Will Miyazaki's "Ponyo" ever hit U.S. theaters?

Actually, the most depressing news out there is that Jackie Earle Haley has signed on to play Freddie Krueger in Platinum Dunes' remake of "A Nightmare on Elm Street." Digest that for a second.

Now, on paper, Mr. Haley as Freddie isn't that much of a stretch. He certainly has the manic look down, but any news about what Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes company is up to just turns my stomach and makes it do flips.

Remaking fun movies like "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare" aren't exactly bold artistic moves, but neither are they really high cinematic crimes. But the Platinum Dunes folks have no plans to stop there; they've got real classics in their sights too.

Further along is a "retelling" (the dirty little euphemism used to claim you're not making a "remake") of Hitchcock's "The Birds." I'm still hoping this will never happen, but assuming it does it will star Naomi Watts in Tippi Hedren's iconic role and have Martin Campbell of "Casino Royale" fame as its director.

Even more insidious but still in pre-infancy stage (if that's possible) is the company's plan to remake what remains my single favorite horror film, Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." If anyone out there has the power to stop all this madness, please do!

OK, enough of that. This was supposed to be all about Hayao Miyazaki, a subject which makes me much, much happier.

It seems that not only does his new film, "Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea" (to be retitled simply "Ponyo") finally have a U.S. release date of Aug. 14 (more than a friggin' year after it debuted in Japan!), but it also has some kids in the lead voice roles that just might give it enough cache to even open in my little corner of the world.

Ensuring that Billy Ray Cyrus will apparently be able to live off the talents of his kids forever, it seems there's another little Cyrus running around, named Noah, and he has landed the titular role of the goldfish princess who just wants to be human. Just in case that's not enough Disney for you, it seems that yet another of those Jonas kids, someone named Frankie, will voice the role of Sosuke, the young boy who befriends Ponyo.

I really have no idea who any of those people are, but if that's what it takes to finally bring this to American movie theaters, bring it on. Among the adults involved in this are Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey and Liam Neeson.

And in even better news that only impacts, well, me, I'm off to see "Adventureland" today at 2:15, and I'm fairly confident it's just going to rule. Peace out.

Should you watch the "Watchmen"? A conditional vote for yes

Before I get into any of that, I just wanted to say that it's simply nice to see that Andrés Galarraga, a k a the Big Cat, is still alive and looking very healthy. He was always easily one of my favorite Major League Baseball players, and was diagnosed with cancer way back in 2000, so it was just great to see him on the bench managing the Venezuelan team in the World Baseball Classic (and thank God for baseball of any kind!)

OK, enough of that. Here today, as it has been for much of the past month, it's all about Zack Snyder's "Watchmen." And now, after having sat on this since about 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon and let it stew around in my mind, I'm ready to call it at least a qualified success (despite its rather underwhelming $55 million opening.)

The main complaint I've heard about Snyder's work is that he stuck way too close to the comic book script and really just made a paint-by-numbers version for the big screen, but I don't really buy it. With "300" he certainly took all of Frank Miller's palate and tone to tell the tale of the battle of Thermopylae, but given the revered nature of what he was working with here and the big input of "Watchmen" co-creator Dave Gibbons on the set, I thought he really put his own pop sensibility on this story. AND PLEASE, BE WARNED, I WILL BE UNABLE TO DO THIS WITHOUT MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS, SO IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FLICK YET OR JUST DON'T WANT TO KNOW, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER.

It starts out right away with the deliriously entertaining opening credits, set to the tune of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changing." I laughed out loud when Silhouette stole that V-J Day kiss and reeled from the sucker punch of her murder only seconds later. For me at least, this spell lasted throughout the flick, even as the other facet of Snyder's style, the need to spatter as much blood as David Cronenberg at his bloodiest, came to the fore.

And it's certainly true that one of the many directors who have circled this project through the years, Terry Gilliam, probably would have taken more chances with this, but I'd have to imagine that's exactly why he and others failed to follow through on it to the finish. Just as the "Watchmen" comic book was all about the good and bad consequences of compromise, so is the movie itself, and it comes down mostly on the good side of things in my book.

What transferred my love of the comic most directly to the big screen is that the movie handled two of my favorite sequences just about perfectly. The first is Dr. Manhattan's TV interview and subsequent trip to Mars. Snyder doesn't have the space to play all the time games that Moore did in the comic, but he still manages to make it hit hard when Janey Slater pulls off that wig and makes the desolate Mars scape the ultimate spot for Dr. Manhattan's intentional isolation. It certainly helps that, as he tells the hero's tale, Billy Crudup manages to capture all the soul hidden behind that vacant stare (even as he does, be warned, dangle his blue wang-dang-doodle quite a bit.)

The second thing it nailed just about perfectly was also driven by spot-on performances by Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and - to a lesser extent - the always-welcome Danny Woodburn as the diminutive Big Figure. Haley just simmers with all the right snarling rage once he's unmasked as Walter Kovacs, and I just had to smile the first time that Woodburn (a k a Kramer's tiny co-conspirator Mickey Abbott on "Seinfeld") came around the corner to confront him in his cell.

So then, what didn't work? Well, for me, it was mainly one scene Snyder left in but botched and two that he almost entirely left out (and in the second case just should have altogether.)

The first, and the single worst scene of the entire movie, was the almost completely passion-free love scene between Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Specter II (Malin Ackerman.) Given the amount of skin it shows (and yes, as the Comedian might say, it certainly does prove in Ms. Ackerman's case that those are some good genes), it's a curiously joyless affair, made all the worse by the attachment of a version of Leonard Cohen's great song "Hallelujah" to it. Just an all-around travesty.

And the most glaring omission would have to be the death of Hollis Mason, a moving moment in the comic book that's replaced in the flick by a random encounter between Nite Owl II, Silk Spectre II and a street gang. But the most grating of all was the inclusion of the newsstand owner and comic book reader for just a split second before they are obliterated. The two of them offer a running commentary on the end of the world that drives a good portion of Moore's tale, so to waste them in such a way on screen was just a total spit in the face.

So, given all that, what tipped the scales to make this one at least a conditional winner in my book? Well, Alan Moore fans can squawk all they want, but for me it was the ending (AND ONCE AGAIN, IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT, PLEASE DO NOT READ ON AND THEN TRY TO BLAME ME LATER.)

To me, it kept all of Moore's big ideas about compromise vs. absolutism intact while just improving on the overall story. Sure, it would have been fun to see the giant squid appear, but would you really want to add another 45 minutes to the flick while Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) explained just how he managed to cook that up? As it is, having the attacks instead mirror the energy of Dr. Manhattan just perfectly amplifies the God vs. man angle, and makes that fact that it's the good Dr. who finally has to encounter Rorschach all the more compelling.

In the end, I'm glad that in this case Snyder's compromises won out over Moore's absolutism so this movie could be made in the first place, and with my Grand/Amstar Cinemas Mystery Shopper pass in hand I'll probably go see it again this coming weekend (since there seems to just be nothing of any merit at all opening.) And in a rather tangential closing, here's a clip of the only performance of "Hallelujah" that can even come close to rivaling Jeff Buckley's, by the singer/songwriter Allison Crowe. Enjoy, have a perfectly passable Monday, and please let me know if you think I'm just all wrong about Snyder's flick. Peace out.

Oscars on the brain, and Watchmen, Watchmen everywhere!

I guess the biggest non-Oscar news out there today is that Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro and Owen Wilson are set to star in "Little Fockers," which will of course revolve around the youngins. Hardly a high-brow movie, but I always at least give it a chance when De Niro goes for comedy.

But here today, it's all about the Oscars, a return to lists and - of course - "Watchmen"! Please feel free to stick around until the end for what I think are the first three clips of actual footage from the movie.

I'm set to record an Oscars video presentation (are those "vodcasts"? I have no idea) with my co-worker Phillip Ramati this afternoon, so they're definitely on my brain, and over my morning coffee I was perusing Wikipedia's list of all the Best Picture winners and nominees (and hoping it's accurate), which prompted these few brief thoughts:

Biggest snub

This is, of course, completely subjective, and for my purposes I restricted it to movies that actually were nominated rather than the almost infinitely broader category of worthy movies that didn't even get the nod.

In the former set, three jumped out at me, with the last one being the most amazing slight in my book. First up is "Dances With Wolves" over "Goodfellas" in 1990. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not sure I've ever seen Kevin Costner's film in its entirety, but I did try at least once. I have, however, probably seen Scorsese's gangster epic at least 10 times on DVD, so I think I can say with authority that this was just the definition of a dis.

Next up is "Forrest Gump" over "Pulp Fiction" in 1994, probably the biggest gap in quality between a winner and a nominee I can think of. I've made my hatred for "Forrest Gump" crystal clear here before, and while I know in my heart that, say, "Norbit" or "The Hottie or the Nottie" are probably worse movies, I still think "Gump" stands the test of time as the worst "good" movie of all. Along with the love of Zemeckis' flick, this vote just showed that the Oscars really weren't ready for something as innovative as Quentin Tarantino's breakthrough flick.

But the biggest goof in my mind goes back much further, all the way to 1939. Now, I have seen "Gone With the Wind," albeit not until it was re-released in theaters sometime in the 1990s. I really liked the overall experience, complete with intermission, so I can't knock anyone who is a devoted fan of the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's grand Southern saga, but I still have to ask how in the world could this have beaten out "The Wizard of Oz"? Like most American kids of my era, there were two movies that we all gathered around the TV for year after year as events: "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Sound of Music." The former is still the one movie that I think would cause me to resort to actual rather than just threatened violence if I ever heard of plans for a big-screen remake, and for flicks that combine wild storytelling with sheer artistry and innovation, they just don't get much better at all. Hence, the winner in this category for me, but please feel free to add any others that jump out at you.

Favorite Best Picture winners

Nothing terribly surprising here, especially in the confirmation that the mid-1970s were indeed the golden age of American cinema, but just thought I'd share my 10 favorites anyway, arranged only by order:

1949: "All the King's Men"
1954: "On the Waterfront"
1965: "The Sound of Music"
1972: "The Godfather"
1974: "The Godfather Part II"
1975: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
1976: "Rocky"
1977: "Annie Hall"
1987: "The Last Emperor"
And, finally, 2007: "No Country for Old Men"

Favorite Best Picture losers

This, of course, took a bit longer, but it's always better to complain about who got hosed rather than congratulate the winner, right? I was gonna try to keep this to 10 also, but it soon became clear that would be impossible. So, here goes, my favorite nominees who failed to take home the big prize:

1939: "The Wizard of Oz"
1956: "The King and I"
1961: "The Hustler"
1962: "To Kill a Mockingbird" (probably my favorite movie of all time, but I suppose you can't gripe too much, since it lost out to "Lawrence of Arabia")
1964: "Dr. Strangelove"
1967: "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate"
1970: "MASH"
1971: "The Last Picture Show"
1976: "All the President's Men" and "Taxi Driver"
1979 (truly a banner year): "Apocalypse Now," "Breaking Away" and "Norma Rae," with "Kramer Vs. Kramer" somehow beating all of those
1980: "Raging Bull"
1984: "A Soldier's Story"
1987: "Hope and Glory"
1990: "Goodfellas"
1991: "Beauty and the Beast"
1992: "The Crying Game"
1994: "Pulp Fiction"
1995: "Babe"
1996: "Fargo"
2000: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"
2001: "Gosford Park"
And, finally, 2006: "Little Miss Sunshine"

Were the Oscars always so "snobby"?

I put that in quotes because I'm not thoroughly convinced they are now, but the backers of "The Dark Knight" (and you can count me firmly among them) could certainly make that case.

So, were the Oscars always so averse to rewarding movies that combine artistry with extreme box-office appeal? The biggest example that proves they weren't would have to be "Titanic," which took home the big prize and 9 other statues, among 13 nominations.

There are other instances, however, that better show that the Oscars once (and fairly recently) took the wishes of fans and real geeks to heart. Here goes, with some Best Picture nominees:

1975: "Jaws"
1977: "Star Wars"
1981: "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
1982: "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial"
and 2001-2003: "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy

And, finally, "Watchmen"!

Anyone who actually made it through all that certainly deserves a reward, so here it is: As far as I can tell, the first three clips of actual footage from the movie "Watchmen," for which you can count me just thoroughly geeked up.

First up is a clip of Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) talking with Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) about the Comedian's murder:



Next up is a snippet of that great scene in which Nite Owl (Wilson) and Laurie Jupiter (Malin Ackerman) take the Owl ship out for a spin and rescue some folks trapped in a burning building.



And finally, my favorite of the three, which features an unmasked Nite Owl and Rohrschach (Jackie Earle Haley). I think this is the first time I've heard Rohrschach speak, and it's just nothing but cool.



So, there you have it. Our Oscars video should be up some time tonight, so please feel free to check back, and have a perfectly pleasant Thursday. Peace out.