent and unsparing Western set in the Australian outback that Hillcoat made, in part, as homage to an earlier McCarthy novel, Blood Meridian.

``I didn't know about the connection to Blood Meridian until much later,'' Wechsler says. ``But The Proposition very much had a [Sam] Peckinpah quality, and I saw The Road as a Peckinpah movie -- men and women surviving under difficult circumstances, struggling between being civilized and being outlaws. Good versus evil. Very primal stuff. The examination of humanity and morality in The Proposition was very applicable to what I thought we needed for The Road. I had met him and gotten an idea of who he was and how he thought as a filmmaker. So when I read The Road, he was the first person to pop into my head.''

For Hillcoat, the McCarthy novel presented the chance of a lifetime.

 ``To have this kind of material land on your lap was an amazing stroke of luck,'' he says. ``And when I read it, I wasn't prepared for the emotional impact it had on me. The incredible visualization and authenticity of the apocalypse was something I would have expected from McCarthy. But the story was also so poignant and real and profound. The only thing that gave me pause was the practicality of finding a young actor who could play the son -- a boy who had a maturity and openness and didn't have any kind of show-business precociousness, because that would be the kiss of death on this material.''

Hillcoat found his ideal actor in 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee. For the role of his father, Hillcoat turned to Viggo Mortensen, another hardcore McCarthy fan who from the outset understood the project's challenges.

``This is the most faithful adaptation -- not just in spirit, like Lord of the Rings was, but also in word and emotion -- that I have ever seen,'' Mortensen says. ``The challenge for me was to convey the man's interior monologue as it is described in the book without words, because film is a visual medium. You have to trust that if you feel it as an actor, and you're living those thoughts, they will come across to the audience.

``The man is thinking about his wife all the time and living with the accumulated regret of his life experience. Kids tend to accept where they are more than adults do, no matter how hard their circumstances are. Adults regret and fret about the future. To get all that stuff across was much harder than the physical demands of shooting in the cold and the wet.''

Hillcoat says he felt the mounting pressure of doing justice to McCarthy's novel after the book won the Pulitzer Prize and caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, whose recommendation turned it into a bestseller. After the original release date had come and gone, rumors swirled that the movie was in trouble and its relatively unknown director in over his head. But Hillcoat says the delay was the best thing that could have happened.

``I knew every rifle was going to be aimed at me,'' he says. ``That's part and parcel in adapting a book that is revered. But the original release date was over-ambitious and unreachable. It was a very long and delicate editing process to get the balance of the flashbacks right, the presence of the cannibals and the pressure upon the man and the boy to constantly survive. We had all sorts of issues with birds flying into the background of shots that required special effects to remove them.

``My job was to stay focused on the task at hand and concentrate on making the best film we possibly could,'' Hillcoat says. ``We could have released the film earlier this year, but it's really not a summer movie. And I can't think of a more auspicious date than Thanksgiving for this film. We're getting something fully realized as opposed to rushed and half assed.''

Holiday movie preview

I'm reposting the holiday movie preview that ran in today's paper here, for easy reference. There are at least two films I really want to see opening every weekend between now and the end of the year. And I'm finally starting to get a little stoked for Avatar.

DEC. 4

Antichrist: Just in time for the holidays comes Lars Von Trier's ruckus-causing scandal about a husband and wife (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who deal with the death of their young son by holing up in a cabin in the woods and doing exceedingly bad things to each other. I've seen Antichrist and can confirm that little Hostel punk Eli Roth has got nothing on Von Trier. Chaos reigns, indeed.

Armored: Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne and Fred Ward are among the employees of an armored-transport security firm who cook up the ultimate scam: Rip off the company, and no one gets hurt. But everybody knows there's no such thing as the perfect crime. Nimrod Antal (Vacancy) directs the mayhem.

Brothers: Danish director Susanne Bier's acclaimed 2004 drama gets a Hollywood remake. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a man who comforts the wife (Natalie Portman) of his older brother (Tobey Maguire), a U.S. Marine reportedly killed in Afghanistan. But the reports turn out to be wrong, and after the missing soldier returns home, the brothers must readjust their lives. Jim Sheridan (In America, The Boxer) directs from a script by David Benioff (The 25th Hour).

Everybody's Fine: Robert DeNiro attempts a role he hasn't played in ages -- that of an ordinary man -- in this story about a widower who heads out on a road trip to reconnect with his three grown and estranged children (Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale and Drew Barrymore).

Transylmania: This comedy is about a group of crazy college students who sign up for a semester abroad in Transylvania, where the kegs aren't filled with beer. Haven't these kids ever watched Dracula?

Up in the Air: Director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking, Juno) cements his reputation as one of Hollywood's best young filmmakers with this superb drama about a man (George Clooney) who hopes to rack up 10 million frequent-flyer miles as he travels from city to city, helping companies downsize their staffs and telling people they are being laid off. As of this writing, Up in the Air is my favorite movie of the year, although I still have a lot of films left to see.

DEC. 11

Invictus: Clint Eastwood directs the story of how the newly elected Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) used the 1995 Rugby World Cup as a vehicle to unite his country. Matt Damon co-stars as the captain of South Africa's rugby team. Sure, the movie sounds corny and formulaic, but the Eastwood factor cannot be discounted.

Me and Orson Welles: Richard Linklater (Slacker) directs this adaptation of Robert Kaplow's novel about the behind-the-stage shenanigans during a Mercury Theatre staging of Julius Caesar directed by a young, pre-Citizen Kane Orson Welles (Christian McKay) in 1937. Ben Chaplin, Claire Danes and Zac Efron are among the performers joining the romantic mischief offstage.

The Princess and the Frog: The Walt Disney Co. tries a radical experiment -- hey, let's make a cartoon that's not computer-animated! -- with this old-school, pen-and-ink 'toon inspired by the classic fairy tale transplanted to Jazz-Age New Orleans and boasting the first African-American heroine in Disney animation history. Directed by The Little Mermaid team of Ron Clements and John Musker.

DEC. 18

Avatar: James Cameron's long-awaited return to the director's chair since 1997's Titanic has already been so hyped the movie feels as if it came out a year ago. Cameron promises you've never seen anything like this adventure, a hybrid of live action and computer animation centering on a war between humanoid aliens on a distant planet. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez co-star. See it in IMAX 3D, or don't see it at all.

Did You Hear About the Morgans?: Hotshot Manhattanites (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) whose marriage is on the brink witness a mob hit and are relocated for their protection to a tiny town in Wyoming. But just because they are running for their lives doesn't mean they can't still hate each other.

DEC. 23

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel: The most annoying computer-animated film ever made now has a sequel with the most annoying title ever conceived.

DEC. 25

A Single Man: Befitting a year that saw so many movies about fashion, famed designer Tom Ford makes his filmmaking debut by writing and directing this drama about a man (Colin Firth) reeling from the sudden death of his partner. Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult co-star.

Broken Embraces: Writer-director Pedro Almodovar's latest melodrama tells of a former filmmaker (Lluis Homar), blinded in a car crash 14 years before, who has become a screenwriter. News of the death of one of his former producers rekindles memories of his affair with an aspiring actress (Penelope Cruz).

It's Complicated: Nancy Meyers (Something's Gotta Give) wrote and directed this comedy about a divorced woman (Meryl Streep) dating an architect (Steve Martin) who, after a night of dinner and drinks, finds herself falling all over again for her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin, whose performance has generated early Oscar buzz).

The Lovely Bones: Director Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) takes on another beloved bestseller with fantasy overtones -- Alice Sebold's novel narrated by a murdered little girl (Saoirse Ronan) who looks down from heaven and watches her family (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon) mourn her death and deal with the void she left. Happy holidays!

Nine: Daniel Day-Lewis is the world-famous film director having a crisis of conscience, and Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard and Judi Dench are among the women in his life in director Rob (Chicago) Marshall's adaptation of the smash Broadway musical loosely inspired by the Fellini classic 8 ½.

Sherlock Holmes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stuffy, pipe-smoking literary detective gets a 21st century makeover in director Guy (Snatch) Ritchie's action-heavy, big-budget reimagining starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as his trusty assistant Watson.

The Young Victoria: Jean-Marc Vallee (C.R.A.Z.Y.) directs this period drama centering on the turbulent early reign of Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt) and her affair with Prince Albert (Rupert Friend). Merry Christmas, Anglophiles!

The Shining Part 2?

A sequel to The Shining sounds like a terrible and contrived idea to me. I don't really care what Danny Torrance is up to as a fortysomething, or how his psychic powers have developed over the years. One of the great things about the book is that Danny's clairvoyance turns out to be a kind of MacGuffin - an excuse, really, for the ghosts that haunt the Overlook Hotel to cut loose and seriously mess with the minds of the poor Torrance family.

Stephen King is a radically different writer today than he was back in 1977. Even though I enjoyed his latest novel, his books no longer have the snap and pace that made reading The Shining such a compulsive experience (I don't know anybody who didn't devour that novel when they read it). Besides, let's face it: The Shining doesn't really belong to King anymore anyway. It hasn't, for decades.

Now and forever, The Shining belongs to Stanley Kubrick, whose film adaptation left such a seminal footprint, the movie has grown to eclipse the book that spawned it. Everybody knows Danny's encounter with a rotting corpse happens in room 237 (like in the movie) and not room 217 (like in the book). Everybody knows the Overlook's garden contains a giant maze (like in the movie) and not topiary animals (like in the book).

Even a passing mention of The Shining makes me think immediately of Wendy Carlos' sinister score - music laden with all sorts of ominous things to come - and the film's opening credits, which manage to make helicopter vistas of a scenic mountain range seem scary. And I haven't even mentioned Jack Nicholson's performance as Jack Torrance, one of the most iconic pieces of acting ever committed to film.

I don't see how anything King could come up with anything striking enough to overcome our memories of Kubrick's Shining, which made some fairly radical departures from the book and has become the de facto version of the story. Even King's proposed title for the sequel, Doctor Sleep, already feels like a let-down.

During the book reading in Toronto where he discussed the sequel, King said he wasn't completely committed to the new novel. "Maybe if I keep talking about it I won’t have to write it." Keep talking, Stephen. And leave The Shining alone.

  

''New Moon'' already breaking box office records

 According to early reports, The Twilight Saga: New Moon grossed nearly $28 million at 12:01 a.m.  screenings around the country held this morning. If that number holds, New Moon would edge out the previous two midnight-screening record holders, Harry Potter and the Blood Prince, ($22.2 million) and The Dark Knight ($18.4 million).

Twilight grossed $191.4 million in the U.S. and a near-identical $192.2 million around the rest of the world. I will be interested to see how much New Moon winds up earning, considering the first film was so much better, and sequels rarely make as much as the original hits that spawned them.

Cormac McCarthy talks about Hollywood and ''The Road''

 Cormac McCarthy doesn't grant many interviews, but the Wall Street Journal's John Jurgensen got him to talk about The Road and the film adaptation last week.

Unlike his appearance on Oprah a couple of years ago, when he seemed uncomfortable and reticent to be there, McCarthy was relaxed and chatty this time, praising The Road director John Hillcoat for capturing the book's spirit, dismissing the widely-held belief that his novel Blood Meridian is unfilmable and revealing a few details about his upcoming book, which will focus on a female protagonist (unusual for McCarthy).

Here are a couple of excerpts from Jurgensen's excellent Q&A:

WSJ: Why don't you sign copies of "The Road"

CM: There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. No, those are the only signed copies of the book.

WSJ: How many did you have?

CM: 250. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, "I have a signed copy of the 'The Road,'" and I say, "No. You don't."

WSJ: What was your relationship like with the Coen brothers on "No Country for Old Men"?

CM: We met and chatted a few times. I enjoyed their company. They're smart and they're very talented. Like John, they didn't need any help from me to make a movie.

WSJ: "All the Pretty Horses" was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out?

CM: It could've been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can't do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.

JH: Didn't you start "No Country for Old Men" as a screenplay?

CM: Yeah, I wrote it. I showed it to a few people and they didn't seem to be interested. In fact, they said, "That will never work." Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn't take long. I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for Best Screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, "Well, I didn't do anything, but I'm keeping it."

Here comes ''Precious''

The first movie Lee Daniels directed, the 2005 drama Shadowboxer about a terminally ill assassin and her unusual relationship with her partner in crime, was largely derided by critics and virtually ignored by audiences, grossing less than $1 million worldwide.

So when Daniels, who had also produced other films about profoundly dysfunctional families (Monster's Ball, The Woodsman), set out to try again, he kept expectations low. Even though his second film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, is adapted from a highly lauded and widely read book, Daniels didn't believe many people would turn out to see it.

``I basically made this movie for my mother and her demographic,'' Daniels says. ``She was always telling me `Why are you making movies about pedophiles and killers? Why can't you make movies like Tyler Perry?' And I said `OK, Mom, I will.' So I was really thinking about an African-American audience when I embarked on this. I really didn't expect it to go anywhere but straight to DVD. I expected my mom and her churchfolk to embrace this marriage of my art into an urban setting. And it really was made primarily for her.''

Shot for a modest $10 million with a first-time actress in the lead, the movie, which opens Friday, tells the story of Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), an overweight, borderline illiterate 16-year-old pregnant with her second child by her father and living with a monstrously abusive mother (Mo'Nique) who belittles and exploits her.

Daniels says he was so awestruck by Sapphire's novel, published in 1996, that he spent eight years trying to convince the author to allow him to turn the book into a movie. But the hard work really began after Daniels secured the film rights.

``The book was not filmable, and it was not easy,'' says screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, who shaped the novel's first-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative into a story about Precious' painful and gradual emergence from her state of shellshocked detachment. ``When Lee asked me to adapt it, he told me it would be difficult not only in terms of translating it to film but in terms of the content, the language. It's written in her voice, someone who is barely literate.

Read the rest of my interview with the makers of Precious here.

Stephen King's ''Under the Dome'' headed for HBO

I'm two-thirds of the way through Under the Dome, Stephen King's massive - and excellent - new book, which I'll be reviewing in next Sunday's Herald. The novel, which came out Tuesday, clocks in at a whopping 1,072 pages and is so big that it includes a map and a list of the massive cast of characters (including a "Dogs of Note" section). 

I've been a faithful reader of King ever since I read The Shining at the age of 12, but it had been a long time since I enjoyed one of his novels as much as I am enjoying this one. Don't let the heft of the thing intimidate you, either: The novel moves like lightning and is as compulsively readable as King's old-school classics such as The Stand, Salem's Lot and, yes, The Shining.

Unlike some of his other books that have been forced into flimsy movies and TV mini-series, Under the Dome would be a natural for a film adaptation, although a two-hour running time obviously wouldn't cut it. In a book signing appearance earlier this week, King let it slip out that Under the Dome will actually be turned into an HBO mini-series, which would be the ideal format for an adaptation. Check out the clip below of King's Q&A at Wal-Mart (he mentions the HBO series at around the 2:30 mark).

Scientists conclude I am the most reliable and trustworthy movie critic in the entire universe

Scientists at NASA, in collaboration with research analysts at Miller-McCume, have crunched a decade's worth of stats and numbers and reached the following conclusion:

If you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist but can only read one review, you might prefer Rene Rodriguez, whose low standard deviation from the mean review score makes him very nearly a living critical average.

 In other words, instead of combing the Internet for hours each Friday to get a consensus of what critics think about the week's new movies, just come here and read what I have to say, because I am never ever wrong about a film, ever. (Well, OK, I may have overrated Reality Bites just a tad. But I was young and impressionable then.)

The brainiac David Sparks, who conducted the study, took the 25 most prolific movie reviewers from Metacritic.com (and not Rottentomatoes,com, which treats crap like this as criticism) and created a chart based on two factors: The favorability with which the critics rate the films and the degree to which their reviews tend to agree with other critics.

Here is the chart detailing Sparks' findings (click on it to make it bigger and readable). Among other interesting tidbits: Michael Wilmington (formerly of the Chicago Tribune) is the easiest-to-please critic on the list, giving more positive reviews than anyone else (Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was second). The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov was deemed the biggest grouch.

The San Francisco's Chronicle Mick LaSalle was the biggest contrarian, meaning if everybody likes it, he'll probably hate it. I wonder where the late, great Pauline Kael would have ranked on a chart like this one.

The study, which I first read about on the newly revived (and consistently great) Movieline.com, also revealed the films starring Elijah Wood have garnered the best reviews of any other actor from 1998-2008, although that may have something to do with the fact that he's only made five or so pictures, and three of them were Lord of the Rings movies. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viggo Mortensen (there's that LOTR factor again) came in second and third.

 Reading this study for some reason reminded me of an encounter I had walking out of the former AMC Fashion Island after a screening of Saving Private Ryan. This seemingly sane and nice-looking woman came up to me and said "You were so wrong about Titanic. That movie was the biggest piece of s--t I have ever seen in my life!" This was, of course, after Titanic had already won 820 Oscars and grossed $9.5 trillion worldwide, so the backlash had kicked in.

Then the woman, who was growing increasingly agitated even though I was just nodding politely and not saying a word, proceeded to go on a rant about how she always made a point of not going to see any film that I liked, because she knew if I thought it was good, that could only mean it was bad.

 "Well, at least I'm consistent," I replied, which only seemed to make her angrier. "Also, you must have really hated the movie we just saw, because I thought it was pretty great." At this point, she called me a very bad word and stormed out of the theater.

From now on, I'm carrying a copy of this report everywhere I go, so I can whip it out the next time I get accosted by an angry reader.

 

 

 

 

The Church of Scientology loses one of its celebrity members

 Paul Haggis, the Oscar-winning writer-director of Crash, has atoned a bit for that wretched movie by ending his 35-year association with the Church of Scientology in spectacular scorched-earth fashion.

Haggis wrote a fiery letter of resignation to the organization's national spokesman Tommy Davis (son of actress Anne Archer), blasting the church's support of California's anti-gay rights legislation Proposition 8. Haggis also accused the church of forcing his wife to sever all ties with her parents - even preventing them from seeing their grandchild - because they had quit Scientology 25 years earlier.

This is a lovely retired couple, never said a negative word about Scientology to me or anyone else I know – hardly raving maniacs or enemies of the church. In fact it was they who introduced my wife to Scientology.

Although it caused her terrible personal pain, my wife broke off all contact with them. I refused to do so. I’ve never been good at following orders, especially when I find them morally reprehensible.

For a year and a half, despite her protestations, my wife did not speak to her parents and they had limited access to their grandchild. It was a terrible time.

 
 Haggis was especially peeved when he came across a clip of a CNN interview in which Davis categorically denied that the policy of separation - forcing members to cut off all ties with specific friends and relatives - existed within the church. "To see you lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying about?" Haggis wrote. "I was left feeling outraged, and frankly, more than a little stupid."

The great majority of Scientologists I know are good people who are genuinely interested in improving conditions on this planet and helping others. I have to believe that if they knew what I now know, they too would be horrified. But I know how easy it was for me to defend our organization and dismiss our critics, without ever truly looking at what was being said; I did it for thirty-five years.

And so, after writing this letter, I am fully aware that some of my friends may choose to no longer associate with me, or in some cases work with me. I will always take their calls, as I always took yours. However, I have finally come to the conclusion that I can no longer be a part of this group. Frankly, I had to look no further than your refusal to denounce the church’s anti-gay stance, and the indefensible actions, and inactions, of those who condone this behavior within the organization. I am only ashamed that I waited this many months to act. I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology.

I still can't stand Crash, but I think Haggis is a bad-ass now. You can read the full text of his letter here. There has been no response on the creepy Scientology website yet, but some kind of face-saving rebuttal must be forthcoming after Haggis' letter and last week's Nightline debacle, during which Davis stormed off camera after Nightline's Martin Bashir calmly and politely asked him “Do you believe that a galactic emperor called Xenu brought his people to earth 75 million years ago and buried them in volcanoes?”

The Nightline interview meltdown starts at the 3:40 mark in the clip below. Can you imagine if Tom Cruise ever quit Scientology in such a public manner as Haggis did? It would be game over, guaranteed.

 

 

There Will Be Shrieks: ''Twilight: New Moon'' cast members coming to Dadeland Mall

 How do you stoke the hype on a movie millions of people are already clamoring to see? By not screening the film for the press until the last possible second, forcing most newspaper movie critics to race back to their laptop and pound out their review in 20 minutes. This guarantees those critics will be in a cranky mood when they see your film, because they know you're doing this on purpose. And for the record, I really liked the first movie (shut up).

Wait, did I just say all that? Sorry, it just slipped out. What I meant to say is that Alex Meraz and Kiowa Gordon, two of the members of the Quileute Wolf Pack from New Moon, will be appearing at Miami's Dadeland Mall on Wednesday Nov. 11 to perform their former top 10 smash Where Do You Go? for a meet-and-greet with fans and a Q&A session about the film.

 

I know what you're thinking: Why do we get these nobodies instead of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart? Because Pattinson and Stewart have payed their dues and don't do mall tours anymore. Meraz (he's on the far left), who plays Paul, and Gordon (far right), who plays Embry Call, may not be very famous yet. But remember that last year, when Taylor Lautner signed autographs at the Shops at Sunset mall, nobody knew who he was either. And look at him now.

Diehard Twilight fanatics who line up at Hot Topic or Nordstrom stores at 8 a.m. on Oct. 31 will get a VIP pass granting them "access to a special event" with the two wolf dudes when they visit Dadeland. For more information, go here or here or here.   

The worst horror movies of all time

 The editors at Moviefone have compiled an amusing list of the 25 worst horror movies of all time. Comprising a list like that is a Sisyphean endeavor, because no other movie genre is stuffed with more turkeys than horror. But the list includes some unexpected choices, such as Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror (no. 20 on the list), "with 'cribmaster' Snoop Dogg starring as the Hound of Hell."

The list includes lots of certifiably wretched dogs. Uwe Boll's House of the Dead (no. 16) has to rank as one of the worst films of any kind ever made. Feardotcom (no. 22) is the kind of soul-crushingly bad that sours you on watching movies for at least a month. And Neil LaBute's disastrous remake of The Wicker Man (no. 9) is so awesomely awful that I think of it as a comedy more than a horror film ("Not the bees! Noooo, not the bees!").

But I disagree with some of the other choices, like Lawrence Kasdan's adaptation of the Stephen King novel Dreamcatcher (no. 7), which I am aware everyone hates (it was such a flop, Kasdan hasn't directed another movie since), but I rather enjoy for the sheer loopiness of the plot.

I also think their choice for the number-one slot, Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween, is a little exaggerated. Yeah, the movie doesn't really work, and I've heard his version of Halloween II is even worse. But I can think of a thousand other well-known horror films that are infinitely worse. Like this one. Or this one. Or this, which is one of my favorite bad movies of all time.

Check out Moviefone's complete list here.

''Wild Things'' score at the box office, while ''Paranormal Activity'' breaks out all over the place

 Despite all the creative battles and hand-wringing that went on during its production, director Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are caused a rumpus at the box office this weekend, grossing $32 million and beating out the Jamie Foxx-Gerard Butler vigilante drama Law Abiding Citizen, which earned $21 million.

Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity grossed a whopping $20 million in its first weekend of wide release, even though it is only playing on 760 screens nationwide. Looks like director Oren Peli's decision to consult the Blair Witch Project marketing geniuses in order to get the word out about his $15,000 movie has paid off handsomely.

I still think Blair Witch was much scarier, but I will confess to having some horrific nightmares the night I saw Paranormal Activity. Something having to do with a scary cat. Coincidence or not?

Here's a good read on the original, pre-Spielberg ending of Paranormal. Turns out there were two of them. I like the second alternate ending best. The one they went with is way too Ring-ish.

The secret Blu-rays you may not know about

The practice of releasing movies on Blu-ray format exclusively to one retail chain or another appears to be gathering steam. Highdefdigest reports copies of The Green Mile on Blu-ray magically appeared on Best Buy store shelves this week, without so much as a peep of promotion from distributor Warner Bros.

 The studio took the same approach a couple of weeks ago when it quietly released Gremlins on Blu-ray, which you can't buy on Amazon or anywhere else online, but you can pick up right now at a Target near you. Same goes for the no-frills Blu-ray release of The Wizard of Oz: If you want the movie but don't feel like shelling out $85 for a mammoth box packed with Oz tchotchkes, you can buy a Blu-ray of the movie by itself for $35 at Target.

When Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen hits Blu-ray next week, the only way to watch the cut of the film created for IMAX (featuring a few extra scenes and some "opened-up" sequences in IMAX format, a la The Dark Knight) will be to buy the disc at Wal-Mart. Every other version of the Blu-ray will present the film in its standard theatrical cut.

I understand these exclusive deals with retailers are probably pretty lucrative for the studios. But when you're trying to make a niche format break through to the mainstream, doesn't it make more sense to make all your titles available everywhere, so people can buy them wherever and whenever they want? 

Leon Ichaso's ''Paraiso'' returns to Miami

 If you missed Leon Ichaso's provocative Cuban exile drama Paraiso (Paradise) when it made its world premiere at the Miami Film Festival in March, you'll have a second chance to catch it during the Miami Beach Cinematheque's A Weekend With Leon Ichaso running Oct. 23-25.

Shot entirely in Miami using local actors and crew for a measly $30,000, Paraiso centers on a Cuban balsero who encounters the dark side of the American dream on Miami's mean streets.Here's the story I wrote about the movie in March.

Paraiso will be shown at 8 p.m. Oct. 23 and 7 and 9:15 p.m. Oct. 24-25. The always-outspoken Ichaso, who is equally adept at talking about Cuban assimilation or low-budget filmmaking, will introduce each screening and participate in a post-film Q&A.

For more information, visit www.mbcinema.com Check out the Paraiso trailer below.