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“I’ve been thinking about Medium Cool a lot lately,” writes Chuck Tryon at Newcritics. “In part because I’m teaching it, but also because the film’s treatment of history and documentary would seem to inform the debates about Brian DePalma’s Redacted and the decision to remove some documentary photographs from the film’s final montage.” Chuck hasn’t seen Redacted yet, but he makes some interesting connections in the full post, which you can read here. I havent’ seen Medium Cool since my first year of college (that’s about nine years, if you’re counting), and Chuck’s post inspired me to try to dig up some clips online. All I could find was the trailer above.

The thing that struck me when watching the trailer is that it looks very “real.” Obviously, I’m too young to have seen Medium Cool at the time of its release, so I don’t know if this is really a legitimate response–I don’t really know what “real” looked like in 1969. But even if it’s just a so-so approximation of 1969 reality, Medium Cool would seem to have something over Redacted, which wants to be a dispatch straight from contemporary popular media but, with its school play version of combat and video blogs kabuki, fails miserably.

Check out the Medium Cool trailer above, and the Redacted trailer below the jump. The almost image-free Redacted trailer is the ultimate teaser, a physical illustration of Brian DePalma’s insistence that the whole movie is comprised of material that an unnamed someone doesn’t want you to see. As Chuck notes, Medium Cool was, literally a movie that was considered too controversial and ground-breaking for release. In contrast, its trailer plays as a perfectly preserved slice of zeitgeist.

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MTV reports that Anthony Hopkins is getting ready to play Alfred Hitchcock in a film about the making of Psycho. IMDbPro has scant additional details: the film is in the script phase, and it will eventually be directed by Ryan Murphy, a TV writer who directed last year’s Running With Scissors. Helen Mirren will co-star as Hitch’s wife Alma.

This makes two slice-of-Hitchcock’s-life projects in the works, after Number Thirteen, which stars Dan Fogler as the young Hitchcock, and which I wrote about here. Psycho was shot on the Universal backlot, so hopefully the Hopkins film will at least touch on Hitch’s decadent steak-and-wine lunch ritual at the Universal commissary.

Semi-related: Jim Emerson’s entry on the Psycho shower scene for The House Next Door’s Close-Up Blogathon.

Under discussion:

Great World of Sound  (2007)

Low and Behold  (2006)

• New indie production/distribution company Elephant Eye is teaming with Palm Pictures to produce Craig Zobel’s follow-up to the Gotham-lauded Great World of Sound. Zobel co-wrote Turkey in the Straw with Barlow Jacobs, who wrote and starred in one of my favorite underseen films of the year, Low and Behold. The Hollywood Reporter says the project is expected to have a higher budget than Sound and to “include more A-list stars.”
• Following in the illustrious footsteps of Clint Eastwood and, um, Ben Affleck, Martin Scorsese’s next project will be based on a Dennis Lehane novel–this time, it’s Shutter Island. Scorsese will once again direct lil’ buddy Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead.
• Sidney Lumet will receive a Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association at their annual awards gala in January.
• Marc Graser reports on how the Southern California wildfires are impacting Hollywood life. You’ll take some comfort in knowing that although flames threatened to shut down productions in Santa Clarita and half of Los Angeles’ luxury hotels are booked full of Malibu refugees, “Paris Hilton’s home just steps away up the beach was unaffected.”