The stars must have aligned in a whole new way in the DVD universe, because we have an exceptional number of interesting indie release this week. My top pick is Simon Rumley's The Living and the Dead, which my colleague Scott Weinberg described as "bizarre, chilling and strangely hypnotic." As he wrote in his review, it "isn't a 'horror movie' in the most traditional sense, but is a thoroughly disturbing experience all the same. And by 'disturbing,' I mean: Really twisted, unique and fascinating to puzzle through." The DVD from TLA Releasing includes a "making of" feature, trailers and a stills gallery.

Eve of Understanding stars Rebecca Lowman as Donna, a woman who embarks on a road trip to deliver notes and knick-knacks to a motley crew of people at the behest of her recently-deceased mother. When she saw it at AFI Dallas last year, Cinematical's Kim Voynar wrote that first-time director Alyson Shelton "largely succeeds in what she's trying to get across, largely because Lowman's strong performance keeps us interested in Donna and what happens to her even in the film's weaker spots." The DVD from Vanguard Cinema includes two "featurettes," photo gallery and "director's statement."

Shortly after I first saw Casino Royale, someone asked me what I thought about it and I blurted out "B-." How could I, a Bond fan, give the movie such a low rating, they wanted to know, to which I replied that it seemed more like a movie-movie than a Bond movie and it should have gone further in its realism, and been R-rated. "If they had made this as a sort of R-rated version of Majesty's Secret Service, it might have actually been a great film," I said at the time. All of this is a long-winded way of leading up to mentioning that Daniel Craig is apparently keen on executing an explicit nude scene in Quantum of Solace, according to reports, which would seem to necessitate an R-rating this time around. Access Hollywood recently asked Jeffrey Wright about the rumors that Craig was trying to work some full-frontal into the movie this time around, to which he replied "The world is ready for anything, but I'm not licensed to reveal that." He also conceded that the title of the film was "pretty exotic."

Meanwhile, for those of you who have completely given up on trying to remain spoiler-free, there are now many details of a key car chase that will occur in the film. The Italian press has been all over this one, with an Italian Bond fansite detailing that the chase will take place along the banks of Lake Garda, between the resort towns of Navene and Malcesine and that the cars are expected to top speeds of 125 mph. According to them "the pursuit will feature spectacular and reckless maneuvers in a series of tunnels, culminating with a scene where a truck brings the action to an abrupt halt and a huge explosion." I don't know about you, but hearing that makes me immediately depressed because I have zero confidence that Marc Forster can pull it off. I mean, really, this is the guy who couldn't even make kite-flying seem realistic.

Finally, thanks to some advance toy marketing, we know that there will be a character in this film known as 'Elvis.' There's no confirmation on who this character is supposed to be, but since he's prominent enough to be toy-worthy, expect yet another casting announcement soon.

[Via MI6]

The British Times has gotten word that Bond 22 will be filming a scene next week at the Barbican, a performing arts center in the north of London. The center is typically used to host music concerts, art exhibitions and theater productions, and according to the paper the "a sign has gone up giving warning that next week it will be the venue for the filming of a scene from the next James Bond film, currently working title Bond 22, which will again star Daniel Craig. Relax, ladies, Craig won't be there as far as I know, but in the Sculpture Court ... they will film a man talking on a mobile phone, the sign says. We'll have to wait for the release of the film, set for November, to see why it was necessary to go to the Barbican to film someone talking on their mobile phone." And that's it. At first blush, this sounds to me a lot like the Miami Body Worlds scene in Casino Royale, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, a source who would know tells me that Eon Productions has yet to release any information whatsoever on Bond casting to Sony, and that includes a thumbs up or down on Gemma Arterton having a role in the film. In other words, they are trying their level best to keep all of this information secret for the time being. Still, I bet that whoever the actress is, she'll eventually be spotted lunching or walking down the street with Barbara Broccoli or Michael Wilson and the game will be up. The last time a major hiring decision was made -- Marc Forster -- the press knew about it before the release could be put out, because the press knew that Daniel Craig was incongruously walking down the street with Broccoli in L.A, obviously to talk business.

At first glance, the screenwriter who gave the world Troy wouldn't seem like the natural choice to adapt a literary novel of childhood joy and adult challenges. But David Benioff isn't just the writer behind brawny action films like Troy and the upcoming Wolverine: Origins; he's also a novelist, who adapted his own book for Spike Lee's brilliant, overlooked 25th Hour. After screening The Kite Runner at the closing night of the Mill Valley Film Festival, Benioff spoke with a roundtable of journalists in San Francisco about collaborating with novelist Khaled Hosseini, the challenge posed by certain cultural differences and the combination of brute force and finesse required to fit an epic novel onto film. Cinematical's questions are indicated.

I guess I'll start with the obvious question, which is: Given that this is a film about a culture completely different from our own, how instrumental was it having (author Khaled Hosseini) on-hand to support you?

David Benioff: It was a great help, and I think I got really lucky, because I've had friends working on adaptations where the relationship between the screenwriter and the novelist is ... tense. And sometimes you have a writer who writes a book and sells the film rights and says "Thank you for the money ..." and just doesn't want to be involved -- and sometimes they want to be so involved -- I can think of examples, like the Sahara guy. (Clive Cussler).

But in this case, Khaled (Hosseini) was both very supportive, but very understanding that the movie was going to be very separate from the book. And he was a great resource; I mean, I could do as much research as I wanted and read books about Afghan history and so on, but I'm not from there, I'm not a Muslim, I didn't grow up in Kabul ... and to be able to call Khaled or e-mail him -- it was mostly a lot of late night e-mails -- and then to wake up in the morning and to have a response from him, a very detailed response from him, explaining what the movie theaters were like in Kabul in the '70s, or what the protocol would have been in a certain situation ... it was a great resource. It was incredibly helpful, and I think it made the script much better than it would have been otherwise.

Cinematical: Obviously, you have a very good relationship with Mr. Hosseini -- and this is not asking you to speak ill of the book -- but what in the book made you roll your eyes, thinking "God, I don't know how you bring this to the screen?"

DB: I don't know if there's a moment, particularly, or just the length of certain sections. For me, when I was reading the book, I was completely captivated by the childhood scenes in Kabul and then felt maybe a slight loss of momentum in the American scenes. You know, many of the (American) scenes I actually love -- and many of them are in the movie -- but I felt like I had to compress that. There's no way to keep as much of the early childhood stuff as we did keep from the book and keep as much of the American things without the movie veering into (a length of) three hours and 30 minutes.

So for me, it was really compressing the American scenes in the center section there, and a lot of compression at the end; at the end of the book, after the climactic fight with the Assef in the Taliban compound and they flee into Pakistan -- then a whole other plot starts, where they're trying to deal with immigration, and dealing with an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) official, and that was never in the script. It was really a decision partly because of time, and partly because I felt like once we had the climax, having another 45 minutes of story time post-climax ... I felt like I would be wriggling in my seat. It just felt like, structurally, it would be a mistake.

Born in Afghanistan in 1965, Khaled Hosseini left in 1976 as his family was relocated to Paris as part of his father's work for the diplomatic service. It was fortunate timing; while preparing to return to Kabul in 1980, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan plunged the nation into decades of chaos some would suggest it has yet to emerge from. Gaining political asylum in America, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California; after attending medical school, Hosseini worked as doctor in Los Angeles -- and wrote his first novel. Not only was The Kite Runner published, but it was on the New York Times best-seller list for over two years, and eventually printed in over 42 languages. Now, after years of development and no small share of controversy, The Kite Runner has come to the silver screen; after screening the film for the closing night of the 30th annual Mill Valley Film Festival, Hosseini spoke with a roundtable of journalists in San Francisco about the challenges of adaptation, the genesis and possible fallout of the film's controversial scene of sexual assault and his own memories of Afghanistan. Cinematical's questions are indicated.

Cinematical: What did you learn about the process of movie making going through this experience?

I underestimated the sheer amount of labor it takes to shoot the seemingly simplest scene, just the amount of work that goes just into setting up a scene and how each member of the team has to do their job exactly right, otherwise the whole thing falls apart. It's very labor intensive. It's also very monotonous. It's exciting in a way, but -- you're doing the same thing over and over and over again. So there's a sense of monotony. I underestimated how exhausting it was. The hours are very long and physically it's very demanding. I don't know how some of these guys do it for 10, 20, 30 years, especially the crew. It's a lot of hard work.

How involved were you in the process?

I was kind of a cultural consultant, a story consultant. Maybe the best way to illustrate it is with an example; I went to L.A. and sat in an office with the producers and we looked at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures that a scout had taken around the world. And they wanted me to kind of chime in and say if there was any locale that could be used to as stand in for 1970s Kabul. And we looked at Turkey and Tunisia, Morocco and India, Pakistan, but western China, the minute those pictures started coming up, I said, 'This place.' So they went out there and the Afghans who have seen the film are startled at the resemblance.

So that kind of thing – questions about dress, about food, about the way a home is decorated, a variety of things of that nature. But I didn't write the screenplay. Obviously, David (Benioff) did. I read the screenplay and we all kind of chimed in our ideas and David wrote another draft, but really it's his creation.

How do you feel the film captures Amir's betrayal of Hassan, the scene where the boy is attacked? From the work you had do creating that scene, how do you feel about seeing it on screen?

I think the scene was shot tastefully. I think in other hands, it could have really been exploitative, kind of graphic, and I don't think there's any need for that. When the boy walks out of the alley and you see the droplets of blood in the snow, I always feel this incredible moment in the audience where they go, 'Oh!' Suddenly, it elevates the film to another level. The stakes are raised at that moment. It's really a devastating moment.

Before viewing (or reviewing) The Kite Runner, the big screen adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel, try a brief word-association test. Here's the key phrase:

Afghanistan.

What was the first thing that came to your mind? War? Opium? The Taliban? Terrorism? Perhaps, and there's no fault in that. However, if you're one of the many who've read Hosseini's book -- and kept it on The New York Times Best-Seller list for over two years -- you may have had a different set of associations: Families. Tragedies. People. And that is why Marc Forster's adaptation of The Kite Runner is worthy of at least a little praise, not only as a sensitively and beautifully made film but also as a deliberate attempt to reclaim Afghanistan -- and the Afghan people -- from an image that we in the West have crafted mostly from brief news reports of trouble or newspaper articles explaining a broken nation's shattered past.

Amir (Khalid Abdalla) is a writer; he lives with his father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi) in California, and they find some sense of belonging in the Bay Area's exile Afghan community, trying to move forward while respecting the past. Amir's written his first book -- his father wants him to take up something sensible -- and is married to Soraya (Aossa Leoni). And then there's a phone call. It's an old friend of the family, Rahim (Shaun Toub); he wants, he needs Amir to come back home. Amir left when he was a boy, during the Soviet invasion; his life is in America now. But Rahim explains why Amir has to come home, and finally convinces Amir with one simple phrase: "There is a way to be good again." Flashing back, we see Amir's boyhood in Afghanistan: His father is a hard-working member of the secular upper-class; his best friend is Hassan (Amad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of the house servant -- and young Amir (Zerekia Ebrahimi), motherless but not unloved, wants to be the best kite-fighter in Kabul. Meanwhile, Baba's faced with Afghanistan's challenges: "The fanatics want to save our souls, and the communists tell us we don't have any. ..." It's a glib line muttered over a drink for Baba; it's about to get a lot less funny.

It still doesn't have a title, and it still doesn't officially have a Bond girl, but according to Empire magazine, Bond 22 has found its villain. Of course, we don't know the character's name nor anything about him, except that he will be played by French actor Mathieu Amalric (Munich). The casting of Amalric was actually announced a few weeks ago by Fox News, but it couldn't be confirmed until Empire today got it out of the actor himself. He did hint at one loose detail about the movie, that it would be about childhood. Now, in the context of the quote, it actually appears that Amalric is saying that the desire to play a Bond villain stems from his childhood, but Empire understood his words differently, or at least spun them so that it seems like he said Bond 22 will focus on 007's childhood (as if James Bond Jr. and Agent Cody Banks weren't bad enough, now we may get a precocious young Bond). Empire also points out that Eva Green has dropped hints that Bond 22's villain will be her Casino Royale character's boyfriend, which would make sense now that we've heard Green will not appear in the next film, though photos of her character will.

This news would indicate that the Denver Post was wrong in claiming Robert Knepper would be playing the next Bond villain. Unless, of course, there's multiple bad guys -- a trend Hollywood has been a fan of lately. Either way, Amalric is an excellent choice to play the (or a) Bond baddie, and not just because he has that same foreign creepy look that Casino's Mads Mikkelsen has. The actor is receiving rave reviews for his starring role as a paralyzed sufferer of locked-in syndrome in Julian Schnabel's critically acclaimed new film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Fans of Amalric's need not worry that because of Bond 22 he will be more sought after for big Hollywood movies (as if any Bond villain actor ever was). The actor told Empire that taking the role is simply funny to him, it's not necessarily what he wants to do with his career and he will continue doing "very small French film[s] for free with [his] friends."

Coming Soon has a new interview with Daniel Craig, and he's talking Bond 22. The script is done, and filming is expected to start very soon to avoid conflict with a possible Screen Actors Guild strike (different from the WGA strike -- ay caramba!). Craig confirms that Bond 22 immediately follows the events of Casino Royale, and praises director Marc Forster, saying, "If you look at Forster's current body of work, that in itself makes me very excited. If you look at Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, and then Kite Runner, which is just stunning, it's such a diverse look at the world, I'd want us to have that. Marc is very solid."

You Ian Fleming fans might be disappointed with one tidbit from the interview -- Craig says the new script isn't based on Fleming's work at all: "There's nothing left, as far as I know." As for Craig's controversial mention of adding Roger Moore-style "humor" to the new Bond, Craig insists he was "lying," and adds "I'm not going to shy away from the fact that occasionally there should be humor. I just don't like gags. I don't like written gags. That's not the way I've ever liked working and I don't think that's funny myself." And Craig fans can rest easy, he says he's totally game for another Bond, as well as a sequel to the soon-to-be-released and surprisingly controversial The Golden Compass. There is no Compass sequel script yet, but there is an outline Craig says is "pretty good." Just pretty good? Show us a little enthusiasm there, DC! The Golden Compass releases December 7th, Bond 22 on November 7th, 2008.

Once again it's time to complain about the Academy's foreign film rules and point out the great films ineligible and/or disqualified from being nominated in the category. The Hollywood Reporter has a surprisingly long article about the annual controversy, in which the trade lays out everything you wanted to ever know about the Oscar for "Best Foreign-Language Film." Basically, the usual complaint is that such an award can't always truly honor the best foreign-language film, only the best foreign-language film that falls within certain guidelines.

Some of this year's obvious exclusions are Ang Lee's Lust Caution, which was denied submission by Taiwan because the film is hardly representative of the country's film industry, and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was passed over by its potential submitter, France, in favor of Persepolis (as was La Vie en Rose), which could have settled just fine with being an Animated Feature nominee. Other disappointments include The Band Visit, which was denied for having too much English dialogue, and The Kite Runner, which can't be submitted by Afghanistan because it was directed by Marc Forster, a Swiss-American, and featured an international crew. Afghanistan ended up with no submission, while Israel had to quickly substitute The Band Visit with Beaufort and Taiwan had to replace Lust Caution with Island Etude.

Last year, the Academy retooled some of the restrictions for its foreign-language category, although now it appears they could use some more tweaking. Also, I would like them to retroactively honor excluded films of the past, which they could do in some way without revoking the Oscars it has handed out (except the one for Tsotsi -- that one was really undeserved, and I'll say it again and again).

The record 63 films eligible for the foreign-language Oscar were announced last month by the Academy, and Cinematical's Eric D. Snider comments on that list here.

You may have noted my mention of a playwright named Beau Willimon last week. If not, it was in a post about a remake of the British miniseries The Jury, which Finding Neverland's Marc Forster will direct. I pointed out that Forster actually handpicked Willimon to be the screenwriter of that project after reading the guy's play Farragut North. The political drama is set to open on Broadway early next year with Jake Gyllenhaal starring and Mike Nichols directing, and I figured that eventually there'd be a movie in the works, possibly with that prestigious duo re-teamed for the big screen version. But no, it seems Gyllenhaal and Nichols just aren't good enough for Warner Bros., who owns the film rights. Instead they've cast some guy named Leonardo DiCaprio for the lead and are hoping to sign on some old television has-been named George Clooney to direct.

According to Variety, the project is also being produced by DiCaprio's company, Appian Way (The Aviator), and Clooney's company (with Grant Heslov), Smoke House (Leatherheads); both companies apparently teamed up after reading the script (were they at the same party as Forster?) and then together brought the thing to Warners. In the film, DiCaprio will play a young idealist working on a presidential campaign who ultimately ends up resorting to bad tactics like backstabbing and trickery. Basically, it sounds like the sad story of the common politico who still thinks there's room for Mr. Smith's out there, only to wake up and discover the real world of Washington. But as much as it sounds familiar, or obvious, or otherwise trite, it seems the play is somewhat autobiographical, as Willimon based it on his experience working on Howard Dean's 2004 campaign. Certainly the film would be a great timely release for 2008, but right now the film, which Willimon is adapting himself, doesn't have a clear start date. Hopefully Warners can grab DiCaprio as soon as he's done with Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and Clooney as soon as he's done with the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading for a just-in-time Fall opening.