Michael Fassbender stars in 'Shame', which is getting strong Oscar buzz despite its very adult subject matter and NC-17 rating. (AP)

By RENE RODRIGUEZ

Violence? Yes. Gore? More, please! Nudity? No, thanks. Since the creation of the NC-17 adults-only rating in 1990, serious filmmakers have tried to broaden our attitude toward sex on the big screen. But few have succeeded. Provocative, high-minded pictures such as David Cronenberg’s Crash, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution barely left a mark. The only NC-17 film that has had any significant influence on pop culture is the apocalyptic trash masterpiece Showgirls, which is remembered fondly – for all the wrong reasons.

Shame, the study of a man struggling with an addiction to sex, may change that trend. The movie, which opens Friday, is the first adults-only film since 1972’s Last Tango in Paris packing major Oscar heat. Michael Fassbender is a serious contender for a Best Actor nomination for his performance as Brandon, a New Yorker trying to hide his compulsive urges from his emotionally damaged sister (Carey Mulligan). Steve McQueen, who directed and co-wrote the film, has also drawn the attention of Academy Award speculators. They may be long shots, but they are in the mix.

Most important of all, Shame is bucking the box office tradition of the NC-17 rating, which has traditionally scared off audiences into waiting for the DVD. The film was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and has already drawn large crowds in New York and Los Angeles. As the movie expands gradually around the country, Hollywood bean counters will track its grosses to see if it can overtake Showgirls’ $20.3 million haul — the largest of any NC-17 film to date.
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My granddaddy made fun of me not having seen this. What do you think I should see?

In August, the last time I saw my grandfather and namesake, Rev. Lester James, Sr., I was on vacation in the D.C. area, and he was about halfway through a Saturday-afternoon showing of Jimmy Stewart’s “Shenandoah” on Encore Westerns. I watched about 45 minutes of it with him before I had to jump up and dash somewhere else – Oh, the times we don’t spend now that we regret later.

Anyway, I mentioned that I’d never seen that movie before and would have to NetFlix it when I got home, which made my granddaddy, who was already showing the fatigue of the cancer that finally took him from us last Wednesday, looked up from the lunch he had barely touched and gave me a very deliberate eyebrow raise.

“What?” said the Western afficiando, horse lover and man who took his cowboys, both in movie and real form, incredibly seriously. “What do you mean you never saw this movie? I’m surprised at you. You’re supposed to know movies.”

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Al Pacino says the enduring success of “Scarface” is “kind of like a fairy tale.”

At a party Tuesday heralding the Blu-ray release of the gangster classic, Pacino said the film “was eviscerated and treated with disrespect” when it came out in 1983 and “it’s almost a miracle” audiences continue to discover it.

The 71-year-old actor reunited with “Scarface” co-stars Steven Bauer, Robert Loggia and F. Murray Abraham and producer Martin Bregman at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles, where they shared memories about making the movie.

Pacino says he wanted to do a remake after seeing Paul Muni in the 1932 original, and Sidney Lumet suggested he make the main character Cuban instead of Italian.

Bregman called their new version “a perfect film.”

The Blu-ray comes out Sept. 6.

Mike Russell went undercover for the New Jersey State Police to infiltrate an organized crime syndicate. He brought down the family, with 48 arrests and 31 guilty pleas in 1986. His work was documented in an HBO special. (Brandon Kruse/The Palm Beach Post)

Mike Russell is the kind of cop other cops call a “dirt magnet.”

Really, they mean it as a compliment.

The bad guys always seem to come to him, even now that he’s 60, semi-retired and living in Delray Beach.

Recently at lunch, he was approached by a local small-time drug dealer about buying cocaine and OxyContin – while wearing a T-shirt from the Hollywood police, a department he consults for from time to time. That was just his latest come-to-papa conviction. Read the full story

Well, Reese Witherspoon’s quote in In Style magazine about how kissing Robert Pattinson during the making of Water For Elephants was “disgusting” leapt around the Internet like wildfire.

Whether it was damage control, or simply being around her co-star, Witherspoon was talking a bit differently about their scenes together at the film’s New York premiere.

We’ll have to wait and see on Friday whether the duo has the kind of chemistry the characters had in Sara Gruen’s best-selling novel.

Ben Affleck brought Boston to Venice, Italy, on Wednesday, presenting a reality-driven heist film “The Town” that is destined to draw comparisons to his other films also set in his Massachusetts hometown.

Affleck also stars in the film, which is having its world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival on the lagoon city’s Lido.

Boston was also the setting for Affleck’s Oscar-winning “Good Will Hunting,” which he co-wrote and starred in, and “Gone Baby Gone,” also written and directed by Affleck and starring his younger brother Casey.

“I didn’t want to get pigeonholed as the Boston director guy,” Affleck told reporters at a packed news conference.

Still, the 38-year-old actor/director acknowledged that his deep understanding of the city helped him create the style he aspired to and which persuaded him to forge ahead with his latest project.

The plot involves a gang of bank robbers from the Boston neighborhood of Charleston, notorious for producing more bank and armored car robbers than anywhere else in the United States.

“The social realism aspect of it was really important to me,” he said. “I don’t think you can like a movie like this or believe a movie like this unless you have a strong sense of place and really believe that the characters are from there and what you see is really happening.”

Affleck cited Warner’s Bros. classic gangster films as well as the more recent Italian film “Gomorrah,” directed by Matteo Garrone about the Neapolitan Camorra crime gang, as inspiring his work on “The Town.”

Gomorrah “was a big influence on me in that sense you felt that it was real. I had never been there before but you felt like he really got it right,” he said.

Affleck said the use of security camera footage was another way to give audiences a real experience.

“I wanted to show (the robberies) as we see them in real life,” he said. “(We) are accustomed to seeing robberies and violence in 15 frames-per-second, black-and-white material we see on YouTube or the nightly news of someone breaking in, with no sound, and breaking some glass and even maybe shooting.”

The film opens with a terrifying heist by masked robbers that finishes with the kidnapping of the bank’s director, Claire, played by Rebecca Hall. Before freeing her, the gang took her driver’s license, leaving her with fears they might come back for her.

Two of the robbers, loose cannon Jem (Jeremy Renner) and the steadier Doug MacRay (Affleck) are concerned she might have evidence to turn over to the FBI.

In order to find out, Doug stages a casual encounter at a laundry where he engages Claire in conversation and invites her on a date.

Eventually Claire confides that she recognized one of the robber’s tattoos but hadn’t told the FBI special agent (Jon Hamm) trailing the gang. At this point, Doug is in an increasingly volatile situation, up against his fellow robbers, particularly Jem and the mafia boss threats of Fergie, played by Oscar winner Pete Postlethwaite.

So far, the film is a high point for the Venice film festival, which has had less star power this year than in previous events.

Renner was on the Lido last year with director Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker” but shrugged off comparisons between the full-throttle characters he played in each film.

“Nothing from ‘Hurt Locker’ rolls into this,” Renner told reporters.

Hall’s career bolted upward with her starring role in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

The festival’s top Golden Lion award will be handed out at its closing ceremony on Saturday.

By CHARLES EALY

The controversial movie “Waco” will begin production in two months in Louisiana, Emilio Ferrari of Entertainment 7 said Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival.

The news comes a year after a dispute erupted in Cannes over whether the movie would qualify for state incentives. At the time, Bob Hudgins of the Texas Film Commission said that Entertainment 7, the production company, need not apply for incentives because they would not be approved, citing what he called inaccuracies in the script about the government raid on the David Koresh compound near Waco.

Ferrari received the news about the Texas incentives during the festival last year and strongly rejected the contention of script inaccuracies.

On Thursday, Ferrari said that Kurt Russell has been cast to play Byron Sage, the key FBI agent at the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, which left 54 adults and 21 children dead.

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