I hate to spread totally speculative bad buzz, but if any advance development merits the term "not a good sign," it's a movie getting its release date pushed back seven months to early September, the year's most notorious dumping ground. Yep -- Richard Kelly's The Box is now scheduled to be released by Warner Bros. on September 11, 2009.

Now, to be clear, its original February release date wasn't exactly a plum spot either. But occasionally something sneaks through early in the year -- think Cloverfield. The few weeks around Labor Day are where movies go to die. The only recent exception I can think of is 3:10 to Yuma.

I'm hoping against hope that the switch isn't actually a vote of no confidence, since a Twilight Zone-style sci-fi film from the director of Donnie Darko sounds fantastic. If it is a low-confidence move, I'm hoping it's a case of a studio not knowing a good movie from a hole in the wall. That happens a fair amount, don't you know. Richard Kelly could use a boost after Southland Tales sank last year.

The Box is about a suburban couple who receive a mysterious wooden box with a single button. The box comes with a promise that if one of them presses the button in the next 24 hours, they will get a million dollars -- but somewhere in the world, someone will die. The film stars James Marsden, Cameron Diaz and Frank Langella.

[hat tip: Cinema Blend]

I guess members of Arcade Fire like to keep an eye on their online reputation, because it took a total of eight days for the band to reduce a popular rumor to rubble. A little over a week ago, Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) had posted that, "a very famous band who is honoring us with being the first filmmakers they've ever scored a film with" had signed up to score his upcoming thriller, The Box. Before you knew it, Pitchfork had picked up the story and was reporting that Arcade Fire was that "famous band".

Cut to one week later and Arcade's co-founder, Win Butler, posted the following message on his blog (through the band's official site): "Arcade Fire is NOT doing the soundtrack to any film. We are all off for the summer, writing songs, reading books and keeping our plants alive" -- although he did concede that he might compose some original music for the film along with band mate Owen Pallet (Final Fantasy).

The Box takes place in 1976, where an unhappily married couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) receive a mysterious box from a stranger (Frank Langella). The box will reward the couple with a massive payday, but only on the condition that a complete stranger dies in return. Erik gave us the heads up on some production photos back in February, but so far there is no release date. Hopefully the 'stink' of Southland Tales has finally worn off, and Kelly will be able to secure an official date soon.

A dedicated contributor to the Ain't it Cool News machine got the chance to catch what they claimed was the final cut of Ron Howard's political drama, Frost/Nixon, and the good news is that it earned a resounding thumbs up (if you make it through the entire review, there is also a little surprise regarding the Arrested Development feature). Frost/Nixon is based on the famous stage play by Peter Morgan, which premiered in 2007 and earned Frank Langella a Tony for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play.

In 1977, Frost, as the host of a popular news show titled Frost on America, conducted a series of hard-hitting interviews with Richard Nixon. Nixon had been interviewed countless times before, but Frost was perhaps the only journalist to ever get him to admit his culpability in the Watergate break-in. Morgan adapted his own play for the screen, and it centers on Frost's team as well as re-enactments of the interviews.

Reprising their roles are Frank Langella as the disgraced former President Nixon, and Michael Sheen as British journalist, David Frost. Joining Langella and Sheen are Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, and Sam Rockwell as James Reston Jr. Judging by AICN's tipster, it looks like most of the praise will be directed at Langella's stellar performance as the former president. So for those of you who like to get an early jump on your Oscar pool, you might want to keep Langella in mind. Frost/Nixon goes into limited release on December 5th.

A good indicator of an unnecessary subplot is one that never seems to cross paths with the A-story -- it's a problem that afflicts the new film, Starting out in the Evening, starring Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose and film and stage veteran Frank Langella. Ambrose plays Heather, a feisty graduate student obsessed with the works of a minor, undervalued novelist, Leonard Schiller, played by Langella. Schiller is long past the point of imagining that he will be widely recognized in his lifetime for his work, and has settled into the quietude of old age, but Heather is so determined to gain access into his private world that she brazenly positions herself as a sexual thrill for the 70-something man, and he somewhat half-heartedly takes the bait, leading to a believable but half-cocked courtship and an interesting exploration of a completely lop-sided relationship. Good fodder for a feature-length motion picture, but for some reason director Andrew Wagner also shoehorns in an entire relationship drama centered about Lili Taylor, playing the lovesick, 40-something daughter of Schiller.

The notoriously press-shy Lauren Ambrose was not readily available to speak about her role during the film's recent press jaunt, but that's a shame, because her character is far and away the most intriguing aspect of the film. Heather is very believable as one of those early-20s graduate students who seem to have crammed a lifetime's worth of reading into the years when they could have gotten some fun out of life, making for an inherently sad but also clever and resourceful personality, able to stand toe to toe intellectually with someone who has fifty years on her. The best scenes in Starting Out come closer to the beginning of the film than the ending, when Schiller is continually rejecting Heather's entreaties to be his chronicler-muse-companion. Although he keeps telling her no, she keeps coming up with reasons to jam her foot back in the door, like some kind of bookworm stalker who knows exactly how to keep from being confronted with a final, stern rejection. These early scenes are spot-on and very well-executed.

Oh, how I used to wish for a future with funky, memorable, wonderful, and cultish Richard Kelly movies for years to come. Unfortunately, I've lost my faith. I loved Donnie Darko -- it was random, entertaining, and it merged actors from all different periods of my moviegoing life. Then I saw the director's cut, which was too over-explained for me, although I'm still eternally grateful for the Darkomentary. Now Southland Tales. I waited ages for that sucker, checking the ultra-vague website often; waiting. Then it came out to boos, got revamped, and now I'm hearing from some sources that it didn't help.

My future Kelly hopes seem dashed, but even after the flop that was Domino, and the Southland troubles, Kelly is gearing up for his third feature, The Box. Cameron Diaz signed on to star in June, then Frank Langella joined her in October. Now The Hollywood Reporter has posted that James Marsden is in final negotiations to play Diaz's husband in the horror film. The film is about: "an unhappily married couple who receive a box from a stranger (Langella) who tells them that if they push a button on the box, they'll receive a hefty amount of cash -- and someone they don't know will die." If it was as simple as that, there wouldn't be a movie, so I imagine those cash-givers are tricky and will make it someone connected to a future boss, family member, or something to throw a wrench in their already-crappy lives.

When you first movie is a cult sensation and your second movie is ... troubled, it's best to have a third project waiting in the wings. Fortunately for Donnie Darko and Southland Tales director Richard Kelly, that third flick is -- after a long gestation period -- finally coming together. According to Variety, veteran character actor Frank Langella will be joining Cameron Diaz in the horror film The Box. The trade paper says Langella will play "a stranger who presents a mysterious box to a woman." How's that for a killer role?

But Variety also reminds us that The Box is based on an old Richard Matheson story called Button, Button. (The basic premise is this: You're given a magical box and if you press the button, you become rich -- but a total stranger will die. You may remember this story from an episode of the "new" Twilight Zone that ran in the late '80s.) Although Eli Roth used to be connected to this project (as a writer, I believe), it now looks like it's Kelly's show all the way. When Cinematical interviewed Kelly at Fantastic Fest, he had this to say regarding The Box: "But my next movie is a psychological thriller, it's PG-13, has a mainstream concept, and it's something the studio is much more comfortable in committing to right away, telling us they'll put it on 2500 screens." So it's a horror film, but we're talking Vacancy 1408 horror here. In addition to directing, he'll be adapting the Matheson story. Production gets underway in the middle of next month.

And just in case you forgot, another Matheson adaptation -- I Am Legend -- hits theaters in December.

Like any fun but exhausting activity, you're anxious for it to be over, but then you miss it when it is. In what seemed like a blink of the eye, TIFF 2007 has wrapped. Eastern Promises nabbed the People's Choice prize, and the wonderful My Winnipeg grabbed top Canadian honors. (Rejoice!) But there was still lots of fun, great films, and some fest craziness that came before the awards were handed out.

My favorite story from TIFF came from a friend who had gone to see Starting Out in the Evening. She loved the film, and said that the end had made her teary-eyed. Impressed with Frank Langella's performance, she walked up to him as she was leaving the theater and told him so. "Are you crying?" he asked, and then wiped her tears away. That Frank is a slick, slick man.

On Wednesday, The Last Lear Q&A with Rituparno Ghosh was cut short when someone pulled the fire alarm. As is usually the case when the bell starts ringing, everyone ignored it and we continued the discussion. (How often do people actually pay attention to those things from the get-go?) Then, mid-sentence, Ghosh was cut short and we were told to exit the theater immediately, because it wasn't a drill as they initially assumed. Whoops. At least it didn't happen during the film. Pisay, on the other hand, had a few technical problems -- thankfully, it was a digital screening, so we didn't end up missing anything.

Technical advances bring artistic opportunities. Admittedly, I've seen my share of indifferent films shot on digital video, but at the same time, DV's also given us some of the best performances in recent memory -- Vera Farmiga in Down to the Bone, Patricia Clarkson in Pieces of April, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby. And, to that list, we can now add Frank Langella's performance in Starting Out in the Evening -- and those of Lauren Ambrose and Lili Taylor, as well. Langella plays Leonard Schiller -- a novelist trying to finish one more book, even though his other works are seemingly long-forgotten. But a graduate student, Heather (Ambrose), comes to call; she's working on a thesis about his earlier novels, and would like to interview Leonard for it. He's not interested -- too much work, too little time -- but something about her tenacity and insight wins him over. ...

... and perhaps it shouldn't. Ambrose's Heather is captivating and complex from the outset -- left to her own devices in Leonard's apartment she immediately starts casing the joint. She's smart and swift and manipulative -- but, in a weird way, not maliciously so. And soon she gets the measure of Leonard's life -- writing, writing and more writing, punctuated by the company of his daughter Ariel (Taylor) from time to time. Ariel's breezy and mostly together -- and in a relationship she's not crazy about, still thinking about her ex, Casey (Adrian Lester). Ariel would very much like to be a mom, but things aren't working out that way; maybe they never will.

So many motion pictures are driven by big conflict and big concepts that the subtlety and small-scale motions of Starting Out in the Evening sneak up on us; both Leonard and Ariel are so obsessed by the idea of how much time they have left that they're missing out on what's happening during the time they have now. And both of them come to a very different understanding of time and its unstoppable forward motion. ...

This Frost/Nixon is turning into the "character actor" event of 2008. All they need is Steve Buscemi! The cast includes Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell, Toby Jones, Matthew Macfadyen, and now the great Oliver Platt is on board as Bob Zelnick. Zelnick was the executive editor of the Frost/Nixon interviews. Ron Howard is directing the film, Peter Morgan (writer of Oscar bait The Queen and The Last King of Scotland) is adapting his Broadway play, which is a dramatic retelling of the post-Watergate interviews between British talk show host David Frost (played by Sheen) and former President Richard Nixon (played by Langella). Sheen and Langella will reprise their stage roles, Langella just won a Tony award for his performance.

I'm a big Oliver Platt fan, he's a welcome addition to just about any movie. I remained supportive even through the 1999-2000 "dark period" when he appeared in pretty much every bad film released, including the jaw-droppingly terrible trifecta of Bicentennial Man, Gun Shy, and Ready to Rumble. Today brings two bits of Platt casting news -- you television fans will be pleased to learn that he has also just been cast in a recurring role on the FX drama Nip/Tuck (Apparently he's only appearing in works with slashes in the title these days). Platt will appear in five episodes as "Freddy Prune, the producer of a TV show on which Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon) serve as consultants," Remember, the boys are in Hollywood this season. Nip/Tuck (a guilty pleasure if ever there was one) is a favorite of mine, and I'm very interested in the Frost/Nixon subject matter, so this is a good time to be an Oliver Platt enthusiast.

There's an indie film that has been off the Cinematical radar, but might just be something to look out for in the future. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Roadside Attraction has secured the worldwide distribution rights to Andrew Wagner's indie drama called Starting Out in the Evening, based on the 1999 novel by Brian Morton. The film, which premiered at Sundance in January, boasts an impressive cast of Lauren Ambrose, Frank Langella and Lili Taylor. Roadside plans to release it in the states this November, just in time for a nice awards push for Langella's performance -- it's one that THR gushingly called "astounding." What might be even more-so is the fact that the performance could come from a shoot that lasted only 18 days.

The story revolves around a forceful grad student named Heather (Ambrose). She's writing her thesis on a novelist named Leonard Schiller (Langella), and hopes this will be a huge step to her own literary success. She meets him, finding him to be: "Old, fat, bald, leaning awkwardly on a cane" -- the vision of her literary hero a bit dashed. Meanwhile, he's been struggling on the same book for ten years, as his health deteriorates. There is also Schiller's daughter (Taylor), who is struggling with her desire for a child and her marriage to a man who doesn't want to have one. Heather invades his world, a seductive and challenging pressure in his life. I'm not sure how much more you can ask for -- an interesting story, great actors, glowing reviews and some indie flavor.