It was only a matter of time before the Oscar-winner exhausted the potency of his trademark "Don't shoot that back at me, bro" riposte, thus requiring a more forceful comeback for offending journalists grilling him on this or that merit of Che Guevara. He saved his grand finale for a lucky-ish Washington Times reporter who last week grilled Del Toro about Cuba's pesky, post-revolutionary "concentration camp" problem:

"I'm getting uncomfortable," Benicio Del Toro said after fielding a question about his new movie's portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. "I'm done. I'm done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don't give a damn."

With that, the Oscar-winning actor walked away, abruptly terminating an interview [...] "We can't cover it all," Mr. Del Toro said. "You can make your own movie. You know? You can make your own movie. And let's see. Do the research."

So concludes the actor's current press run, as far as we know — suspended until at least November, when the inevitable, essential "'Who would win in a battle to the death: The Wolf Man or Che?" question arises in the first round of interviews for his fall tentpole.

• 
  'Che' spurs debate, Del Toro walkout [Washington Times via Fox News]

"Unexpectedly" is debatable, we suppose; IFC took a wait-and-see approach after acquiring Steven Soderbergh's 262-minute biopic last fall, dropping it in New York and Los Angeles a month ahead of its Jan.21 roll-out to VOD. Its success means good news to those bros in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C. hoping to throw Benicio Del Toro's accent back in his face: Che gets at least one week in your towns starting tomorrow. Sorry, Cleveland — we passed along the request, we swear.

• 'Che' Roadshow Soldiers On [Movie City Indie]

The phrasing came during a tetchy exchange with New York magazine, where Del Toro was forced to defend his regional accent in Che:

There's been some criticism about your accent in the movie. You speak in a Caribbean Spanish accent while Che Guevara had an Argentine one. Was there a reason you made that choice?
Where'd you read that?

It was mentioned in the Variety review, among other places.
What do they know? He doesn't know Spanish. You should ask someone Cuban what my Spanish sounds like. Are you one of those people that believe what they read?

No.
Well, then don't shoot it back at me, bro.

We shan't! Kudos, Mr. Del Toro, on crafting a new spin on what was becoming an old chestnut: "Don't tase me, bro." Now that we've found a suitable replacement, we shall toss that overdone phrase where memes go to die: on a Geocities page circa 1998, surrounded by flashing GIFs.

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Che’s Benicio Del Toro on Faking an Asthma Attack [New York]

Quickly becoming the TMZ of the independent-film beat, indieWIRE had cameras on the scene for an altercation that we were surprised hadn't happened before Friday: In the middle of defending his aggressively objective 4.5-hour portrait of Che Guevara, Soderbergh first repelled a shouty viewer bellowing, "He was a murderer!" before a torrent of outraged barks and heckles flooded the orchestra pit around him at the Ziegfeld Theater. The video cuts off before the rumored advance of pitchforks, torches and refund requests to the front row, with Soderbergh negotiating his escape only after promising not to make Ocean's 14. Che would be proud.

• Soderbergh Q & A: Is Che a Murderer? A Revolutionary? [YouTube]

WHAT'S NEW: There's no wanting for prestige or variety this weekend, with Fox's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still leading a saturated box-office charge on 3,600 screens. This time around, Keanu Reeves arrives from space to portend our imminent doom, evincing a timely environmental-awareness message with the aid of Jennifer Connelly and fitfully clusmy CGI. And if there's anything holiday moviegoers love, it's a Keanu apocalypse; expect Earth to pull around $38.3 million.

The next biggest opening is something called Delgo, the sci-fi quasi-Romeo & Juliet rendered with discarded Pixar 2.0 software and the budget voice talent of Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Malcolm McDowell and Burt Reynolds, among others. We like this one for about $3.2 million en route to Flopz™, neck-and-neck with the Latino ensemble (plus Debra Messing for gringa kicks) laffer Nothing Like the Holidays at around $3.3 million.

Doubt, meanwhile, opens small this week against fellow Oscar groveler The Reader; the former is faring far better with critics than the latter (unfairly, we might add), but the Kate Winslet lookie-loo factor won't disappoint the Weinstein Company when the numbers come in Sunday night, probably around $41,000 per screen. Also, if you've got four and a half hours and a seat cushion to spare, pack a lunch and check out Che in its one-week-only Academy qualifying run. It's the kind of thing you can tell your grandkids about years from now when they tug on your sleeve and ask you to regale them with stories of cinema's good old bloated days.

A few stars are actually smattered elsewhere in the mire: Ethan Hawke and Mark Ruffalo's Beantown gang drama What Doesn't Kill You opens on three screens, while Michelle Williams's spare girl-loses-dog indie Wendy and Lucy arrives on two. Also opening: The noirish Dark Streets; the animated fantasy Dragon Hunters; the stop-motion Oscar hopeful $9.99; the Chinese vanity project Waiting in Beijing; the Kim Basinger revenge flick While She Was Out; and the polish Holiday tale Hania. Whew.

THE BIG LOSER: Not so much a "loser" as an example of what we wish there was less of in the world, Timecrimes is an acclaimed Spanish thriller that nevertheless orbits around the genre conventions of time travel. Not to be arbitrary about it, but dear film industry: Please let the time-travel movie die. They're ultimately the same hoary stunt performed again and again, illogically at worst (Primer) and amusingly at best (Back to the Future), and almost always forgettably. Let Timecrimes end it. Please.

THE UNDERDOG: Speaking of going out gracefully, Clint Eastwood says his performance in Gran Torino is his last. And why not? Eastwood's late-career revisionist streak has knocked off its last myth: The vigilante hero, a man who'd sooner revolt in Dirty Harry than keep pace with the degradation of social order. Torino's grizzled Korean War vet still takes the same vengeance on Hmong gangs and black thugs overtaking his Detroit suburb, but essentially in the service of a multiethnic utopia perceivable just over the horizon. (He even gives his Silver Star and titular vehicle to the tormented young man he's taken under his wing, a little more optimistic bellwether than Harry Callahan's climactic badge-tossing in 1971.) As a straight drama, Gran Torino isn't especially good — sort of a violent, profane revenge epic crossbred with an afterschool special — but! Viewed in context with the last four decades of Eastwood's mercury, it's a strikingly rich, funny, elegant and utterly fascinating valedictory.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include The Dark Knight, the thrilling, Oscar-chasing doc Man on Wire, the first four seasons of Happy Days, and holiday-ready complete-series box sets of The Wire, Get Smart and Deadwood.

"Give this man some money," Benicio Del Toro was saying in his deep, private voice, flicking his face towards the nifty washroom attendant. He'd just done a perfunctory pocket-check, and come up empty.

"Money?" asked the director, the very one who dissembled so well on the subject in those Ocean's flicks, and who has a PhD of sorts in heists. Soderbergh dug into his pockets. Del Toro stood still, and let his lustrous mane do the talking. The washroom attendant smiled eagerly, but not too eagerly.

"It'll be big," the director was saying, still scraping through his pants. "I just went to the ATM."

"I just went to the ATM?" Really, Steven? That's not the way we would have expected him to characterize that Liberace film he just signed on for, but hey. Work's work.

• ¡Viva las manos limpias! [National Post]

· Paris, Not France premiered Tuesday night, with its subject in attendance as promised and with a letter from its beleaguered sales agent reportedly making the rounds beforehand:

"With less than one hour to go and no restraining order in place, I feel comfortable now letting you all know that this film was the subject of legal threats and was almost not shown at all here at the festival. [...] I am hoping that Paris will see, with the audience tonight, that there is nothing to be afraid of here. And will eventually let the film be distributed. What was originally conceived to be a 20-minute puff piece extra on the DVD release for her album, has in fact become a fascinating examination of what it's like to be a star in our star-obsessed culture. I can guarantee you three things: you may be the only people to ever see this version, you will not be disappointed, and everyone will be asking you if you saw it."

A few trusted sources were there, one of whom seemed to like the film more in theory: "Paris Hilton didn’t create this system––she’s just amongst its most photogenic exploiters. Its lack of perspective on its subject is troubling in the present, but at the very least, Paris Not France may serve in the future as a valuable time capsule of that exploitation in action." Another was less convinced, lamenting a larger Hilton conspiracy against the fest as a whole. And like you, we sense ourselves forgetting about the whole imbroglio before we even finish this sentence.

· IFC Films announced this morning that it acquired Steven Soderbergh's polarizing, 262-minute biopic Che for Stateside distribution. Look for one-week NYC/LA runs in December (followed by a VOD run in January), thus qualifying star Benicio Del Toro for an Oscar nomination that will probably go to Mickey Rourke anyway.

· Speaking of Oscars, The Hollywood Reporter notes that this year's fest is relatively light on awards-season hopefuls. Come back, Diablo Cody, all is forgiven!

· Kathryn Bigelow's actioner The Hurt Locker — which even mortal enemies David Poland and Jeffrey Wells agree is the best Iraq War film to date — also found a buyer, with the upstarts at Summit Entertainment grabbing it for under $2 million.

· Kevin Smith has officially moved into the I-slew-Goliath phase of his predetermined ratings squabble over Zack and Miri Make a Porno, telling an interviewer at Premiere exactly how many frames of fecal matter you can get away with onscreen before the NC-17 ax falls.

· Just for the record, Noah Emmerich's starring-role streak in New Line films — his latest being a cop in Pride and Glory — has nothing to do with the fact his brother runs the studio. If you don't believe him, ask him — it worked for Anne Thompson!

Boomp3.com

At the Toronto Film Festival screening of Che, beloved actress Rachel McAdams served as the unofficial ambassador of her native country, Canada. She got the idea when she remembered all of the difficulties she had adjusting to American customs and culture on the set of The Hot Chick in 2002. As she sees it, McAdams' role is to help American film stars become acclimated to the more laid back Canadian lifestyle. McAdams said, "There's not a lot of difference between Canada and America, but if people are confused, they shouldn't hesitate to text me." McAdams handed out pamphlets that featured a metric system conversion chart, as well as a collection of vegan donut shops personally curated by McAdams.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

"We have a sense of humor and that's lacking in this business. People take things too seriously—some people are just whacked out. It should be a lot of fun, if I can make people smile."

After the jump, smile along with the highlights from Bart's first day — including a revisionist Sydney Pollack obit and Variety's latest round of Che-hating.

On Sydney Pollack: "Sydney Pollack was a gracious man and an accomplished director, but he never knew how to work the press. That was reflected (inadvertently) in the tributes extended by critics and film writers following his death last week."

On Che and Steven Soderbergh: "Che was a Communist thug who, through myth-making like Soderbergh's, has been transformed into an iconic hero, especially around Europe where Che caps and T-shirts are a major industry. ... Perhaps Soderbergh's next film will be a biopic about Stalin that, oops, forgets to mention certain trivialities like mass murder.

On Sex and the City: "Witness the shrill critical contradictions being hurled at each other by two journalistic doyennes. 'A movie for grownups of all ages,' enthuses Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. 'Vulgar, deeply shallow and totally "ick," ' rants Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. ... Sarah [Jessica Parker]'s not 'deeply shallow,' nor is her movie. In fact, I think any critic who uses that expression needs a better editor."

Hilarious! Traffic City, here we come!

• PeterBart.com [Variety]
• Variety Chief's Blog Spicing up Life [Portfolio via Anne Thompson]

The most controversial American film of the fest, meanwhile — Steven Soderbergh's as-yet-unsold epic Che — won only a best actor prize for Benicio Del Toro after critics predicted (and/or prayed for) much more. Critics everywhere but Variety, that is, which has us wondering: What did Che ever do to these guys anyway?

It all started after last Wednesday's marathon press screening, when Todd McCarthy's screed credited "scattered partisans" with contrarian buzz before suggesting "the pic in its current form is a commercial impossibility, except on television or DVD." Fair enough, although a survey of reviews suggests McCarthy himself is the most vocal of the anti-Che minority. Which is fine, right? OK! So we thought we'd let it go, but then came Anne Thompson with her all-caps admonition, "DON'T TAKE AN UNFINISHED MOVIE TO CANNES!!!!" But NY Times critic A.O. Scott, while hardly over the moon, later echoed most of his peers when we spoke elegantly and persuasively on the open-ended film's behalf:

This is one of the frustrations of Cannes, for American critics at least. We see lots of fascinating movies — not all good, but very few completely worthless — and then wonder if we, or our readers, will ever see them again. I'm not in the movie business (a mutually beneficial arrangement, believe me), and not inclined to speculate with someone else's money. I do hope, however, that sometime in the near future I can take part in the long and contentious conversation that Che deserves, and also see how my own initial ambivalence about the film resolves itself.

Got it. Adults agree to disagree. But then came Mike Jones's dispatch on Variety's festival blog The Circuit, citing everything from long bathroom lines to the film's bad party to anti-Che commenters on his and other Variety blogs calling out the film's "mass murderer" subject. Now that's just hateful.

Coincidence? Perhaps; these are pretty independent thinkers, but it's a rare concentration of venom to seen directed at one film that doesn't even have American distribution yet. We wish they'd have saved some for that Eastwood backlash we know is coming.

It's not like we didn't see this coming, although even the most cynical of marketplace buyers probably wouldn't have guessed the accompanying snapshots might be the biggest pick-up of the festival. And really, is this tame glint of intimacy any more suggestive than the hickeys, cohabitation, cattiness and mutual shopping excursions of their recent, torrid past?

Whatever. Hey, look! Another glowing Che review from Salon's Andrew O— What? You want... Oh, for Christ's sake. Fine. Just this once, though:

Here are a few fantastic round-ups of aQuentin Tarantino lecture from the other day. We admit we've always had a soft spot for his cockiness, his divisiveness, his... What? OK, OK — but this is the last one! We mean it!

Ahem. So. The Variety review of Charlie Kaufman's directing debut Synedoche, New York is about as cautiously optimistic as critic Todd McCarthy gets, at once praising its ambition while pointing out its certain doom among buyers, viewers and history alike:

Like an anxious artist afraid he may not get another chance, Charlie Kaufman tries to Say It All in his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. A wildly ambitious and gravely serious contemplation of life, love, art, human decay and death, the film bears Kaufman's scripting fingerprints in its structural trickery and multi-plane storytelling. ... On the most superficial level, many viewers will be nauseated by the many explicit manifestations of physical malfunction, bodily fluids, bleeding and deterioration. A larger issue will be the film's developing spin into realms that can most charitably be described as ambiguous and more derisively will be regarded as obscuritanist and incomprehensible.

"Obscuritanist," Todd? Really? We liked it so much better when we could just read from afar without feeling like it's our turn in a Scrabble game. Anyway, one of these films from the last week of dispatches will claim this year's Palme D'Or on Saturday; we'll bring you the news when it happens, assuming it immediately precedes or follows another torrid, yachtside lesbian encounter. Otherwise? It can wait.

• Looks Like Lindsay Lohan is a Lesbian, Kissing Samantha Ronson [Egotastic]

Meanwhile, bigger American titles — particularly Che, Two Lovers and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's mindfuck directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (pictured) — remain on the market after less-than-rapturous response from critics and industry alike. What gives?

In the case of Kaufman's film, which premieres today at the festival, an early buyers screening last weekend yielded little but scratched heads and closed wallets, though with a cast top-lined by Philip Seymour Hoffman, most observers presume a deal is imminent. The same goes for Steven Soderbergh's even more challenging Benicio Del Toro-starrer Che — a 268-minute Spanish-language epic you may have heard left more than a few people skeptical of its commercial viability.

But even the Joaquin Phoenix/Gwyneth Paltrow film Two Lovers, easily the most mainstream, best-reviewed and least-expensive (with its $12 million budget) of the three, has drawn few serious inquiries more than three days after its premiere. Buyers are increasingly content to wait for the right price (it's easier when the troubled likes of the Weinstein Company and ThinkFilm can't afford to drive up costs); they're also determined to outlast the sluggish theatrical marketplace by accruing fewer titles on their release calendars. (See Fox Searchlight and Focus Features, which expensively nabbed Choke and Hamlet 2, respectively, out of Sundance and haven't bought since.)

The skittishness is conspicuously rubbing off on sellers now as well — especially Europeans, as The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein and Steven Zeitchik discovered Wednesday:

European sellers are not necessarily sympathetic to American fears over less easily marketable product. "The Americans are lazy, they're arrogant and too scared to do any deals," said one European sales exec. "I tell them: get some balls — your companies are all going down the toilet, maybe now's the time to get some films before it all collapses." ...

[T]he word is new strategies are needed to jump-start the market. Films will need be approaching completion before they are presented to buyers. "Buyers perceive that it's a buyers' market and they don't have to buy off footage; they can wait for the whole film," [William Morris Independent's] Cassian Elwes said.

That scenario likely applies to the $61 million Che, which even with Soderbergh at the helm likely faces months of cutting and revision before a distributor would take it on. Then there's the case of Tyson, the Mike Tyson documentary over which director James Toback was heard referring to his "prospective distributor" Sony Pictures Classics — even as the company was credited only with a "lowball," then "modest six-figure bid" and co-president Michael Barker was quoted elsewhere as saying, "I'm trying to find a year when we left without buying a film. ... If we ever did it was a long time ago. There are no gems in the market." Ouch! Oh well — there's always Toronto.

"I find it hilarious that people always complain about movies being the same, and then when something different comes along — a film that deals the cards in a different way — they say why isn't it more conventional?" [Soderbergh said.]

"There's the painter who did a portrait of a woman, and when she saw it she said, 'It doesn't look like me.' And the painter replied, 'Oh, it will.'" — Benicio del Toro responding more or less to the same.

Deep! Though maybe not deep enough for Todd McCarthy, the Variety grump who held forth with easily the most vicious (and potentially fatal) pan to yet emerge among critics: "Neither half feels remotely like a satisfying stand-alone film, while the whole offers far too many aggravations for its paltry rewards. Scattered partisans are likely to step forward, but the pic in its current form is a commercial impossibility, except on television or DVD." His colleague Anne Thompson agreed, likening Che to previous rough-cut Cannes clusterfucks including Southland Tales, The Brown Bunny and 2046 and scolding: "DON'T TAKE AN UNFINISHED MOVIE TO CANNES!!!!"

But... but... the producers even splurged for a brown-bag dinner during intermission! With Kit-Kats! Anyway, Che has its defenders as well; Kim Voynar thinks it's a Palme D'Or (and maybe even Oscar) front-runner, Jeffrey Wells is over the moon and Glenn Kenny has high praise at indieWIRE:

Che benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity. ... Benicio del Toro, despite being ten real years older than anybody playing the part in any period should be (and in fairness to him, let's note that this has been a very LONG gestating process; the original plan had Terence Malick directing with Soderbergh producing, and that was many years ago), works almost demonically at making Che's appeal palpable. But his performance is just a remarkable cog in Soderbergh's meticulous examination of process. Both parts of the film are largely about revolution as a job of work.

We'll indeed see how (or if) revolution works in the months ahead as distributors kick its sizable tires. Meanwhile, a few other long-distance odds and ends from the Croisette:

—Jennifer Lynch — daughter of David, survivor of Boxing Helena and Cannes '08 contributor with the thriller Surveillance — has a word with the LA Times about her checkered past: "I still can't Google myself today." But! "It's great to have fallen flat on my face and to stand up again."

—Guardian critic and infamously grumpy old man Ronald Bergan wants to know what happened to all the "great lost directors" whose careers have faded over the years. We'd empathize, except the mention of lucky hacks John G. Avildsen (Rocky, The Karate Kid) and John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, Short Circuit) isn't touching us quite so persuasively.

—Finally: Why the long face, Petra Nemcova? Oh. Sorry.

"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee told reporters. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that — that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

Incidentally, when Eastwood was asked about Lee's comments during Tuesday's Exchangeling press conference, the Cannes moderator reportedly rebuffed the inquiry. But! We digress! Lee also squeezed in a Coen brothers smackdown ("Look, I love the Coen brothers; we all studied at NYU. But they treat life like a joke. Ha ha ha. A joke. It's like, 'Look how they killed that guy! Look how blood squirts out the side of his head!' I see things different than that.") and announced a new documentary about Michael Jordan he's planning to unveil at next year's festival.

Elsewhere, we finally found someone who doesn't like Eastwood's latest, and the Croisette cascades with hype as Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-and-a-half-hour Che prepares to unspool in its entirety. "From a press and industry perspective, people are definitely talking about the film," writes Karina Longworth, "but everyone seems less interested in what's going to be on screen tonight than in how it'll eventually be seen." All together? Kill Bill-style? Straight-to-video serialization? Buy one, get one free?

Also among the debris:

—Hide the kids! Oscar-fetish grunt and Blurb Whore Hall of Famer Pete Hammond has been hyperventilating over Vicky Cristina Barcelona and co-star Penelope Cruz in particular, and it's all unflinchingly caught on video.

—Sadistic Variety blogger Mike Jones also videotapes a succession of fest attendees mispronouncing the title of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. (Don't be fooled — that's a hard "K" at the end of "York.")

—The brilliant if frustrating Argentinian director Lucretia Martel showed off her new film La Mujer sin Cabeza (The Woman Without a Head) on Tuesday; she was rewarded promptly with mystified reviews and the helm of a big-budget film about "alien invaders and their army of giant insects." Like Indiana Jones 4, kind of, but with even less story.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Paramount, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg have made some changes in their game plan to avoid the Da Vinci scenario. For one thing, they're not having a big party. ...

In contrast, Indy's producers have skedded a "filmmakers party" for 250 people — no press invited. There will be the usual press conference following the screening; the only TV and print junket interviews with the cast are scheduled the day before the screening, instead of afterward; access to Spielberg outside the press conference is strictly interdit.

We didn't want to go to your stupid party anyway; we're too busy joining Pete Hammond in handicapping the Oscar chances of this year's higher-profile fest selections. Actually, we're doing no such thing, and we wish Hammond wouldn't either, but there it is: Jury chair Penn might help shepherd his ex-director Clint Eastwood's Changeling to the Palme d'Or! Che is a front-runner, except it's not finished! Kung Fu Panda is an animated film contender! Only 10 more days of this; thanks for nothing, LA Times.

Elsewhere, Anne Thompson is making the rounds in smoke-filled rooms, and Jeffrey Wells was on the scene at a panel during which David Poland — via Skype! — apparently predicted the end of The Hollywood Reporter within three years. So, you know, don't renew your subscription.