News of the Week

1. Sascha Baron Cohen’s Bruno has been slapped with an NC-17. Full story here. It's common for films to be submitted to the MPAA with questionable stuff, so they can be cut down and receive an R. Scorsese did this with Casino and the infamous "head in a vice" scene. He only put it in the original cut to throw the MPAA a bone, but they didn't object.

Onward . . .

2. Shutter Island (Scorsese’s fall film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Max von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley, Elias Koteas, Patricia Clarkson, Ted Levine, and John Carroll Lynch) has its first ad.I’ve heard there are a lot of surprises and developments in its source material (Dennis Lehane’s novel) so I’m avoiding all details until the film opens on Oct. 2, 2009

3. Composer Maurice Jarre has passed on at the age of 84. He won Oscars for 3 David Lean films (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, A Passage to India), but I’ll always remember him for 2 Peter Weir films (Witness, Dead Poets Society).