Death is the ultimate dramatic device, but great art doesn't emerge from strong devices alone. In Take, the directorial debut of Charles Oliver, the impact of a single, startling tragic death immediately conveys the sense of watching a gravely serious movie, which is definitely the case. However, having immediately provided a tone, Oliver fails to follow up with a story powerful enough to justify it. That's not to say that the experience Ana (Minnie Driver) goes through after her son dies in a freak accident before the start of the film isn't relentlessly bleak, but there's hardly anything distinctive about the circumstances to make viewers care any more than they would if they were glancing at it in the morning headlines.

Still, Olilver has made a quietly observant work solely driven by the specific needs of two downtrodden protagonists with completely believable motives. In flashback, we learn that Ana struggled with her son's elementary school, which wants to put him in a special needs program. Meanwhile, she has a hard time communicating with her husband and finding decent work to get by. Elsewhere, reckless gambling addict Saul (Jeremy Renner) destroys his life in a whirlwind of debt. His misfortune, as it's shown in early scenes at a prison where Saul awaits execution, will lead him to accidentally murder Ana's innocent child, Jesse (Bobby Coleman).

This year, television is going to get one heck of a drama! It's got all the ingredients for a hit. Sex. Dysfunction. Car Crashes. No, no, no. I kid. While I'd love a series based on David Cronenberg's Crash, especially if Elias Koteas was in any way attached, this is about that other one -- you know, the Crash that won the Oscar. Yahoo reports that the adaptation will be cable station Starz's first original drama series, with 13 one-hour episodes planned.

The series even has handful of the film's names coming back behind the camera -- Paul Haggis, Bob Yari, Don Cheadle, and Mark R. Harris. As for in front of the camera -- no cast members have been picked yet, although production is scheduled to begin in the spring.

Now, I'm one of those people who actually really dug the movie. I thought it was interesting, thoughtful, and entirely gripping. I was happy to see it win the big statue. That being said, I wonder how this will play to audiences. Many people have noted it's heavy-handedness, so what will that mean for a weekly series? A few hours of it, sure, thirteen hours -- not so sure. What do you think?

Yesterday, we ran the Guardian piece on Paul Haggis and noted that he hasn't yet laid claim to a title for his upcoming Bond film, still called Bond 22. Today there's more to report. This is very sketchy, and I've tried in vain to find the source video to investigate it myself, but here goes -- AICN is reporting the following, from a tipster who watches British television. Daniel Craig was on a U.K. television show called This Morning and some discussion of the title of the upcoming Bond film led to Craig maybe saying the title was going to simply be 007. Again, that's a giant maybe, because even the talkbackers on the AICN boards have noted that this appears to be more of an unfounded conclusion on the part of the commenter than anything with grounding. Specifically, Craig is "paraphrased" by the commenter as saying "It's more of a number. Because the first movie dealt with him earning his 00 status and now he is 007 for the first time."

Okay, what is more of a number? That's what's unclear here. The tipster is maddeningly vague on this point. After pasting the paraphrase from above, he goes on to say that Craig was specifically asked if 007 is the film's title, to which Craig responds that he 'may have said too much'. But did this come in response to the direct question about the title? If the interviewer put the question directly to Craig and he answered with "It's more of a number" then that's something. Otherwise, I think this is nothing more than a wild goose chase. By the way, I really need to get a life, don't I?

Screenwriter and director Paul Haggis gives a pretty good interview over at the Guardian, parting with some amusing anecdotes, like the fact that David Cronenberg is apparently "quite upset" with him over using Crash as the title of his 2004 film, despite Cronenberg already having a film with that title. He also talks a bit about In the Valley of Elah, and defends its box office, saying that it did well in the Midwestern markets, where people go to see a movie because "I like Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron, she's pretty." Gee, who would have ever thought Paul Haggis had a condescending attitude toward red-staters? Haggis also gives his views on the writer's strike and talks a bit about Million Dollar Baby, but the most interesting thing for me to note is that he's still not ready to part with the title for Bond 22, apparently because he doesn't have one.

According to the interviewer -- don't you wish the Guardian would just print Q&As instead of doing everything in profile, by the way? -- Haggis confirmed that the project is "still known only as Bond 22" and that his "contribution is unlikely to include advice on the title. He admits to never knowing what to call his scripts and when writing Crash, only used it as a working title." Although Haggis is known to have been not-quite-finished with the Bond 22 script when the strike happened, the producers were apparently satisfied enough that they decided to push forward anyway. I guess we'll find out how wise that decision was soon enough. In the meantime, what do you think the title of the next Bond picture should be? Take what you know of Casino Royale and Ian Fleming-sounding titles, and add in what you know so far about the next one -- it will be partially set in South America, it will have another Eurotrash villain, and will have Daniel Craig again.

I have to be honest with you, as much as I enjoyed Casino Royale, when it comes to the villains I draw a blank. There was no one too memorable -- certainly no villain to match up to say a Dr. No, or even Grace Jones' thigh strangling technique. IGN reports that Danish actor Jesper Christensen (aka Mr. White) will be returning for Bond 22; his involvement has also been confirmed by MI6.co.uk and CommanderBond .net. Both sites reported on an interview the actor sat down for with the Danish media outlet vip.tv2.dk. And it was during said interview that Christensen confirmed Mr. White's return for another go-round with our favorite conflicted super spy. Now if they could just figure out who gets to be the next Bond girl, they might have something here.

Last May, Oscar winner Paul Haggis was hired to do a little script polishing for Bond 22 (he did the same for Casino Royale). In an interview with IGN, Haggis confirmed that Bond 22 is "not based on any book or short story or anything that Ian Fleming had done. Although it is based on Ian Fleming ideas. And it starts right after the last one, two minutes after Casino Royale this movie starts." The ending, in case you don't remember, had Bond (spoiler warning) ... tracking our friend Mr. White to an exotic locale before popping him once in the leg and delivering his first official: "The name's Bond, James Bond". Last month, Patrick reported on the first glimpse of Daniel Craig back in action. Location shooting had been taking place in Palio di Siena during their famed horse race in the Tuscan town of Siena. Previous reports had also put director Marc Foster and Barbara Broccoli in Austria last July, so this time it looks like Bond is definitely going to be earning some frequent flier miles.

One of the 78th Oscars clip montages was devoted to films about big social and cultural issues, and when the clips were done and the cheering muted, host Jon Stewart gave a resigned smile to the camera and delivered a cruel, cutting, it's-funny-because-it's-true joke about Hollywood high-mindedness: " ... And none of those issues were ever a problem again." And that moment came to mind watching In the Valley of Elah. You get a sense of what everyone involved, especially writer-director Paul Haggis, was trying to do -- to make a gripping, engaging drama about Iraq and America -- but as the movie stretches and grasps and strains with sweaty-palmed desperation and clumsiness, you can feel those aspirations slip out of reach. You can tell everyone involved wanted to make an important statement. What they would end up making was a fairly indifferent movie. But hey, if an expatriate Canadian Scientologist who used to write for The Facts of Life can't bring the boys home, who can?

And I may, perhaps, be a little over-the top in the above dismissal, but that might just be because In the Valley of Elah is one of a ever-growing class of movies -- released in the last quarter of the year, festooned with talent, and ostensibly about something -- that desperately want to be seen as 'political' and 'important' modern moviemaking. My initial revulsion at the clumsy coincidences and cardboard characters and cheap tricks in Haggis's previous directorial effort, Crash, gave way to a sort of grudging admiration for the fact that, all things considered, Haggis was trying to talk about race and class. The willingness to look at those topics -- so present in life, so absent on the mainstream big screen -- made Crash seem better than it actually was. And while heaping honors on Crash may not rank on the all-time list of Oscar's worst Best Picture Picks (Forrest Gump, Million Dollar Baby, Around the World in 80 Days, et al.), it's not exactly in the honor roll of Oscar's finest moments.

But we've already given Haggis rewards for his lazy storytelling, his cheap sentimentality, his glib and clumsy narrative tricks -- so who could fault him for coming back to them again and again? In the Valley of Elah is very much in the mold of Million Dollar Baby -- where an older man uses his lifetime of experience to try and do the right thing even though doing the wrong thing would be a hell of a lot easier. It's also got Crash's delusions of moral grandeur. Yes, In the Valley of Elah is about great and mighty topics, but it's somehow both self-satisfied and self-righteous, both preachy and predictable.

I know what you're going to say -- am I that desperate for news of Bond, that even the slightest tidbit is enough to catch my eye? As it turns out, the answer is yes. CommanderBond.net recently reported that some unofficial location scouting took place for Bond 22 in Bregenz, Austria earlier this month. Representatives for a opera house in Bregenz confirmed that "people from Pinewood Studios in London" were nosing around. According to CommanderBond, the "people" were producer Barbara Broccoli and director Marc Forster.

Broccoli and Forster visited The Floating Stage on Lake Constance and they also spent some time watching a rehearsal for the festival's upcoming production of Tosca. The rep went on to say that he was expecting a decision sometime this fall, but there were no details of what the production had planned for the opera house.

Last month Foster had confirmed that they were planning on shooting in the Alps, and now we could be adding Austria to the list. (By the way, news about locations seems downright benign with the fallout from a comic Bond still being felt.) Sources at IGN are convinced that producers have given the green light for all the quips and double entendres in the script (which had received a little polishing from Paul Haggis back in May). The possibility that fans were going to have a much more jovial kind of Bond received some mixed reactions. The Guardian newspaper even joined in on the outcry and pleaded with producers to leave the jokes at the door claiming it was the, "creaking gags that sank Bond as a cinematic force." But to this day, there has yet to be a peep out of the production about what Forster really has planned, direction-wise. Not to mention the fact that we've all been burned by bogus rumors before.

What I like most about Paul Haggis is how he can bring together a bunch of actors -- some truly loved and others who you might question -- and make a really solid movie. Matt Dillon was swimming in a sea of questionable thrillers and goofy comedies before Crash, Sandra Bullock had her romcoms and c'mon -- Tony Danza? It almost seems like Haggis was chatting with someone, saying that he could pull the good out of anyone. I can only imagine that someone then said: "Okay, you've got Sandy down from Speed 2, but what about Jason Patric?" Well, if you had any doubts about him or the rest of the cast for Haggis' latest, In the Valley of Elah, I don't think you have to worry any longer.

MSN has put up the first trailer for the real-life-inspired drama, which is about an Army vet (Tommy Lee Jones) whose son disappears after returning from Iraq. It's a pretty somber, but intriguing trailer that starts off with his son's worried voice, some fuzzy images and then the dreaded call to Tommy -- his son is missing. All the big players are shown -- Jones, Sarandon, Theron, Patric, Brolin and Franco. As much as I love Josh Brolin in Grindhouse, it's nice to see him get some serious drama, and I can only hope he gets more juicy roles after this, and even better -- James Franco isn't channeling any Osborne whineyness. The trailer's got tanks, darkness, ominous shots, chases with pounding music and those typical pesky military cover-ups. Of course, it's also got some war commentary on Iraq, but that's to be expected considering the themes in Crash. Now, if you head over there to catch it, you might want to avoid reading MSN's description to the right. It's pretty revealing -- more-so than the information we've shared in the past, or the trailer itself.

I debated whether or not to even publish this -- rarely have two men had less to say about a subject. But nevertheless, Paul Haggis and Marc Forster did take a few questions at LAFF about their upcoming collaboration on the still-untitled Bond 22. Asked to speak in general about his commitment to the project and why he turned down an offer to direct, Haggis said: "I just didn't want to dedicate that much time. It's going to take me six months to get the script into shape as it is." Ouch -- that's a little harsh, no? Is he saying the script turned in by Purvis and Wade was subpar? That would be hard to believe -- those guys are getting hired all over the place. Haggis also took a swipe at the notion of this new film being a direct sequel to Casino Royale: "I wouldn't describe it as such," he said. "I think it's going to stand on its own although it does follow right on the heels of Casino Royale."

As for Forster, he brushed off the notion that he's already steeped in preparations for his Bond effort. "To be honest, I haven't put any thought because really, my mind is in The Kite Runner and scoring and finishing that up," he said. "I haven't spent any time with that stuff. I wish I could tell you. Maybe in a later period." Someone followed up that statement with the completely redundant question about whether or not he's found a Bond girl yet. "I think finding Bond girls will always be an interesting task but again, not something I have dealt with at this point," he said. Looks like we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit -- Forster isn't quite ready to put on the Bond hat yet. But soon.

Why mess up a good thing? The trio that made Casino Royale work so well is now in place for the sequel. We already brought you news that the script for Bond 22 has been turned in by original scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, but now comes word that, just like last time, Paul Haggis is being brought on board to inject his own voice and do some re-working. The LA Times speculates that with all of the projects he has going on, including editing In the Valley of Elah, Haggis might have asked for a hefty raise to do this again, but I personally can't imagine that it's really a chore -- who wouldn't want to take a more or less finished Bond script and add their own changes to it? The Times goes pretty far in giving Haggis credit for the success of the last Bond film, saying that his writing "helped to revitalize the aging franchise and give it the edgier credibility it needed to hook a new generation of fans." Wow -- sounds like someone is a fan.

Further down in the article, the Times goes the Variety and HR route of re-hashing what has been reported on the online movie sites, when they tell us that four directors are now in contention to helm Bond 22. The "whisperings" --as they call them -- have Tony Scott, Jonathan Mostow, Marc Forster, and Alex Proyas being in talks for the chair, although what LatinoReview actually said is that an offer is already out to Forster, and that makes a lot of sense to me. There's no way Barbara Broccoli is going to go toe to toe with Tony Scott every day on the set -- she wants someone she can keep a lid on. Jonathan Mostow? It's possible, but Forster sounds so right that I'm digging around right now to see if I can confirm it. Stay tuned to Cinematical for updates.