* “Ben Hur”— I finally caught up with this most popular of religious epics many moons ago at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, where it was introduced by it’s then elderly but still fairly hale star, Charlton Heston. Heston might have still been in good shape in the late 1990s or early 2000s, but the 35mm print that was shown on the giant screen, theoretically the best then available, was washed out and wan.

That disappointment is now a thing of the past with a restoration made frame-by-frame from the original 65mm negative that was so painstaking this “50th Anniversary” edition of the 1959 film actually arrives 52 years after the original “Ben Hur” release. At last, the spectacle looks as spectacular as a spectacle should, even if it’s now on relatively small home screens. (My 42 incher is by far the biggest TV I’ve ever had, but it’s obviously not the Cinerama Dome.)

The film itself is a humdinger though, considering it was directed by William Wyler, it’s also kind of a disappointment as humdingers go. Because he lacked an obvious personal style, Wyler tends not to get the kind of credit that contemporaries like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Howard Hawks do, but he was an extraordinary director in his own way. Wyler had made a better epic, a thrilling and thoughtful Western parable made a few years prior called “The Big Country” (Blu-Ray coming soon!) which featured Charlton Heston in one of his very best roles as a morally ambiguous cowhand. Wyler had also made, much earlier in his career, a better film about Christianity. A too little known early talkie from 1929, “Hell’s Heroes,” is an emotionally profound version of the oft-filmed tale, “Three Godfathers,” and the finest and most moving embodiment of the Christian ethos this secular Jew has ever seen. Also, just in general, very, very few movies can match Wyler’s post-World War II classic drama, “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

“Ben-Hur” may not be as superb as these other films, but it’s mostly not chopped liver either. Also, lots of people really, really love chopped liver. In case you’re one of the relatively few movie fans who hasn’t seen the film — it’s currently at #176 on IMDb’s top 250 — this is the story of Judah Ben-Hur (Heston). Ben-Hur hales from Judea, not the San Fernando Valley or Long Island, but his is nevertheless literally a Jewish prince, whose loyalty to his own people drives a wedge between him and Roman former best-friend Messala (Stephen Boyd). This results in a series of grave injustices and a pair of fateful meetings with a certain superstar to be from Nazareth.

As seen on the new restoration, the 3 hour 42 minute mega production is beautiful and exciting but can get a bit windy at times. In particular, Heston, who found Wyler to be an unforgiving taskmaster, lets his hard work show too much with some overwrought thespian displays. Nevertheless, “Ben-Hur” is a heartfelt, class-A production from one of Hollywood’s greatest directors not far from his peak. The legendary chariot race, choreographed and second-unit directed by super-stuntman Yakima Canutt (“Stagecoach“), is easily one of the greatest chase action sequences of its type ever filmed, and the quiet conclusion is touching.

Monty Python fans, on the other hand, may find themselves giggling to themselves at a couple of points. A few moments would be spoofed a couple of decades on in “Life of Brian,” particularly in regards to how the film treats “the Christ.”

As for the Blu-Ray itself, the huge, and definitely not cheap, deluxe package also includes loads and loads of extras, including the equally ambitious in its day 1925 silent version of the story. Adapted, like the later film, from a once hugely popular biblical potboiler written by Lew Wallace and also a bit of a “make-or-break” project for MGM, it starred Ramon Navarro as Ben-Hur and the equally famous Francis X. Bushman as Messala. (At one point Wyler contemplated a similar two star strategy, imagining Heston as Messala and Paul Newman as Ben-Hur. Pardon me for saying it, but I think the result might have been an even better movie.) On the 1959 version, Charlton Heston also provides one of the two commentary tracks.

One more thing. Fans of the “The Celluloid Closet” take note: the famous story about famed author and personality Gore Vidal rewriting the crucial Messala-Hur reunion scene early in the film is, I believe, not mentioned in the bonus materials in the package. As the story went, Vidal — soon to become one of the first more or less openly gay public figures — and Wyler decided that it would be more interesting to have the ultimately villainous Messala nursing an unspoken but passionate romantic attraction to Hur. Heston always said he didn’t believe the story and would have nothing of it, but then Wyler’s idea was, I believe, that both Heston and Hur would be entirely in the dark on the matter and the attraction would be more or less one-sided. Gore Vidal had a slightly different idea about that, of course, but then Mr. Vidal has a slightly different idea about just about everything.

* “The Battle of Algiers”— Gillo Pontecorvo’s legendary 1966 semi-fictional dramatic recreation of 20th century history of course has little to do in any obvious ways with a spectacular like “Ben-Hur.” Nevertheless, both films do actually take an strong anti-imperialist stance while going out of their way to humanize both the rebels and their sometimes ambivalent oppressors.

A panoramic fictionalized recreation of the events that finally led the French government to grant independence to Algeria, it’s easy to see why this brilliant blend of stylized fiction and realist documentary film techniques has been cited by film critics and political pundits from pretty much any perspective you can think of. If I were forced to compare “The Battle of Algiers” to any other modern film, it would be Spike Lee’s 1989 anatomy of a riot, “Do the Right Thing.” Both Pontecorvo and Lee had strong points of view of their own, but they were both mature enough filmmakers and human beings to explore the moral pluses and minuses of all sides in an essentially impossible situation in which no fully moral response actually exists. Pontecorvo clearly sees the terrorist tactics used by the Algerians as unacceptable but also an inevitable response when people are first made powerless by a thoughtlessly repressive regime, which employs both torture and sub-rosa agent provacateur terrorism of its own.

It has some thrilling sequences, but “The Battle of Algiers” is not a film to watch when you’re tired. Unlike “Do the Right Thing,” it doesn’t really have strong characters or plot in the usual sense and shows the director’s debt to Sergei Eisenstein, whose film’s often had “collective protagonists.” It’s a device that, personally, I usually find more interesting to think about than engaging to watch.

On the other hand, “The Battle of Algiers” is filled with insights on modern politics and warfare and more than rewards serious attention. It’s peppered with several terrific action sequences and some great music credited to both the director and Ennio Morricone. Some of that music will sound very familiar to many of you because one of the film’s major themes was featured prominently in “Inglourious Basterds.”

* “The Four Feathers” —  Conservatives are often nostalgic for the more frequently right leaning films of old, but good movies dealing with politics are rarely simply “right” or “left.” Based on a adventure novel by A.E.W. Mason, which has been filmed seven times since the silent era, “The Four Feathers” would seem to be as reactionary as they come, since its sympathies are clearly aligned with English imperialists mucking about in the Sudan as if they owned the place.

The lavish English-made 1939 version was wartime propaganda largely concocted by the Hungarian-born Alexander Korda, a producer who was very close to the conservative, unabashedly imperialist Winston Churchill. On the other hand, his brother, Zoltan, was the director of the film, in the tradition of all good Jewish families, the Kordas were far from devoid of political disagreements. From such family arguments, good movies may often come.

“The Four Feathers” focuses on professional soldier Harry Faversham (John Clements), the scion of a British family raised by a father who believes him to be a coward and who is deathly afraid that dad might actually have been correct. As told by the left-leaning Zoltan Korda and the right leaning Alexander Korda in this version, Harry also disagrees strongly with the latest English adventure in the Sudan, though for reasons that sound oddly brutal and possibly racist to modern ears. Apparently unconcerned with the reaction of anyone, Faversham therefore exercises his option to resign his commission.

His three best friends (Jack Allen, Donald Gray, and Ralph Richardson, who unsurprisingly steals the movie) send their former pal three feathers, symbols of cowardice. Though his fiancee (June Duprez) agrees with him about the war, she doesn’t approve of his action either and Faversham awards himself another feather. Unable to stand the alienation of his friends, Faversham embarks on an insanely dangerous and painful mission which will prove more terrifying than what his old mates are enduring, though that’s no walk in the park, either.

I first saw “Four Feathers” back in 2000 at an an American Cinematheque screening of an ultra-rare nitrate print. While the Blu-Ray edition does a predictably terrific job of putting something very close to what I saw on a 1080p TV screen, the movie itself didn’t quite wow me the way it did last time, although I would still heartily recommend it to anyone interested in classic era adventure films. Was it my mood last time, or this time, that made the difference? I’ll be revisiting this one later, I promise.

That, of course has pretty much nothing to do with two of the new version’s real-life father and son producers, Irwin and David Winkler. For the remake of the 1971 actioner, the pair have teamed up with another parent-and-offspring team, Irwin Winkler’s long-time producing partner, Bill Chartoff and his son, Robert. (For the record, there are a total of ten producers and five executive producers credited on the film.) Both individually and with Bill Chartoff, the elder Winkler has been involved with a remarkable number of good movies and a few genuine classics, starting with Sydney Pollack’s pitch-black Oscar winner, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” and also including two of Martin Scorsese‘s signature works, “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” Winkler and Chartoff also, of course, produced “The Mechanic,” the first time around when it was as much of a chilling look at sociopathy as it was an action flick.

Like any great producer, Irwin Winkler has had his share of interesting financial failures.  There was the ultra-culty early John Boorman film, “Leo the Last” and Martin Scorsese’s big budget 1977 disappointment “New York, New York.” Fortunately, there was also the occasional modest but high quality success like Bertrand Tavernier’s great 1986 love letter to jazz and jazz fandom, “‘Round Midnight.” He and Bill Chartoff were also key players in one of the most enduring franchises in film history, the one that started with a low-budget boxing drama called “Rocky.” Since 1991’s “Guilty by Suspicion,” Winkler has also occasionally directed. His most recent films include the musical Cole Porter biopic, “De-Lovely,” and the Iraq war drama “Home of the Brave,” which received a speedy burial.

For his part, son David Winkler has worked on a number of television movies as well as with his father on 2006’s “Rocky Balboa.” He also directed the 1998 drama, “Finding Graceland” starring Harvey Keitel.

I was personally anxious to talk to Winklers during a recent L.A. press junket for “The Mechanic” because of an oddball “only in L.A.” family anecdote. I was nevertheless beaten to the punch by an Italian reporter with a rather distinctive interviewing style who tended to dominate the discussion.

“Father and son,” she said, “and in the movie there is a conflict between father and son. How did you live?”

“We didn’t have any conflict,” Irwin Winkler responded.

“Any conflict, whatsoever?”

“Nobody’s made that comparison.” David Winkler couldn’t take a question like this seriously. “I do what I’m told,” he said

“Me, too,” said the elder Winkler.

Then I was able to play the parental card with a question, though on the maternal side. At some point in the 1980s, my mother was dabbling in commercial real estate and found herself escorting Winkler to some potential locations for one of the “Rocky” films. By this time, the films were an institution and Sylvester Stallone a genuine international superstar. However, then as now, my mother had minimal interest in, and less knowledge of, any movie made after 1965 or so. When she escorted the producer to a potential location, Winkler supposedly said words to the effect of “Sylvester might not like this place,” she responded, “Who’s Sylvester?”

“And what did I say?” asked Irwin Winkler.

“You laughed,” I replied “You apparently found it adorable that she just wasn’t that interested in the film business.”

Winkler nodded and clearly had nothing to add. It was time to segue quickly as David Winkler had been making jokes about telling his mother of his dad’s meeting with my mother. Did the venerable producer have any memories of that time — not of my mom, of course — but simply relating to how the film business has changed in thirty years?

“Basically, it’s still hard to make a good movie. It’s still hard to make a small movie. It’s still hard to make a big movie. It’s still hard to make a movie with a big star. Those things have always been difficult. I don’t think it’s changed very much. It’s just tough.”

Speaking of film-making being a hard slog, someone mentioned the fact that this new remake of “The Mechanic” has been in motion since the early 1990s. That’s a long time to keep working on a project.

“Yeah. Probably the second biggest item in the budget is unproduced screenplays. We had a lot of writers writing them,” Irwin Winkler said.

Were any of those discarded drafts by writers we would know?

“I think you’d know ’em all. They were all really high priced. I don’t think it’s fair to them to mention the fact that they took a lot of money and didn’t deliver anything.” After time for a laugh, the elder Winkler added, “They weren’t too bad, really. It’s enough to say that the Writer’s Guild didn’t give them any credit on the movie, but we did a lot of screenplays. We spent a lot of money. What happened was, a lot of the writers would write more interesting and bigger action sequences. It started to work for us when we went back to [Lewis John Carlino’s] original script which really dealt with the relationship between the Ben Foster character and the Jason Statham character. ”

So, what specifically worked about the screenplay they went with?

David Winkler answered first. “It was something you don’t see nowadays. You don’t see movies that are more serious in tone, that the action is not ‘Spider-Man.’ As much as I like those movies, I think people like to feel that there is something around the corner that is realistic and not necessarily big and high-tech. Here’s a man whose code of honor is to kill people in way that is a little more subtle than what the C.I.A. would do. It was very faithful to the original in terms of structure and tone. It’s got a satisfying ending, but it’s still somewhat dark.”

Our Italian friend then asked, in a rather long-winded way, which of Irwin Winkler’s many movies “lived in his heart” — i.e., was his favorite.

Winkler responded that it would have to be one of the movies he personally directed because of the greater commitment directors make to their movies, and his favorite was “De-Lovely.” “I loved the music. I loved Kevin Kline.”

Since “De-Lovely,” while not a giant hit, got a decent amount of attention, I wondered if there was something Winkler had done that he was less well known but which he wished more people knew.

“Yeah, my last movie, ‘Home of the Brave.’ It was the first film that really came out about the war in Iraq and about the soldiers coming home. I loved doing it because I did this big action sequence in the beginning. I’d never done anything like that either as a producer or a director. Then, I thought I really got into the character of these servicemen and women and the problems they had after [returning from] the war. I was very, very disappointed that we didn’t get any audience. We didn’t get reviewed…It really got almost no distribution. We had made a deal with MGM and they were supposed to spend a great deal of money on it. We opened against all these big movies over Christmas, which was probably crazy, in two theaters. We didn’t do any business and that was the end of the movie.”

Winkler continued. “I co-wrote it — it was my original idea and I got [story] credit for it from the Writer’s Guild. I worked very closely with the writer [Mark Friedman] who did a terrific job. We went off to Morocco to shoot it and then up to Spokane to shoot the American part. I was away from my family for a considerable amount of time. Whenever we showed it to servicemen, or ex-servicemen, they were very moved by it.”

Does that kind of lack of recognition really hurt, someone else asked, or after so many years in the movie business was Irwin Winkler able to just let it go?

“I’m still talking about it,” he deadpanned. “I haven’t directed another movie since,” he continued to further prodding. The poor reception of the film clearly bothers him more than a little, but he had to admit that the Iraq war has turned out to be a difficult subject to make a successful movie about. “‘Green Zone‘ was a terrific movie. Nobody went to see it. It was part of that trend nobody wanted to see the war in Iraq.”

One of us wondered about Irwin Winkler’s long association with MGM, as their star has very seriously faded in recent years.

“When I got there their star was fading! From 1966 on their star was fading!” Winkler said to some laughter. “I don’t know. I made movies for Paramount. I made them for Warner Brothers. I made them for Fox. I made them for everybody. But, you’re right, most of them were [with MGM], but it was U.A. [United Artists]. We made ‘New York, New York.’ We made ‘The Mechanic.’ We made ‘Busting’ [a just about forgotten action film starring Elliot Gould and Robert Blake]. We made ‘Raging Bull.’…Then MGM basically merged with UA, so it ends up with the MGM label, but a lot of them were U.A., which was a great place to work.”

Then came a question about the film’s production company, Millennium Films, which the questioner felt had a somewhat unusual approach to film-making these days.

David Winkler answered. “Thank God there’s somebody like Avi Lerner. CBS Films bought our movie and decided to distribute it after seeing it. Avi is one of the few remaining gamblers who will sell a movie based on its foreign sales, put his own money on the line to get the movie made, and then hope it sells. There used to be a lot of Avis ten years ago. Now it’s a difficult world to get a movie made.”

What are the Winklers up to now?

“We have a film in post-production right now called ‘Trespass,'” Irwin Winkler answered. “Joel Schumacher directed it for us with Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage.”

Looking at the press material, I got the somewhat incorrect impression that Irwin Winkler had been involved with a number of very tough “existential” films involving killers and not only the 1971 “The Mechanic.” In particular I was thinking of John Boorman’s somewhat arty, ultra tough first film adaptation of Donald Westlake’s The Hunter, “Point Blank” starring Lee Marvin.

David Winkler joked that maybe it was because he and partner Bill Chartoff were “closet hit-men.”

The elder Winkler responded, “Maybe I’m a closeted existentialist. Those are the two. We made more personal dramas. I kind of like ‘The Gambler’ a lot better.”

I couldn’t exactly disagree as the 1974 film written by James Toback, directed by Karel Reisz and starring James Caan as a gambling-addicted literature professor was a terrific piece of work that I suddenly had the desire to revisit the moment Winkler brought it up. I also mentioned another classic, Sydney Pollack’s film version of Horace McCoy’s bleak depiction of dance marathons during the Great Depression, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” It was the 1970s and that’s probably the best explanation of the tone of these films which, today, no major studio film producer would dare touch.

After that, what seemed like idle questions about what the two Winklers thought of “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech” (they both thought both were very good), led to an observation from Irwin Winkler.

“In all the press we’ve been doing, we’ve been talking about how difficult it is to make films today and all that. Then, when you look at the films that we think are going to be nominated for an Academy Award…they’re all kind of small, intimate, interesting films. The biggest one is “True Grit” which is budgeted at under $40 million. You don’t have “Lawrence of Arabia” — unfortunately, I’d like to see “Lawrence of Arabia” — but you have these small dramas like “Black Swan” or “The Social Network,” [and] “The Fighter.” All these films seem to be not only getting attention, but also getting business,” Winkler said, alluding to “The Hurt Locker,” which, despite being a Best Picture winner, was far from a box office dynamo. (The exception to the trend of smaller movies being major league Oscar contenders this year is obviously “Inception.”)

Was Winkler surprised by the unexpectedly large success of “True Grit”?

“I’m stunned by it. I’m not only stunned by it, we pulled out a screenplay we had from 1993 that was sensational that we literally haven’t done anything with in 18 years. We just put it in a drawer because we knew we couldn’t get anybody to finance a western in the last 15 years…We took it out of the drawer this week because we said, ‘Okay, now maybe you can get a western off the ground.”

Of course, the matter of which films succeed and fail at the box office has always been a mystery.

“I’ll tell you how the mystery is,” Irwin Winkler said. “We were in the mixing room doing the final edit on ‘New York, New York.’ My editor was Marcia Lucas, who at the time was George Lucas’s wife. ‘My husband can’t finish this film that he’s doing.’ She called it a ‘cockamamie film.’ He can’t finish because he’s running out of time at Warner Brothers in the mixing studio. So, [she asked if] he could come when we finish mixing ‘New York, New York’ at like 7:00 at night. Could George bring in his film and finish it up at night? So, I said, ‘Sure.’ I couldn’t say ‘no.’ That was ‘Star Wars.’ She called it a ‘cockamamie film.’ Nobody knew what it was gonna be. What William Goldman said is true, nobody really knows anything about moves, about Hollywood.”

“By the way, ‘New York, New York,’ we made it at almost the same time as ‘Rocky,’ United Artists, which financed both films, said ‘We’re going to make a fortune on ‘New York, New York.’ [It had] Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese directing it, a great song…First of all, nobody wanted to play the song. It took two years for Frank Sinatra to make a recording of ‘New York, New York’ for it to be a hit. ‘Rocky’ became the hit and ‘New York, New York,” nobody cared about.”

Changing topics slightly, did David Winkler want to follow in his father’s footsteps a bit and return to directing movies as well as producing them?

“I have a four year-old boy and a two year-old girl. The idea of being so engrossed in something from six in the morning until ten at night…I found something more fun than directing.”

So, is producing movies easy, compared to directing?

“I don’t know if it’s easier,” Irwin Winkler said. “It’s different.”

“It’s easier on your family,” David Winkler added.

After that, the Winklers and us journalists meandered through a few odd subjects, including praise for co-star Ben Foster and the popularity of animated family films, which they enjoy but are happy to leave to the experts at Pixar and elsewhere. Then, we returned to the topic of supposedly moribund genres like musicals and westerns. Someone’s gag about remaking “New York, New York,” a problematic musical drama which has failed to accumulate even much of a cult following over the years despite being directed by Martin Scorsese, led to a nice summation of the situation by Winkler as he commented on the success of “True Grit.”

“It also tells us you never know what genre is gonna work. The only genre that works is the ‘good’ genre. In other words, you make a good movie and people are going to see it…When we made ‘Rocky,’ everybody said ‘nobody wants to see boxing movies.’ ‘Women won’t go to see a boxing movie.’ ‘She’s not the prettiest in the world; he’s not the handsomest in the world — it’s not Robert Redford up there.’ Yet, people went to see it. I think the best advice we could have for ourselves is ‘make something good and, hopefully, they’ll come.'”

It’s no secret around these parts that I love a good musical. Emphasis on both the “good” and the “musical” part. If you let me, I’ll give you an hour long dissertation on why John Cameron Mitchell’s “Hedvig and the Angry Inch” is way better than “The Sound of Music” which is, however, way better than Pauline Kael said it was and why Rogers & Hart songs are much better than Rogers & Hammerstein songs but that I still like “The King and I” and, yes, “Flower Drum Song.” Then, we’ll move on to MGM and the Freed Unit.

In fact, coincidentally, my last post here last night was also about musicals. I’m also actually angry at the place where I got the picture  from above (it’s linked) because it’s from a “10 Musicals That Don’t Suck Piece” which fails to include any movies older than “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and therefore implies that all musicals made prior to 1974 suck, especially “West Side Story.” So “The Bandwagon” and “Singin’ in the Rain” suck also, I guess. That really sucks.

So, if there was one thing possible to distract me from the current almost-everyone-is-somewhat-or-very-or-incredibly-wrong clusterfrack in our nation’s politics at the moment (and I’m incredibly glad I’m not a political blogger these days), it has arrived. The Hollywood Reporter (via Monika Bartyzel) reports that the “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” duo, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, are in negotiations to direct a project I’d either never heard of before or forgot all about, “Bob: The Musical.” The music will be the very talented composer Marc Shaiman, whose fingerprints are on countless film scores and everything from “Hairspray” to “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.”

If you’re wondering what the big deal is and you’re not one of my three known regular readers (for some mysterious reason, all of their initials are “R.R.” — okay, two of them are brothers, so there’s that), look up at those tiny red letters near the title of this post and that’s all you’ll need to know. All I’m saying is, assuming this ever gets made, it’d better be good. Yes, I know “Bob” is a common name, but since I already have to live with “What About Bob?,” this better be at least as good as that decent comedy was. Good or bad, I’m going to have to deal with jokes about it until I die.

And now a great moment from my favorite previously made Bob-themed musical film.

* RIP Jill Clayburgh. I’ll have more in remembrance of this very fine actress tomorrow. She passed on from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, an illness she’d been dealing with for more than 20 years.

* This makes me feel a bit old since I remember him before he was President of the United States in “The West Wing” and even before he was a very bad possible future U.S. President in “The Dead Zone,” Martin Sheen will be Peter Parker’s oh-so-doomed old Uncle Ben in the Marc Webb “Spiderman” reboot. Making me feel even a bit older, Sally Field is looking like a likelihood as Aunt May, who was always drawn by artists like Steve Ditko and John Romita as if she were about 99 years old. Of course, these days we mainly see her selling hawking Boniva for bone health, so I guess should just adjust to the new reality that Sister Bertrille (aka “The Flying Nun”)/Sybil/Norma Rae isn’t a baby anymore. And I really do like her. I really do.

* The very interesting, talented, and occasionally irritating (when he writes op-eds about with premises about the impact of movie violence I disagree with) Mike White has been offered the gauntlet of “Pride and Prejudice with Zombies” recently dropped by the equally interesting but more experienced David O. Russell. White is best known as a writer and actor. His most fiscally successful screenplay — in which he also acted — was the terrific “School of Rock.” In quirkier times, he starred in and wrote 2000’s “Chuck and Buck” as well as “The Good Girl.” This will be his second directorial outing, the first being…I don’t remember the name and you don’t either. It’s a bold and interesting choice, I will say that.

* A lot of people thought his “Hot Tub Time Machine” was kind of toxic (others thought it funny; I thought it not seen by me…I’ll get to it someday), so I guess it makes sense that Steve Pink’s next project will apparently be a remake of “The Toxic Avenger.” Gross-out franchise, here he comes.

* Boy, that Lars von Trier is so f*cking suave.

* AFM, the American Film Market, has been going all week. It’s an event where lots of smaller films find distribution and foreign deals are made. Deadline has some interesting deals today. “The Giant Mechanical Man” might sound like one quirky rom-com too many, but any film with Jenna Fischer and Topher Grace in the lead has my attention. Starting up also is the AFI Film Festival, which I’ll be checking out some over the weekend and there may be some quickie off-the-cuff impressions of the movies there coming from there.

* And finally, I’ve been guilty of ignoring the MGM bankruptcy this week, and I’m writing this directly across the street from the Sony lot, the home of Leo the Lion in his prime and for many years past that. Anyhow, the Wall Street Journal summarizes the situation numerically. Reminding us that, adjusted for inflation, “Gone With the Wind has made $1.6 billion. On the other hand, the studio only had one movie in the top 50 this year. What was it? The aforementioned “Hot Tub Time Machine.”

*  The big news right now is the bombshell, but not unexpected, admission to the New York Times by Casey Affleck that “I’m Still Here” is a fictional film. Moreover, Affleck still may not have come completely clean because he stated that David Letterman wasn’t in on the truth during the notorious interview with star/co-conspirator Joaquin Phoenix. Via Company Town, we learn that Letterman writer Bill Scheft is comparing what went on to Andy Kaufman stunts and even took credit for one of the lines.

A lot of people apparently think that Affleck, perhaps more than Phoenix, has some atoning to do, including Anne Thompson. I guess I can understand her frustration at being manipulated and lied to, but ultimately, it’s only a movie and we in the show biz press have all the credibility of car salesmen. Also it is, after all, a movie. From everything I’ve heard about the film, the far greater sin would have been if it had actually been real.

* Orthodox Jewish-bred Israeli-Brit Sacha Baron Cohen seems to be well on his way to a Shana Tova (good year). He’ll be moving into the world of “serious” acting in a planned biopic about the late multitalented Queen singer/songwriter/pianist Freddie Mercury to be written by the exceedingly busy docu-drama specialist Peter Morgan. I’ve read some ethnic quibbles somewhere (sorry, lost the link) since Mercury’s family hailed from parts of Asia. It seems to me the physical resemblance tells the tale and is no more offensive than the multi-ethnic Asian-Caucasian-Native American Lou Diamond Phillips playing a Mexican-American teen in “Stand and Deliver,” despite having not a drop of Latino blood in his veins. All ethnicities are really ethnic mixes anyhow. I can’t count the number of times I assumed someone was Jewish only to find out they were actually a mix of other groups that just came out looking all Jewy or people who look Latino who are actually Eurasian, etc.

No one seems to know whether Cohen, who can sing a little, will sing his own part. Considering Mercury’s remarkable voice, I wouldn’t complain if they simply used the old recordings. If it was good enough for “The Jolson Story” it’s good enough for this.

* Warner Brothers is apparently going to step up their DC Comics game. I have to admit that I find it amusing to read “superheroes” and “spreadsheet” in the same sentence. It’s apparently related to the impending wrapping of the Harry Potter franchise, as WB CEO Barry Meyer joked about remaking the entire series with Justin Bieber.

* Among the acquisitions at Toronto’s film festival is director John Cameron Mitchell’s bid to move a bit into the mainstream, “Rabbit Hole.” It’s an, I’m sure, deadly serious adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire about a couple trying to stay together after the loss of a child. It stars the terrific pair of Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart.

Mitchell’s extraordinary debut was his adaptation of his one-man show with music by Stephen Trask, “Hedwig and the Angry Itch” which is one of my favorite films of the century so far. His follow-up was the comedy-drama with hardcore gay and straight sex, “Shortbus” which was, as I wrote elsewhere some time ago, a lot less exciting or unnerving than you might think.

We certainly can’t accuse Mitchell of trying to play the same game twice. Still, I’d love to see him try his hand at another musical at some point. He’s also a terrific performer, obviously, and I’d love to see him do a few acting gigs as well. He’s essentially been MIA as an actor since “Hedwig” back in ’01.

* From the “is this news?” file — more delays of MGM movies. It’s the usual suspects — “The Hobbit,” Bond 23, and Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s horror flick, “The Cabin in the Woods,” which has been out of commission for so long it’s starting to get bed sores. The “Red Dawn” remake is also being affected.

* Actor Shelley Malil of “The 40 Year-Old Virgin” will get to do his atoning in prison for a shockingly serious and violent crime.

* The known-to-supergeeks-only Atlas comics line is being revived and is apparently generating talk of movie adaptations. I remember those character; if the talk is right people must be mighty desperate for new superheroes to make TV shows, movies, and video games about.

Heck, I’m ready to revive the abortive Atlas-inspired comics line that me and four other 13 year-olds attempted to launch back in the day. I don’t remember if I actually created any characters, but if you see “Catman: The Movie,” trust that I got a piece of the action.