One of the last films I saw at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — and consequently one I never got around to reviewing — was “Jodorowsky’s Dune.” A straightforwardly constructed but vastly entertaining movie-lore documentary about cult Chilean-born auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky’s elaborately failed quest to bring Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel “Dune” to the screen, it was one of the most audience-friendly breakouts of the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, and has now been picked up for US distribution by Sony Pictures Classics.

Of course, “Dune” was eventually filmed, to infamously unsuccessful effect, by David Lynch in 1984 — it’s still one of the signature bombs of the decade, and there’s probably a fascinating study to be made about how it came to be. Frank Pavich’s film, however, is more interested in what might have been: with the eponymous director, a garrulous, riotously eccentric 84-year-old, as his chief storyteller, “Jodorowsky’s Dune” details the evolution and dissolution of a project that was perhaps too ambitious ever to come to fruition.

Beginning in 1974, when Jodorowsky was still hot from the midnight-movie success of “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” he gradually conceived a fever-dream of a big-budget sci-fi epic, one whose planned collaborators ranged from H.R. Giger to Mick Jagger to Salvador Dali — though with Jodorowsky and his son slated to play the leads. You can probably see why it didn’t happen, though the strength of Pavich’s film is that we’re never sure how much he’s exaggerating, or even fabricating, tales of the tortured pre-production process. His own testimony is buttressed by that of multiple colleagues and admirers, ranging from Nicolas Winding Refn to Hitfix’s own Drew McWeeny.

Jodorowsky’s “Dune” may have been an impossible vision, but it has at least made for a good film in its own right — though it’s less high-concept, it should appeal to the same genre-geek audience that treasured last year’s “Room 237.” It’s a playful acquisition from Sony, and with the right marketing, could find its own cult following. 

Pavich responded to news of the acquisition with the following statement: “To have my first film distributed by Sony Pictures Classics is a dream come true. I’m incredibly excited to know that we will be working alongside the company that so fully supported such great documentaries like ‘Crumb’ and ‘Searching for Sugar Man.’ SPC has seen that, even though this is a documentary about a never-completed film, it is not a story about failure. It’s a story about ambition and how the power of art can effectively change the world.”

No release date has been announced yet, but expect this one to find plenty more fans on the fall festival circuit.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that this year’s Oscar-nominated original scores and songs will be featured in a live concert on Thursday, February 27, three days before the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony.

The news first popped up at Variety. “A symphony orchestra of Los Angeles studio musicians will perform a suite from each score of up to 10 minutes in length,” music branch governors Charles Fox, Arthur Hamilton and David Newman said. “Subject to availability, each original composer will conduct his or her own work. We”re planning for brief onstage conversation with composers and their directors about the process of creating music for motion pictures.”

Suites of up to 10 minutes from the original scores will get the symphony orchestra treatment. The event “is truly a milestone in Oscar music history,” the governors said, “placing Oscar-nominated music center stage in what will hopefully become an annual event.”

Recent Best Original Score winners have included “Life of Pi,” “The Artist,” “The Social Network” and “Up” while the Best Original Song trophy has gone to tunes from “Skyfall,” “The Muppets,” “Toy Story 3” and “Crazy Heart.”

The concert will be held at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus.

I think it’s fair to go ahead and stand out here and say Cate Blanchett gives a tour de force performance in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.” It’s definitely the best thing she’s done since “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” if not “The Aviator” or “Notes on a Scandal.” She takes a shallow concept of a character, really, and injects it with so much withered spirit, flighty contempt and horrified dissatisfaction that you can’t help but expect her name will be in the conversation for awards at the end of the year.

The film is pretty great, too, by the way. It’s not some romp squeezed in between more substantial Allen efforts. It has a lot on its mind, ideas it handles well in both the macro and the micro throughout. But mostly it’s an awesome vehicle for a top-notch cast to unload, with Blanchett way out in front.

Sally Hawkins? She’s always been good at the little details. Bobby Cannavale? I saw him on Broadway a few months back in “Glengarry Glen Ross” and I’ve been a fan since “The Station Agent.” The confidence he brings to a role is staggering. Can we cast this guy in everything, please?

Andrew Dice Clay? He delivers. Peter Sarsgaard? Very well used. Alec Baldwin? There’s not much going on internally with his character and much of what you take away from it is done in the editing, but like Sarsgaard, he’s perfectly utilized. Michael Stuhlbarg and Louis CK are well-situated on the periphery, too, but really, Blanchett pretty much owns the movie.

“Blue Jasmine” is a riches to rags tale about Jasmine (Blanchett), the wife of a Park Ave. investment scumbag (Baldwin) who loses her upper crust lifestyle and is forced to move in with her adopted sister (Hawkins) in San Francisco while she attempts to find her feet. The script (which also deserves some awards attention) unfolds in a very controlled fashion, bleeding flashbacks into Jasmine’s present neuroses and really working as a bourgeois send-up (an old Allen favorite) that nevertheless provides for real empathy. But more on all of that at a later date.

For now, though, I have to imagine even detractors of the film won’t be able to argue against what Blanchett does here. Maybe some will think she goes over the top, I don’t know. I thought she kept a steady eye on that line and never crossed it. The result is probably the best performance in a Woody Allen film since Sean Penn in 1999’s “Sweet and Lowdown.”

Sony Pictures Classics came really close to securing an Oscar for a lead actress last year. Can they get there this time?

“Blue Jasmine” hits theaters July 26.

You may have noticed a healthy showing for “Saving Mr. Banks” in Kris’ updated sidebar predictions, and he’s hardly out in the wilderness there. Sight-unseen buzz is strong for John Lee Hancock’s first directorial effort since 2009 Best Picture nominee “The Blind Side,” largely on the strength of good word (and a Black List mention) for Kelly Marcel’s first feature script, which chronicles the brittle relationship between P.L. Travers, the Australian author of “Mary Poppins,” and Walt Disney himself, as they sparred over his blockbuster adaptation of her children’s novel.

As you surely know by now, Emma Thompson plays Travers, while Tom Hanks plays Disney. We’ve had an inkling of the actor’s appearance as the legendary mogul since he turned up at the Emmys last year with Disney’s signature mustache in place, but we can now see the full effect in the first official still from the film. It’s hardly the most exciting image, but gives a clear look at the likeness — which is reasonable, without being a distracting transformation. Meanwhile, the disconnected body language between Hanks’s Disney and Thompson’s tight-lipped Travers is likely indicative of the dynamic we can expect between the characters throughout.

It’s hard to draw any other conclusions from a single image, though on this skimpy evidence, Daniel Orlandi’s early-1960s costuming seems to have that bright, slightly ersatz newness common to mainstream period pieces. And the film’s impressive supporting cast, which includes Colin Farrell, Paul Giamatti and Rachel Griffiths, is being left to the imagination for the moment. 

Hanks’s casting as the more famous of the two figures has grabbed most of the headlines on this project — and with “Captain Phillips” also on the horizon, the two-time Oscar winner is clearly shooting for a comeback year. But it’s Thompson that I’m most curious to see. Leading roles for the British actress — still the only person to have won Oscars in the disciplines of writing and acting — have been few and far between in the 21st century, while it’s been 18 years since her work last captured the Academy’s collective imagination. Een if the film turns out to be a soft serve, it’ll be nice to see her back in the spotlight.

Are you looking forward to “Saving Mr. Banks?” 

Everyone has their reasons for making movies. Those reasons are different on a case-by-case basis and run the spectrum from superficial to profound, but you kind of live for this level of insight into a project and dedication to a deep, complex idea that really needs a medium like the cinema to fully explore it.

As far as I can tell, a Tumblr page called Batman Is Still Better Than Spider-Man deserves the credit for digging up an AFI archival video clip of Dustin Hoffman detailing a very personal epiphany. It was posted to YouTube in December. In it, Hoffman explains what the 1982 film “Tootsie” meant to him and why it was “never a comedy” for him.

Misogyny is very much a part of our dialogue these days, in politics, in stand-up comedy, certainly in the arts. But it rarely takes on such a meaningful shade as I see in this video, so while it has deservedly made the rounds plenty as of late, I felt the desire to share it here, too.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPAat-T1uhE&w=640&h=480]

Welcome back to our long-dormant Oscar Bait column, in which we muse on the awards potential of a yet-to-be-produced project.

I’m afraid to say I’ve still not seen Angelina Jolie’s 2011 directorial debut “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” which never landed a UK distributor. The Bosnian War romance, shot in both Bosnian/Serbo-Croat and English-language versions, wasn’t exactly a success, but it was no embarrassment either: it received some sympathetic reviews, played the Berlin Film Festival and nabbed a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. (Okay, I think we all know why, but still.)

Either way, the Oscar-winning actress seems to have been sufficiently encouraged by her debut’s performance to take a second turn behind the camera, and this one — though still in pre-production — looks to be a significantly bigger deal. Where “Blood and Honey” was distributed by then-newbie indie outfit FilmDistrict, her follow-up, World War II survival story “Unbroken,” has the might of Universal Pictures behind it.

What is more, Universal today announced plans to release the film on Christmas Day 2014, positioning it as one of their prime prestige properties for next year. Well, maybe. The holiday date did the trick for the studio’s “Les Miserables” last year, but Christmas Day brought little joy for such past Universal award hopefuls as “Angela’s Ashes” and “The Producers.” Meanwhile, with the festive season no longer lending contenders the advantage it did when the season stretched into late March — as we often like to remind you, no December release has won the Best Picture Oscar since 2004’s “Million Dollar Baby.” (Jolie’s little-campaigned debut, as it happens, was a casualty of the December crush in 2011.) So “Unbroken” will need more than prize credentials to woo potential voters.

Those credentials are pretty intriguing, though. If Jolie is still a largely unknown quantity as a filmmaker, her screenwriters certainly aren’t. For only the second time, Joel and Ethan Coen are performing scripting duties on a project not their own. That their first such for-hire job was last year’s limp screwball comedy “Gambit” may give some readers pause, as might the fact that they’ve rewritten a script initially penned, at different stages, by two Oscar-nominated screenwriters in their own right: William Nicholson and Richard LaGravenese. This kind of pass-the-parcel process is common Hollywood practice at the scripting stage, of course, though one hopes the screenplay doesn’t emerge with too many transitional scars.

Don’t expect much of a Coens stamp, however, on inspirational material far removed from their own work. Based on Laura Hillenbrand’s non-fiction bestseller “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption,” the film tells the story of Louis Zamperini, a war hero and Olympic athlete who survived 47 days on a raft after a plane crash, before being captured and incarcerated in a Japanese POW camp.

With production set to begin in September, Jolie has yet to cast the film completely — though it has just been confirmed that young British actor Jack O’Connell will be playing the meaty, physically demanding role of Zamperini. This is a huge get for the talented 22-year-old, who is best known in the UK for a charismatic turn in the teen TV series “Skins,” and will be introduced to mainstream US audiences in the upcoming “300: Rise of an Empire.” (He was originally slated for the lead in flop YA adaptation “Beautiful Creatures,” which would up going to Alden Ehrenreich after visa issues got in the way.) 

Zamperini’s is a story to which Universal first acquired the rights way back in 1957, and revived by optioning Hillenbrand’s book four years ago. (If you’re really into collecting Oscar omens, consider that Hillenbrand wrote the source material for 2003 Best Picture nominee “Seabiscuit.”) Meanwhile, it’s one to which Jolie claims a strong personal connection, stating: “I”ve had the privilege of spending a great deal of time with Louie Zamperini, who is a hero of mine, and now-I am proud to say-a dear friend. I am deeply honored to be telling his extraordinary story, and I will do my absolute best to give him the film he deserves. I am grateful to Universal for making this film a priority.”

A formidable below-the-line crew is already taking shape: perhaps lured with the Coen connection, master cinematographer and perennial Oscar bridesmaid Roger Deakins is on board, as is Emmy- and Guild-winning production designer Jon Hutman, who worked with Jolie on her debut.

High-end stuff, then. With Jolie having put her acting career on the back burner in recent years — voice work aside, her last screen appearance was in 2010’s regrettable “The Tourist” — this could be an opportunity for the conscientious humanitarian to redefine her career as an artist. With her wild-child past now a pretty distant memory, she’s both well-connected and well-regarded in the industry, so her peers will be inclined to reward her if the film’s up to scratch. Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson are among the Hollywood leading men to charm their way to a Best Director Oscar. No actress-turned-filmmaker, however, has ever secured so much as a nomination. (Just ask Barbra Streisand. And no, “The Godfather Part III” does not qualify Sofia Coppola as an actress.) Could Jolie be the first?

The 48th Karlovy Vary Film Festival closed over the weekend with a handful of juried awards for its premieres. I’m afraid I didn’t see the winner of the festival’s crowning Crystal Globe prize, Hungarian director Janos Szasz’s WWII drama “The Notebook.” I can, however, endorse the shared Best Actress award for the strong female ensemble of Lance Edmunds’s painterly but ponderous US indie “Bluebird”: Amy Morton, Louisa Krause, Emily Meade and Margo Martindale. Less so: a Special Jury Prize for British director Ben Wheatley’s vastly disappointing “A Field in England.” I caught up with the film in the UK on its unconventional multi-platform release (cinemas, DVD, VOD and terrestrial TV, all on the same day) last Friday, and will discuss it further at a later point.

I’m particularly pleased that local auteur Jan Hrebejk  took the Best Director award for “Honeymoon,” which I reviewed in my last festival roundup. Where that one reviewed three world premieres, today’s will examine a trio of standouts first unwrapped at previous fests.

Inasmuch as the Romanian New Wave of the past decade or so can be said to have a poster girl — albeit one of suitably solemn expression and attire — Luminita Gheorghiu may well be it. The veteran actress, long revered in her homeland, has been a vital supporting presence in a number of the movement’s key films: “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (which won her a left-field LA Critics’ award), “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Aurora” and last year’s “Beyond the Hills.” The industry owed her a starring vehicle, and she’s been given a spectacular one in Calin Peter Netzer’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner “Child’s Pose” (A-), a snappish, seething, darkly funny drama of class and ethics that she presides over with iron-backed imperiousness. On the one hand, it’s easy to imagine Jacki Weaver or Helen Mirren feasting on this part in a Transatlantic remake; on the other, few filmmaking nations can match Romania these days for this kind of severe take on institutional rot.

At first glance, Gheorghiu’s narrow-eyed, fur-clad society marm Cornelia is the latest addition to cinema’s rich portrait gallery of monster mothers, ranging from “Mommie Dearest” to Mo’Nique’s Mary Jones: introduced at her birthday party, her sense of oppressive entitlement is apparent in everything from her posture to her expensively bleached hair. She bats away her mild-mannered doctor husband as if he were a hovering waiter, but dotes on her adult layabout son, Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache) — while still openly acknowledging his worthlessness. Barbu’s similarly jaded girlfriend Carmen (Ilinca Goia, excellent) receives equal condescension from Cornelia, minus any residual affection.

Cornelia’s queen-bee status, however, is challenged when Barbu perpetrates a DUI collision that kills a 14-year-old boy from a working-class family. With the police taking an understandably hard line against the privileged, seemingly remorseless offender, it’s left to his mother to barge her way into the case with elegant aggression, pulling every class-related string at her disposal to ensure preferential treatment. Whether handsomely paying off witnesses or using her husband’s contacts to change the results of inconvenient alcohol tests, she does it all with the same unblinking refusal to excuse or apologize: if her son’s crime is an annoyance, even a disgrace, to her, she’ll be damned if he’s going to be punished for it by anyone but herself.  

That Cornelia’s manipulation of the authorities succeeds to the extent it does, however, is allowed to reflect less poorly on her than it does on the corrupt crevices of the Romanian legal system. Razvan Radulescu’s beautifully turned script retains a kind of chilly admiration for its unrelenting protagonist throughout, with her gormless, graceless son emerging in parallel as the passive monster of the piece. That Cornelia’s expert amorality is being wasted on such an unworthy beneficiary lends a warped nobility to her efforts. Meanwhile, Gheorghiu’s swaggering, sour-tongued performance peels back the mask of hauteur and battle-ready makeup to show — if only in unguarded flickers — the profoundly disappointed, needfully self-reliant woman beneath. (She’d make one hell of a Miranda Priestley.)

Andrei Butica’s roving, inquisitive camera seems partly complicit in her performance and perspective, sizing up and placing subsidiary characters just so — only to turn markedly still as the film tiptoes toward an inevitable faceoff between Cornelia and the bereaved. Are her powers of persuasion stymied by stony grief, or shut down in the name of tactics? The conditions of unconditional love are brought harshly to bear on the final act of this blistering film, and indeed on Gheorghiu’s increasingly ashen face: there’s more than one way to lose a son, it seems.

If Robin Weigert plays a very different kind of weary, well-to-do mom in “Concussion” (B+), one largely afflicted with more luxurious crises, she can claim extra sympathy points on at least one score: Cornelia never suffers the pain or indignity of being hit in the face with a baseball by her own son. First-time director Stacie Passon’s cool, composed suburban comedy — underheralded at Sundance, but picked up by the Weinsteins’ Radius label — begins with this bloody domestic mishap, which, as the title suggests, is a kind of symbolic stimulus for the mental unravelling that follows. The more restless partner in a middle-aged lesbian marriage that has sexually flatlined, Weigert’s sardonic property developer Abby is subsequently moved to upset the sleepy balance of her taupe-decorated, gym-dominated routine in affluent Upper Montclair, New Jersey — an area whose geographical prefix takes itself rather seriously. (I know, I’ve lived there.)

Shortly after Abby purchases a fixer-upper warehouse apartment in Manhattan, her smooth-talking handyman (Johnathan Tchaikovsky) talks her into a part-time career as a high-end, same-sex call girl, uncoiling her own sexual frustrations while treating those of others — including, unexpectedly, alluring, putatively straight neighboring mom Sam (the wonderful Maggie Siff). The kids are certainly all right in this particular study of lesbian marital strife, but they’re about the only ones.

Passon’s briskly humorous, pleasingly slow-to-judge film nonetheless hinges on behavioral leaps that some viewers will find harder to buy than others. Happily, she has an invaluable ally in Weigert — best known for TV’s “Deadwood” and used too sparingly since — whose wry-yet-wounded demeanor and salty delivery makes Abby’s most irrational impulses all too painfully human. The improbability of her actions is precisely the point, after all: it’s in the realm of what we’d never ask or assume of other PTA members, yoga classmates, or other community acquaintances we know only glancingly well. Like a feminized “American Beauty,” Passon’s enticing debut shoots for sleek absurdity — whether beginning and ending with perfectly made-up treadmill runners in taunting slow-motion, or contemplating the tangled list of synonyms for ‘beige’ — only to suggest how little we know of reality. 

Reality is what throws the title character — a young woman who thinks herself already emotionally hardened — further for a loop in “Miele” (B), a justly well-regarded Un Certain Regard entry at Cannes this year that marks a most unexpected directorial debut for Italian actress Valeria Golino. (Yes, that means two leads from “Rain Man” have directed their first film in the past year. You’re up, Tom Cruise.) Taking an impressively sinuous approach to material that could easily invite lumpy Lifetime treatment, this mature, even-handed study of euthanasia strenuously avoids hot-button politicking. It’s not the rights and wrongs of assisted suicide that are held up for scrutiny — thought that’ll happen independently of the film’s efforts, particularly in its home country, where the practice is strictly illegal — so much as the psychological toll it takes on a dedicated young advocate.

Nicknamed “Miele” (“Honey”) in her guise as a wiry angel of death, twentysomething Irene (Jasmine Trinca) masquerades as a student while carrying out gentle mercy killings on terminally ill clients secured via a local physician — jetting off to Mexico on a monthly basis to secure the necessary pet tranquilizers for the job. She performs her duties with impeccable stoicism and little obvious emotional residue, until a crotchety, highbrow client (Carlo Cecchi) announces late in the game that he’s depressive rather than terminal. Her personal ethical code violated, she embarks on an unsupported mission to coax him off the ledge. The resulting relationship unfurls with unsentimental warmth, though the film has more snap and sting as a solitary character study than as a two-hander.

Golino’s study of the issue may not be prescriptive, but it does err on the side of repetitive, as Irene and her bemused new cause engage in figure-of-eight arguments about who does or doesn’t possess the right to die; their resolution, however touching, isn’t hard to anticipate. Her filmmaking, however, is consistently surprising: with cinematographer Gergely Pahanok, Golino demonstrates an artist’s eye for high-style composition and glinting late-summer light that illustrates a world at once inviting and over-examined, depending on who’s doing the looking.

We’re right in the middle of the blockbuster movie season. Some think it’s been a lackluster summer slate. I haven’t had major expectations for much of anything so I guess I’m okay with merely being satisfied so far, but with Guillermo del Toro’s massive-scale “Pacific Rim” hitting theaters this coming weekend, it seems now would be a nice opportunity to look at the race for Best Visual Effects.

This and the other crafts fields will of course be thoroughly covered later in the year when Gerard Kennedy dusts off his series of crafts-centric columns. Just looking at what we’ve seen so far, there are obviously a lot of contenders, but to my eye, few have really stood out as singular.

I can’t remember anything at all about the visuals of “Star Trek Into Darkness,” for instance, though I respect that a lot of hard work went into bringing that world to life again. Speaking of sequels, most seemed willing to give the rather hamstrung “Iron Man 3” a pass but the effects sequences felt uninspired and, much like “Star Trek,” I find myself trying hard to remember the film’s visual signatures.

Even “Pacific Rim” suffers somewhat from the blur of CG spectacle. So much of it is gorgeous with a truly unique neon palette, but just about every battle scene takes place under the cover of nighttime torrential rain. That makes it cheaper to hide this and that, one imagines, but it also makes it difficult to see what’s actually happening from moment to moment. If I’m being honest, I’m more a champion of the film’s design, particularly in the Hong Kong sequences, than I am of its visual effects. That doesn’t mean it won’t, or shouldn’t, be one of the top contenders at the end of the year, it just all kind of blurred together for me is all.

Speaking of feeling fatigued by an onslaught of CGI, I’ll be interested to see if “Pacific Rim” draws the same breathless complaining about endless action that “Man of Steel” did last month. I’m a fan of Zack Snyder’s superhero reboot, though I apparently wasn’t looking for the same things in the film that some of the more disappointed viewers were. And I thought the effects were rather sensational.

Other films have signature work that could be remembered, like “Oz the Great and Powerful” and “The Great Gatsby.” Others still, like the underwhelming “World War Z” and “The Lone Ranger,” seem likely to be relegated to the fringe. Ditto post-apocalyptic tales “Oblivion” and do a lesser extent, “After Earth.” Something like “Fast & Furious 6,” part of an inexplicably forgiven mounting franchise, could even find some traction (though more likely for its sound work).

One film that I think absolutely stands out from the fray, however, boasting its own unique stamp with mostly modest effects that count every step of the way, is “This is the End.” I saw the film a second time last night and boy does it still clock up there, against all expectations, with the best films I’ve seen this year. And the effects work is never embarrassing, always just right and serves the story well at every step of the way. “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” couldn’t manage a nomination a few years ago but I would love to see something like this taken the least bit seriously by the branch.

But there is more to come. The frontrunner and likely winner at the end of the year will be Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity.” Peter Jackson and his team led by legend Joe Letteri will be back with “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” while Jackson’s protege Neill Blomkamp will unleash his “District 9” follow-up “Elysium” next month. More superheroes will try to leave their mark, from “Kick-Ass 2” to “The Wolverine” to “Thor: The Dark World,” and who knows how more specialized effects work in a film like “Rush” will land with voters?

There will be time to chew on all of that and more in the upcoming awards season, but with it being the height of visual effects splendor at the cinemas, it seemed a good time to take stock right now.

Tell us your favorite use of visual effects so far this year in the comments section below.

Between “Gravity” and his directorial effort “The Monuments Men,” George Clooney — who, lest we forget, shared the Best Picture Oscar for “Argo” a few months back — has what may be another busy awards season lying ahead of him. Even if his on-paper prospects don’t pan out, however, he’ll be accepting at least one award before the year is out, as BAFTA’s Los Angeles division has named him the recipient of their Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film.

The Britannia Awards, established by BAFTA/LA as a kind of bridging event between Hollywood and the British film industry, will be presented on November 9, and televised on BBC America the next day. Five awards are presented at the event, but the Kubrick is their highest honor: past recipients include Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Hugh Grant, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro, Jeff Bridges, Warren Beatty and last year’s honoree, Daniel Day-Lewis.

Penn and Day-Lewis both won the award en route to their most recent Oscar wins, though the award recognizes career achievement rather than the year’s work. To use BAFTA/LA’s own wording, the Kubrick winner is “a unique individual, upon whose work is stamped the indelible mark of authorship and commitment, and who has lifted the craft to new heights.” In Clooney’s case, the award is in recognition of his work on both sides of the camera: after all, he has amassed nine BAFTA nominations across the disciplines of acting, writing, directing and producing, winning his first ever BAFTA for “Argo” earlier this year.

BAFTA/LA chairman Gary Dartnall said of his selection: “George Clooney is without question one of our industry’s true icons. His work has captivated audiences from all corners of the globe, and BAFTA Los Angeles is proud to be celebrating his immeasurable contributions to our craft. We are also especially pleased to be continuing our partnership with BBC America, whose support and primetime broadcast of the ceremony will ensure that viewers around the country will be able to celebrate the occasion with us.”

This will be the second year that the ceremony is televised. You may recall that Daniel Day-Lewis made last year’s inaugural broadcast an unexpected talking point when he playfully used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to parody Clint Eastwood’s empty-chair Republican convention routine. (How time flies.) They can’t count on that kind of publicity again, but Clooney’s a reliably charismatic presence at these affairs. Winners in the event’s other categories — British Artist of the Year, the John Schlesinger Award for Excellence in Directing, the Chaplin Award for Excellence in Comedy and the Albert R. Broccoli Award for Worldwide Contribution to Entertainment — will be announced in the coming months.

Hand it to Harvey Weinstein. He’s using this whole controversy over the title of “The Butler” to drum up tons of publicity for the film, which hits theaters next month. But this circus is nevertheless ridiculous and I feel silly even writing about it.

Now Weinstein is turning the whole thing into David vs. Goliath, which has frequently worked for him in the past, whether it be in legal battles or awards campaigns. This morning he appeared on CBS to air the laundry out in public.

“It’s not that they’re wrong,” Weinstein admitted on the program. “It’s just a grace note would have just said this is a movie about civil rights, 28 individual investors financed the movie and 122 times in the history of movies, titles have been used and repeated [sympathies to whatever poor TWC gopher had to dig up that number]. Our understanding with them was this was just going to be the simple process it always is.”

Moreover, Weinstein goes so far as to suggest this is about something else entirely. “I was asked by two executives at Warner Bros., and I would testify to this, that if I gave them the rights back to ‘The Hobbit,’ they would drop the claim,” he said. Consider your laundry aired out, Harvey.

Weinstein’s lawyer, David Boies, also floated the assumption just about everyone else has, which is that Warner Bros. is stirring trouble in order to hurt the film. “What’s going on here is that they’re using the power of the MPAA…to say, ‘We’re going to restrict competition from this new film,'” Boies said. “And that’s just wrong.”

There was talk from Weinstein about being taught by his dad to fight injustice and a limp retort from First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams combating the notion that a studio would try to hold a competing film back (Floyd, honey, sit down as second) and about honoring one’s word. But the whole thing was just kinda sad to watch unfold.

MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd had the last word in the clip below. “Sit down,” he said. “Talk to each other…This is silly.”

Everyone in the studio just laughed. Hollywood, ladies and gentlemen.

British director Stephen Daldry currently holds what I believe is a unique record: all four of his films to date have received Oscar nominations for either Best Picture, Best Director or both. That he’s managed to maintain this Academy favor even when his last two films — “The Reader” and, in particular, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” — ran into some critical opposition means any new project of his will be regarded in some quarters, however blindly or cynically, as a prestige player.

His latest, however, could follow a different path. “Trash,” which commences production in Rio next month, is scheduled to be released by Universal next May — making it Daldry’s first film since his 2000 debut “Billy Elliot” not to nab an awards-baiting December release spot.

It’s also his first film made with famed British production company Working Title. The script has been adapted from Andy Mulligan’s well-regarded 2010 children’s book by the quintessential Working Title writer, Richard Curtis — an Oscar nominee nearly 20 years ago for “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his name has since become a byword for a particular strain of soft-edged British crowdpleaser. (We’ll see if that holds with his upcoming Rachel McAdams-Domnhall Gleeson romance “About Time.”)

Mulligan’s book tells the story of Raphael, a homeless trash-picker subsiding on a massive city dump in an unnamed Third World country, whose chance discovery of a mysterious bag makes him and his friends a police target; as they go on the run, they find in the bag a dead man’s mission to right a severe wrong. Several reviews of the book likened its narrative to that of “Slumdog Millionaire,” which may give an indication of how Working Title sees the project. (The novel was disqualified for a BBC children’s book award due to its violent content and use of foul language — that alone may make it one of Curtis’s edgier undertakings.)

Newcomer Rickson Tevez  takes the lead, while starrier support was confirmed today: Oscar nominee Rooney Mara (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) will play an NGO worker, while Martin Sheen plays a kindly priest who looks after the dumpsite children. With the focus of the story principally on the boys, however, this represents another chance for Daldry to nurture a new young star as he did Jamie Bell in “Billy Elliot” (and, to a lesser extent so far, Thomas Horn in “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”).

Daldry and Curtis are both names who now attract a fair amount of critical skepticism, so “Trash” will likely be vulnerable to that, however good it does or doesn’t turn out to be. Collaborating on a film principally for a family audience — a demographic Daldry covered in “Billy Elliot,” and Curtis most recently with “War Horse” — could deflect some of that. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent this spring release crosses over.

As I’ve already written, 2013 would appear to be the year that South Korea and Hollywood have become formally acquainted. Park Chan-wook and Kim Jee-woon made their US debuts with “Stoker” and “The Last Stand” respectively, while Bong Joon-ho has “Snowpiercer” coming our way. And in a tidy coincidence, one of Park’s most well-regarded films, 2004’s Cannes Grand Prix winner “Oldboy,” is getting the remake treatment this year courtesy of Spike Lee. 

It’s certainly one of the more intriguing remake propositions of recent years. Park’s wildly stylized, grandiosely violent revenge thriller is a true one-off that can hardly be replicated, only reinterpreted; while Lee has dabbled with some success in genre cinema, he’s never done so with material this defiantly out there. The outspoken director has been on highly erratic form of late, so it’s anyone’s guess how the film — which stars Josh Brolin as an advertising executive on the hunt for his captors after being inexplicably imprisoned for 20 years — will turn out. It could be inspired. It could be calamitous. The odds are firmly stacked against it being boring.

The first official poster for the film, at least, suggests that Lee has retained the original’s strangeness (and, indeed, its imagery) to some extent. It’s a striking image that serves as a taster for the first trailer, which will be unveiled on Wednesday. The film opens Stateside on October 25; I would bet on it showing up in Venice (where Lee has premiered several films, including last year’s Michael Jackson doc “Bad 25”) and/or Toronto first.

Check out the poster below — does it grab your interest? Or would you rather Lee had left this one alone? Tell us in the comments.

It’s tough to work Kurt Vonnegut out for the screen. It rarely comes together well. But I’ll be damned if I’m not excited to see Guillermo del Toro try with Charlie Kaufman writing. You kidding me??

According to a story that originated at The Daily Telegraph, an adaptation of Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five” — which was originally filmed by George Roy Hill in 1972 — is part of the “Pacific Rim” director’s current deal with Universal. Not only that, but he has a writer in mind, frankly the perfect conduit for Vonnegut if there ever was one: Oscar-winning “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich” scribe Charlie Kaufman.

“Charlie and I talked for about an hour-and-a-half and came up with a perfect way of doing the book,” he told the British newspaper (via The Playlist — the story is not currently available online). “I love the idea of the Trafalmadorians [the aliens of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’] — to be ‘unstuck in time,’ where everything is happening at the same time. And that’s what I want to do. It’s just a catch-22. The studio will make it when it”s my next movie, but how can I commit to it being my next movie until there’s a screenplay? Charlie Kaufman is a very expensive writer! I”ll work it out.”

Further to that studio mandate, Jeffrey Wells says he has a little added info from a source. Del Toro “is pushing Universal to belly up and pay Kaufman to bang the script out, but Uni won”t pay [Kaufman]”s fee unless [del Toro] assures that ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ will be shot within 12 months.” The problem is del Toro’s next two projects are “Crimson Peak” and and FX pilot for “The Strain” and they’re set to be filmed back-to-back.

Now, part of me wishes this news didn’t bubble up, because it almost sounds like a project that could have been. That said, I love, love, LOVE the idea of these two guys working together, and not only that, but the idea of del Toro scaling back after the scope of “Pacific Rim” is positively thrilling to me and I think it would be a great way to come out of that world. I can see him geeking it up with Kaufman coming up with ideas much like he did with “Pacific Rim” screenwriter Travis Beacham, and if it’s at all possible to crank this film out quickly and efficiently, it has the potential to be one of those amazing artistic partnerships.

Here’s hoping it happens. Maybe del Toro is scooting the news out there this week, in advance of “Pacific Rim,” to get the press chewing on it in public and help force Universal’s hand. But I’d hate to see this one not work out now that I know about it.

“Pacific Rim” is due out in theaters on Friday.

Among the 276 artists invited to join their ranks this year, the Academy including a pleasing selection of world cinema luminaries, ranging from recent first-time Oscar nominee Emmanuelle Riva to Romanian New Wave cinematographer Oleg Mutu. One name, however, that was particularly applauded from all sides was trailblazing Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi.

Still serving a sentence of six years’ house arrest for propaganda against the Iranian government, Panahi has made his last two features within these restrictions — though in bold defiance of the government’s decree that he not engage in any filmmaking activity for 20 years. The first of these, his acclaimed personal diary-doc “This Is Not a Film,” was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive to make its Cannes debut, and wound up on last year’s 15-title shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. It didn’t get a nomination, sadly, but it clearly raised Panahi’s profile sufficiently within AMPAS to prompt an invitation from two separate factions: the Directors’ and Documentary branches.

Panahi is arguably best known for his narrative filmmaking: his 1995 debut, the critically beloved child’s-eye drama “The White Balloon,” was Iran’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar that year. So it was interesting to see which Academy branch the director chose to join. (AMPAS rules dictate that individuals can only belong to one.) This statement released by Panahi earlier this week — and posted on Academy governor Michael Moore’s website — suggests that he’s gone with the documentarians:

“I would like to sincerely thank the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for inviting me to join their organization. I am especially grateful to Michael Moore and the documentary branch for nominating me.

“It”s an honor for me to join such a prestigious organization, and I am proud to accept the invitation on behalf of the large family of the Iranian filmmakers, who have steadfastly represented the best of Iranian arts and culture despite all the limitations they have been subjected to.

“I understand this membership affords me the chance to see some of the best films every year and vote on their merits. For someone in my situation who has been banned from making films, viewing the works of international colleagues is an opportunity that I would deeply cherish. If I am forbidden from making films for twenty years, I can at least share the joys of filmmaking in a vicarious manner.”

It’s touching to see that amid the numerous factors compromising his life and career right now, Panahi is still prepared to take his Academy membership this seriously. (Would that every voting member would do the same.) This is one addition that reflects very well on the organization indeed.

Panahi’s latest film “Closed Curtain” — a meta-narrative effort that reflects directly on his own imprisonment — premiered at Berlin in February, where it won him the Best Screenplay award, though I believe it’s still awaiting a US distributor. 

With over $34 million already in the bank, “Despicable Me 2” has convincingly Minion-ized the box office, neatly paving the way for the capsule-shaped critters’ forthcoming spinoff vehicle — itself none-too-subtly promoted in the new film’s closing credits. But is it any good? Drew McWeeny thinks it does its job well enough, though it’s lacking in the story department. I more or less agree: it’s bright, disposably fun family fare, though where the similarly fluffy first film had a reasonably smart idea at its core, the sequel loses focus by stripping Steve Carell’s protagonist of his conflicted supervillain identity. What do you think? Is this a franchise you’re keen to see continue? And in a lean year so far for animation, can this sequel get more Academy love than its unnominated predecessor? Vote in the poll below, and have your say in the comments.

The Karlovy Vary Film Festival is a rewardingly contradictory one. The locale is pure chocolate-box fragility: a bijou spa town in the densely wooded hills of the Czech republic, its buildings appear frosted by professional patissieres. The atmosphere, meanwhile, is more robustly rowdy: wealthy neighboring Russians populate the busy party circuit as cinema-loving students descend on the town by the busload, open-air bars surrounding the festival center dispensing rivers of Pilsner all the while. Neither the setting nor the crowds, meanwhile, immediately suggest the festival”s diverse, tough-minded programming, which trades largely in bleaker realities – or more challenging fantasies, as the case may be.

More than many festivals its size, Karlovy Vary”s film selection is keenly curated as opposed to merely cobbled-together – so I realize that it”s looking a gift horse in the mouth to lead off my coverage with what is, by several yards, the worst film there. But Mark Steven Johnson”s mangy dogs-of-war thriller “Killing Season” (D-), which played as part of Karlovy Vary”s career achievement tribute to John Travolta, is not only the starriest of the fest”s otherwise discerningly chosen world premieres, but it”s also the one coming soonest to a theater (or, indeed, a laptop screen) near you. (Next week, in fact – though no one would blame you for waiting.) Not a festival film by any stretch of the imagination, this drably gory B-movie is best viewed as a necessary evil: a Hollywood attraction dangled to bait uncertain festivalgoers into the more exotic, more exciting reaches of a rich lineup. I”ll do likewise.

Travolta was on hand to introduce the film to a heaving crowd in the festival”s concrete-chic flagship theater. His co-star Robert De Niro, slumming it once more in the wake of his seventh Oscar nomination, was otherwise engaged. The same appears to be true of his performance, glazed-over even by his recent standards, as a terminally gruff former army colonel seeing out his retirement in a dingy log cabin in the wooded Deep South: embittered by the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, he has laid down his arms and assumed a fixed scowl as his weapon of choice.

Travolta, by contrast, is making more than enough effort for both of them as the Serbian war criminal once shot and left for dead by De Niro, and now out for retribution. Accessorizing his performance with a satin-sheen buzz cut, profoundly questionable facial hair and a thick Eastern Yoo-ro-pean accent that might kindly be described as ‘committed,” he”s the liveliest element of a film that takes the windy combat philosophies spouted by these two still-bloodthirsty dinosaurs alarmingly at face value. Evan Daugherty”s dim-witted script was once on the Black List, though it began life as a story of two WWII veterans. A script editor could argue for this one-size-fits-all context on the rationale that man keeps fighting the same wars over and over again, but the shift doesn”t say much for the narrative”s depth of insight or attention to detail.

In any event, the film”s puny politics prove beside the point as the story devolves into a particularly bloody, repetitive game of cat-and-mouse – Tom and Jerry, specifically, as De Niro and Travolta stalk each other around the forest, taking turns to exact brutal, cartoonish punishments. “Thread a rusty stake through my leg and hang from the trees, will ya? Fine, I”ll pin you to the wall with an arrow through your cheek, before waterboarding you with salty lemonade.” Katniss Everdeen never had it so tough.

I needn”t tell you that once they”ve run out of arrows, lemonade and stamina – which is, by the way, some time after Johnson runs out of ways to stage their ludicrous showdowns, though well before cinematographer Peter Menzies tires of his trusty khaki filter – these two grizzled warhorses realize that they have more in common than a mutual taste for Johnny Cash and grievous bodily harm: they”re scarred by the same conflict, you see. Travolta”s Alien, De Niro”s Predator; whoever wins, we, the audience, lose. On the plus side, I suppose it”s nice that they”re making torture porn for old men now.

“Killing Season””s superficially Balkan conscience at least gave it a faint thematic connection to a festival that, for all its astute cherry-picking of other festivals” highlights, is most significant as a showcase for new Eastern European cinema. So I”m happy to say that two of the best things I saw in my time there were both homegrown Czech productions, beginning with Jan Hrebejk”s slick but pleasingly knotty ghosts-of-the-past melodrama “Honeymoon” (B), which I”m told should be a significant local hit. It”s also a strong candidate to be the country”s foreign Oscar entry this year. Hrebejk”s “Divided We Fall” was nominated in 2000, and he”s been submitted twice since – most recently in 2010 with “Kawasaki”s Rose,” a complex tangle of Communist-era emotional debts that I admired at its Berlinale premiere.

 I hadn”t realized until now that “Kawasaki”s Rose” was conceived as the first in a thematically linked trilogy of films about the damaging repercussions of secrets come to light – to which “Honeymoon” is the conclusion. I haven”t seen the intervening entry, 2011″s “Innocence,” though it would appear some tonal transition has taken place: there”s a vein of spry, charcoal-gray humor running through the new film that contrasts strongly with the poetic stoicism of “Rose,” though both films engage with cruel human truths. By situating the narrative in the fluid dramatic playground of a crowded country estate over a single weekend, Hrebejk seems to have at least one eye on Renoir”s deathless comedy of manners, “The Rules of the Game” – which is not to overstate the pleasures of a film that most recalls a wryer, slyer Susanne Bier.

We open on the lavish church wedding ceremony of attractive, well-to-do couple Tereza (Anna Geislerova) and Radim (Stanislav Mejer) – an event in which neighboring optician and apparent stranger Jan (Jiri Cerny) takes an inordinate amount of interest, cheerily photographing the wedding party and following them, unbidden, to the reception. Our tetchy bride, keen not to make a scene on her big day, is nonetheless anxious to evict this politely creepy crasher, who seems to harbor a crush on her Teutonic hubby. Hrebejk cleverly keeps her reactions pitched halfway between unwonted snobbery and reasonable panic, until the unwrapping of Jan”s wedding gift – a sturdy urn bearing his own name – suggests he”s out to upset more than just the seating plan.

“Theatrical” is all too often used by film critics as an unqualified putdown, but this is cinema that, in the best sense, unfolds like a good play. Hrebejk keeps multiple mysteries of identity and motivation in flux from one act to the next, faltering only in a denouement that hammers home its soapy ironies a shade too cleanly. His cast, meanwhile, is on point throughout – particularly Geislerova, whose brittle vulnerability and clean-scrubbed beauty would make her a pretty nifty replacement for Gwyneth Paltrow, should we someday lose the Oscar winner to macrobiotics forever. That likeness isn”t the only thing making it easy for me to imagine a smart Hollywood rejig of “Honeymoon,” though it hardly requires one.

The festival”s other Czech highlight came to me via a recommendation from festival director Karel Och: when I asked him for a personal favorite that I”d be less likely to see elsewhere, he directed me without hesitation to “DK” (B), a short, sharp, discomfitingly intimate documentary about the late Czech architect David Kopecky, a radical aesthetician who died in 2009, aged just 46, of a brain tumor. Far from a standard-issue cinematic eulogy, Bara Kopecka”s portrait is colored by equal doses of devotion and anger – as it would be, considering that Kopecka is the subject”s much put-upon widow. (As such, it”d make the spikier half of a double feature with Agnes Varda”s “Jacquot de Nantes.”)

It takes a lover, after all, to draw the compelling connection this film does between an artist”s professional triumphs and personal shortfalls. The architect was celebrated for his restless creativity and uncompromised individuality, but Kopecka doesn”t flinch from showing how these very virtues could make him aggressively difficult to live and/or work with – the film”s surfeit of home-video footage makes for some wincingly tough viewing, particularly as Kopecky becomes increasingly possessed by his illness. It”s a bruised, brave one-off that deserves beyond-borders travel on the festival circuit. 

One foggy morning in 2007, screenwriter Travis Beacham was walking along the beach in Santa Monica and he looked out at the famed amusement park pier jutting out into the water. His imagination ever running rampant, he pictured behind those mist-covered, empty rides a towering machine, a robot — a mech, actually — waiting to do battle with some vicious monstrosity. The germ of “Pacific Rim” was born.

A treatment, a screenplay, an epic production and six years later, that vision is about to take hold outside of the writer’s imagination and on screens nationwide. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it’s an original concept at a hefty price tag without the benefit of star power or a built-in fanbase. Those unique elements have cast a dark industry shadow on the film’s opening weekend prospects, but for Beacham, it’s all about an ambitious vision brought to life. And it’s not lost on him how lucky he is to find himself in this position, the material having made its way to a passionate filmmaker and been saved the typicality of a screenplay-by-committee dismantling and re-figuring of that vision to suit, well, the suits.

“It does give me pause,” Beacham says. “I think in the process of getting it done, early on, I was just so in love with it and sort of determined to get it made one way or the other that I wasn”t thinking much about how unique the situation was, that it was an original property or that sort of thing. I was just in the zone. But it”s really sort of stunning and it”s hard to believe that it”s happened this way.”

A large part of that has been the involvement of Guillermo del Toro, who has openly said the film — in which humans face off against giant monsters called “kaiju” hellbent on taking this Earth — “saved” him at a time when he was moving from project to project, desperate for the spark of passion that would make him excited to direct a movie again. Del Toro went from “The Hobbit” to “At the Mountains of Madness” before finally saddling up to “Pacific Rim,” bringing his geeky love of kaiju adventure with him. Like Beacham (whose earliest film memory is watching a Godzilla movie), del Toro delights in the peculiarities of the genre, the world-building potential of it all.

It made for a great collaboration, the two bouncing ideas back and forth and fleshing out the universe and the backstory of a very complex concept.

“I think what was really special and really sort of unusual about the process was that everyone was kind of picturing the same movie,” Beacham says, referring also to production company Legendary Pictures, whose president Thomas Tull is a self-professed fanboy who helped launch the new Batman and Superman franchises at Warner Bros. “Nobody, from the producers to the director to the screenwriter on down had a radically different idea of what they were making, tonally and thematically. It was the same animal in all of our heads, which made the collaboration really easy.”

Some ideas that were understated in Beacham’s original draft became more pronounced when del Toro (who shares a writing credit) came on board. A sort of “Alamo feeling” was adopted, this last stand of humanity against the perpetual raging of monsters that breach our universe through a crack in the Pacific Ocean floor and wreak havoc on cities along the Pacific Rim, from Cabo to Hong Kong, San Francisco to Sydney. The character of Stacker Pentecost, played by Idris Elba in the film, took on a more authoritative role, one of highly placed military leadership rather than a more grunt-like approach (though actor Charlie Hunnam got to pick up some of the slack in that regard). And the trippy concept of “the drift,” whereby two pilots operating the massive mechs — Jaegers, as they’re called — bleed into each other’s consciousness, was carved back a bit as well.

“But it”s still part of the world, and it”s still a heavy part of the theme,” Beacham says. “And there”s one drift sequence in the movie that I think is probably, to my eyes, the best thing that I”ve ever seen Guillermo del Toro commit to film. But it”s a bit more simplified than it was in the first draft of the script. Hopefully that”s a lot of stuff that we can get into in later iterations of the story.”

In fact, the world of “Pacific Rim” is so big and the film chooses to tell such a small slice of the overall story that Beacham and company had a lot of excess “dark matter,” as he calls it, accoutrement of the universe that had to be scrapped but still boasts so much potential. The film drops the audience right into the middle of a war that has been raging between the humans and the kaiju for years, a brief prologue setting the scene. However, Beacham was given the opportunity to expand on that prequel material in the graphic novel “Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero.”

Beacham knew what he was wading into with the film, a subgenre of a sort that has been well-covered by movies and yearns for something new: the apocalyptic tale, the big budget, humanity-on-the-brink mayhem yarn that we’ve gotten in “Independence Day” and “Armageddon” and you name it. But Beacham’s viewpoint was that the way humans often deal with disaster in these films is from a helpless position. He wanted to tell a story that turned that convention on its head, one of aspiration rather than desperation.

“I wanted the solution to this disaster to be every bit as much of a spectacle as the disaster that they were going against,” he says. “So it wasn”t like, you know, you”re hacking into the alien”s computer or anything like that. I wanted it to be, ‘They have giant stuff, we build giant stuff.’ From the first draft of the movie there”s always been this sort of vaguely Apollo-era, big science connotation to it, which I really like.”

Indeed, to give another shade of insight into this notion, Beacham has quoted his favorite line from Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” in the lead-up to “Pacific Rim”‘s release: “It wasn’t a miracle; we just decided to go.” But more than that, there’s a trend in Western storytelling that he wanted to buck with the film as well, one of viewing technology as something that can get out of hand and act on its own behalf. This goes back to Mary Shelley, even, but from Skynet to Marvel’s “Ultron,” technology as an obstacle has had its run.

“I think there”s a place for those sorts of stories, definitely,” Beacham says. “But I think just in terms of Hollywood movies, the ideas become so explored and so saturated that I just wanted to see something where technology was an unambiguous solution to a problem. I think we need those sorts of stories, especially in this day and time when there”s so much inherent skepticism in the populace regarding science and technology and that sort of thing. We need the other point to be made in a powerful way, I think.”

And of course, beyond the raging behemoths of “Pacific Rim,” under the hood, it had to be a story about people if an audience was going to engage. Beacham has said the Eureka moment for that came when he decided the Jaegers needed to be piloted by two neurally-connected people. How that would speak to relationships on the screen would open up countless doors. And in that idea, he even found a way into a bit of Expressionism with his script.

“I think that was what really let the story happen, because suddenly it wasn”t just about giant robots and giant monsters,” he says. “The mechs were an expression of the human drama. They were driven by the relationships of the characters. That was a real way to make the relationships of the characters important in the battles, in a literal sense.”

In the wake of “Pacific Rim,” Beacham has a lot on his plate. He’s no longer on the Disney remake of “The Black Hole” but has continued collaborating with director Joseph Kosinski as the two have charted a television series, “Ballistic City,” which was picked up by AMC. He’s also working on a sequel to “Pacific Rim,” allowing him to mine some more of that “dark matter” and expand the universe.

Beyond that, hopes are higher than ever that the first spec script he sold out of film school — a dreary fantasy called “Killing on Carnival Row” inspired by the work of author China Miéville that was a calling card for him for years — will finally go before cameras. For a time it was set to be director Tarsem Singh’s next film and del Toro has circled it in the past as well. Beacham cheekily says he wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the near future the “Pacific Rim” director becomes involved in the project again.

For now, though, Beacham is just eager for the world to trip on the kaiju/mech disasterpiece that’s been spinning in his brain since that foggy Santa Monica morning. Tracking, intellectual properties, quadrants, these don’t concern him. What concerns him is the world he and his passionate colleagues have created, and how lucky they are to afford you passage into it.

“Pacific Rim” arrives in theaters on July 12.

Well, I think it’s fair to say the Venice Film Festival has won the Opening Film contest this year. While Cannes had its parade slightly rained upon by the fact that their opener — Baz Luhrmann’s otherwise suitably sparkly “The Great Gatsby” — was released in the US beforehand, their Italian rivals will be kicking things off on August 28 with a world premiere that happens to be one of the year’s most anticipated films: Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity.” 

As I wrote in my preview of the Venice lineup two weeks ago, the outer-space thriller, which stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, was all but certain to bow on the Lido: Cuarón has a good relationship with the festival, having premiered both “Children of Men” (2006) and “Y tu Mama Tambien” (2001) there, winning the Best Screenplay award for the latter. (Back in 2001, Alberto Barbera was the festival’s artistic director; 12 years later, he’s in charge again. The more things change, eh?) Clooney is also a Venice staple, having brought a film there in all but one of the last six years.

Less predictable was its selection as the curtain-raiser. The high-stakes opening slot is a tricky one to fill for festival programmers, and Venice has had mixed fortunes with it in recent years: Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” started the festival with a bang in 2010, Mira Nair’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” with a thud last year, and with Clooney’s own “The Ides of March” landing somewhere in between in 2011. With the festival planning an all-stops-out 70th anniversary edition this year, they couldn’t afford another “Fundamentalist.” However the film turns out — and hopes are obviously sky-high — “Gravity” is just the starry prestige blockbuster (in 3D, to boot) they needed, one that will unite cineastes and red-carpet hounds alike in their excitement.  

Should we be concerned that the film is premiering Out of Competition? It’s something of a surprise, given that Cuarón competed for the Golden Lion on both his previous visits to Venice — but it may be Warner Bros.’s choice rather than the festival’s, as major studios sometimes prefer not to subject their premier attractions to the pressure of early awards competition.

“Gravity” will now almost certainly proceed to Toronto after kicking things off at Venice, while a date at Telluride in between is quite possible. With Bernardo Bertolucci presiding over the Competition jury this year, the 70th Venice Film Festival will take place from August 28 to September 8, and I’ll once more be in attendance. Bring it on.