There was supposed to be an embargo on Sweeney Todd reactions until Monday, but then Envelope guy Tom O'Neil posted last night and then N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr (a.k.a. "the Bagger"), let go. So I called my Paramount guy this morning and begged for a release from bondage, and he said okay.

Then David Poland posted this morning, mentioning also the embargo and being careful to point out that the film "plays a lot better on multiple viewings." (Mutliple viewings because, you know, Poland is so important and well-connected.) The only guy who's unmoved so far...Read More

I went to last night's screening of Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount, 11.21) with a guarded attitude. Here we go, another flush of the downward Burton swirl, get ready for it. The man has been in a kind of losing-it mode since Planet of the Apes and he's had his day...live with it. And then it began, and less than two minutes in I knew it was exceptional and perhaps more than that.

Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter

Ten minutes later I was feeling something growing within me. Surprise turned to admiration turned to amazement. I felt filled...Read More

A fresh slate of Sundance '08 titles were announced again today -- premieres, spectrum, etc. The pop-through titles are Martin McDonagh's In Bruges (opening nighter), Bernard Shakey's CSNY Deja Vu (closing-nighter), Brett Simon's Assassination of a High School President, Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Steven Schachter's The Deal, Rupert Wyatt's The Escapist, Sean McGinty's The Great Buck Howard, Mark Pellington's Henry Poole Is Here, Sharon Maguire's Incendiary, Tom Kalin's Savage Grace, Bill Maher's Sleepwalking, Noam Murro's Smart People, Alan Ball's Towelhead and Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association's decision to put Charlie Wilson's War, The Savages, Margot at the Wedding, Juno, The Darjeeling Limited, Waitress and Lars and the Real Girl into the comedy/musical category for the Golden Globes Awards is, of course, a bizarre call. Because the HFPA is committed to filling an annual slot of comedy/musical contenders, they seize upon any dramedy they can find and call it a comedy.

The general definition of a dramedy is a drama leavened with humor that is either (a) dry, (b) cryptic, (c) deadpan or (d) acid but almost never out-and-out "funny." Juno is probably the...Read More

Late to the table on Michael Cieply's 11.28 N.Y. Times piece about Disney and Pixar wanting to push Ratatouille for Best Picture rather than the "less prestigious," ghetto-ized Best Animated Feature Oscar. Answer: the Best Animated Feature Oscar is a very high honor and should be regarded as such. Only the very best animated films are considered so what's the problem? The friends of Ratatouille should leave well enough alone and stay on their side of the fence.

The first Sweeney Todd L.A. media screenings are happening today -- one at 4 pm, another at 7 pm -- but there will be no reactions like the ones posted after last Monday's Charlie Wilson's War showing. The trade review date is 12.17 -- Paramount is otherwise saying no reviews "until time of release." Tongiht's second high--voltage event is a post-screening q & a with Zodiac director David Fincher at the Arclight. Variety's Todd McCarthy will deliver the questions following a showing of the Zodiac Director's Cut.

I need to take a little credit for pushing an idea with Entertainment Weekly when I freelanced with them ('91 to '96) that they totally ignored, but are now finally going with -- a Hollywood "Smart List" that champions "the savants and the wunderkinds whose ideas are driving the film industry forward," according to EW copy.

In '93 or '94 (it may even have been '95), I sent at least a couple of faxed memos urging my then-editors (Cable Neuhaus, Maggie Murphy, Jim Seymour) to blow off the idea of putting out an annual Hollywood Power 100 list and go instead with...Read More

Manhattan hotshot journo Lewis Beale is the latest smart guy to allow his personal feelings to get in the way of acknowledging the malignant greatness of There Will Be Blood. In his not-yet-posted Film Journal review he admits it's "a major work from an extremely talented director that's been "meticulously made and contains some astonishing set pieces," and another one of Daniel Day-Lewis's "astonishing, burrowing-into-the-role performances." But it "centers on a pretty reprehensible human being whose actions become less sympathetic, and more bizarre, as the story unfolds." Beale calls it "a flawed, at times distasteful piece that will turn off as many viewers...Read More

Michael Fleming's Variety story about Jake Gyllenhaal agreeing to play famed quarterback Joe Namath put me to sleep when I read it two days ago. The fact that Namath was "the first football player to find rock-star status" means zip in terms of a strong story ingredient. I remember Namath and the reports about his big-star swagger -- fame, girls, money, endorsements. But nothing happened in his life that would make for strong drama.

The most exciting thing that happened in Namath's life was beating the Colts in the '69 Super Bowl. But a...Read More

After seeing Charlie Wilson's War last Monday night I wrote that I liked it, and I meant that. I said "there is edge and attitude in this Mike Nichols film -- certainly irony upon irony. And it does stay with you." I also said that if you can "kick back, chill down and enjoy what's awfully well-crafted and efficient about it (which isn't hard), you'll be fine with it too."

But the honest fact is that I like Aaron Sorkin's 5.25.05 version of his Charlie Wilson's War script somewhat more.

I don't know how much of...Read More

In his 11.29 article about the '08 Sundance Film Festival, N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger quotes festival honcho Geoffrey Gilmore as saying that more than half of the 2008 lineup emerged "from the pile." The term "pile" is usually accompanied by the adjective "slush," and taken together they mean films that have been submitted by unconnected nobodies. Or, as Halbfinger writes, "without the benefit of advance buzz from the festival's network of talent and sales agents, established filmmakers and other scouts."

The Paramount Vantage guys finally straightened out the embedded code for that new There Will be Blood trailer -- the best of the bunch -- without the other PV trailers looping in.

Two positive trade reviews for Charlie Wilson's War went up today. Variety's Todd McCarthy called it "a smart, sophisticated entertainment for grownups...snappy, amusing and ruefully ironic." And the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt said...well, it's hard to find a tight summation of opinion, but he notes that this "outrageous tale of 1980s-era good corruption, apparently largely true and all the more outrageous for that, might be the perfect antidote to today's shrill political scene with Republicans and Democrats staking out intractable positions and accomplishing little."

Another thoughtful letter about No Country for Old Men came in today, this one from HE reader Matthew Leicht. "I saw it yesterday, and it kind of shook me in a way that no movie has in recent memory," he begins. "For the most part, there seems to be a debate over various scenes in the film and why they're there, blah blah, but my thumbnail view is that this is a movie about principles and morals.

"Anton Chigurh is dismissed as a psycho by almost everyone in the film, but he explains in three different scenes (gas station, Carson Wells, Carla...Read More

"I can't tell you much about last night's [Manhattan] screening of Walk Hard-- there's a review embargo for a few more weeks-- but I will tell you this: I haven't heard an audience laughing so hard since Superbad," writes Screener's Katey Rich. "Coming after a long fall of grim (but often great) movies, Walk Hard is the perfect holiday season antidote for grownups, riotously silly but well-made, a thumb to the nose at the pretension and preening that often takes the screen this time of year."

At last night's Gotham Awards, Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger confessed to The Envelope's Tom O'Neil that Michael Clayton is his favorite pet pony in the Best Picture race. And that strategy-wise, he sees Atonement and No Country for Old Men as the likeliest contenders.

A statement of general policy, effective now and locked for the indefinite future: I hereby refuse to see any movie starring Queen Latifah, and I'm going to really and truly think twice about any film in which she plays a supporting role. As far as I'm concerned every film she's in carries the Mummy's curse, and that includes the mostly insipid Hairspray.

Q.L.'s track record is worse than Cuba Gooding's even, and that's saying something. The Perfect Holiday, Life Support, Stranger Than Fiction, Last Holiday, Beauty Shop, Barbershop 2: Back in Business, Chicago, etc. No reflection on her person or personality. She...Read More

A Wired/Underwired blogger named John Scott Lewinski said today that two sources (a working movie producer, the other a show-runner on an upcoming sci-fi pilot) have told him that the WGA strike is set for a 12.8 settlement, which is pretty close to what I heard last weekend about the strike settlement to be announced sometime close to Pearl Harbor day (i.e., Thursday, 12.7).

The bad news, he admits, is that he might be passing along "a rapidly spreading rumor that might be, in fact, a rapidly spreading rumor. Both of my sources refused to go on the record because the...Read More

Right off the top and without thinking too much, here are some gut-response standouts among the 2008 Sundance Film Festival selections. The dramatic competition, world cinema, world cinema docs and domestic docs were posted at 1 pm today by Variety's Todd McCarthy. Premiere selections will be released tomorrow.

Rawson Marshall Thurber, Sienna Miller on the set of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

As usual, one looks for catchy or provocative subject matter, a proven director, veteran actors...anything that pops through among the Sundance grim-itude. You certainly need to be on the lookout for any film that appears...Read More

An excellent new trailer for There Will Be Blood -- the best pocked-sized conveyance of what this film is -- performances, plot points and all -- is viewable from the Paramount Vantage website. But the embedded code is insane -- it relaunches every time you refresh HE -- and you're forced to watch trailers for Into The Wild and other PV films over and over. It was torturous so I dumped it and replaced it with this YouTube trailer, which is almost as good.

I sense limited interest in the 25th anniversary screening of E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial at the Academy theatre on Thursday night. Just as Steven Spielberg's esteem has begun to diminish, so has the legend of this 1982 film. And I'm saying this as someone who truly worshipped E.T. when it first came out, and who interviewed Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore for an Us magazine cover story.

It's certainly one of Spielberg's finest, but the saturation has been so commercially relentless -- the Universal theme-park ride, that awful Neil Diamond song "Heartlight." the endless parade of DVD re-dips -- that it's...Read More

In a capsule review, Time critic Richard Corliss -- usually a fairly adventurous sort and certainly no rigid conservative -- has slammed Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26), using terms like "daft" and "deranged zone." No worries -- it's a solvable issue. Corliss has to see it a second time, is all.

After my first Blood screening, I knew it was masterful but I felt traumatized, appalled, thrown off. The second time I saw it for what it was -- a diseased but riveting American epic without an ounce of fat...Read More

Rudolph Giuliani has a brief but significant mention in Charlie Wilson's War (Universal, 12.25) . It's just a quick line in a consultation scene between Rep. Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) and his secretaries over his being investigated for snorting cocaine at a hot-tub party in Las Vegas in '86. The debauch is depicted at the very beginning of the Mike Nichols film.

(l.) the real Rep. Charlie Wilson; (r.) Rudolph Giuliani

Wilson asks a secretary, "Who's running the thing? Who's the prosecutor?" She answers, "Rudolph Giuliani. From the Southern District." Another assistant asks, "Do you...Read More

By taking the best feature of the year trophy at tonight's 17th annual Gotham Awards ceremonies at Brooklyn's Steiner Studios, Sean Penn's Into The Wild became the first 2007 movie to win anything significant in the year-end awards cycle.

Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez and Peter Knegt have reported on all the managed generosity. Michael Moore's Sicko won the best documentary feature award, Juno's Ellen Page won the breakthrough actor award and Craig Zobel was named best breakthrough director for Great World of Sound. The casts of Talk To Me and Before The Devil Knows You're Dead tied for the best ensemble...

There aren't very many Republican actors in Hollywood, granted, but they're out there. And it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of them would be supporting Fred Thompson's bid for the Republican Presidential nomination. The guy has acted in "40 film and TV projects, after all, and appeared with thousands of other performers during his years in Hollywood going back to the mid-1980s until a recent turn as Ulysses S. Grant in HBO's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," as Politico's Jeffrey Ressner reports. And yet "only one recent contributor to Thompson’s presidential campaign, with a donation of $350, put...Read More

Yesterday's announcement about Warner Bros. production president Jeff Robinov being handed the reins of the newly formed Warner Bros. Pictures Group as of January '07 means he'll be running all worldwide marketing and distribution while continuing to oversee production for all studio releases. WB president and COO Alan Horn will continue to have "final greenlight authority" but will have less overall power and no dominion over marketing, which leaves domestic marketing president Dawn Taubin, a longtime ally/protege of Horn's, in a vulnerable spot or at least a somewhat weakened position.

There are hints that the Broadway stagehands strike might not go on too much longer. A guy with some knowledge of the Broadway theatre world told me earlier today that a resolution doesn't seem too far off. And N.Y. Times reporter Campbell Robertson wrote today that "in a sign that this stoppage might have been more of a break than a breakdown, the League of American Theaters and Producers announced that it was canceling performances only through Wednesday’s matinees" -- i.e., tomorrow's. "Two weekends ago, when the talks fell apart, the league canceled all of Thanksgiving week," Robertson notes. The two plays...Read More

Tariq Khan's 11.26 Envelope piece about the ten worst Oscar losers is based upon behavior actually witnessed by TV viewers, as opposed to what's been reported about this or that loser throwing a hissy fit. Sore-losing legend Eddie Murphy doesn't rate, therefore, because the cameras didn't see him leaving the Kodak theatre in a huff last year after losing to Alan Arkin in the Best Supporting Actor category.

This despite the L.A. Times' Joel Stein having run a 2.27.07 first-person observation piece about Murphy's limo driver being told to pick up Murphy just after Arkin's triumph.

Bill Murray's shocked...Read More

A day-late "welcome back!" to N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr, a.k.a. "the Bagger."

Carr has run a "comment of the day" from Kate who complains that little if anything in the way of late fall prestige movies have hit her local plex so far. HE's reponse: Kate, the key to 21st Century moviegoing is to give up on the old lofty pedigree/ warm-emotional-bath feelings that award-level films have given you in the past. Forget about movies soothing your soul. You're not going find deer and rabbits in the North Pole, and the state of...Read More

While admitting yesterday that he "got played a little" and "was not as careful as I should have been" in posting the since-discredited story about a Weinstein plan to push I'm Not There's Cate Blanchett in the Best Actress instead of Best Supporting Actress category, David Poland was correct in saying that Blanchett's Dylan turn "is one of the five best performances on the year in all categories, male or female or dog or cat, if you were going to pick five...it is easily the current crowning achievement of her career."

The Film Independent, non-IFP Spirit Awards selection committee really likes Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, and not just because of the four just-announced nominations -- Best Feature, Best Director and acting noms for Cate Blanchett (a sure winner) and Marcus Carl Franklin. They've also selected the Weinstein Co. release to receive the org's Robert Altman Award, a pat-on-the-back group award for the director, casting director and ensemble cast.

Lisa Kudrow, Zac Braff following the reading of nominations -- Tuesday, 8:28 am, 2nd floor conference room, West Hollywood's Sofitel.

Jason Reitman's Juno, Julian Schnabel's The Diving...Read More

Charlie Wilson's War (Universal, 12.25) is a very good-but-not-great political dramedy with a very solid and settled Tom Hanks, an agreeably arch and brittle Julia Roberts (in the finest sense of that term) and a brilliant Phillip Seymour Hoffman...give this man a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination and no jacking around...thank you!

It's not a monumental achievement but that's okay...it really is. It's a film aimed at the over-40 set and that's cool also. All right, yes...it feels a little too pat and tidy and perhaps a wee bit smug, but that's fine also. There is...Read More

When the WGA strike ends early next month a lot of creatives are going to look back on this brief turbulence as one of the warmest and happiest community periods of their lives. Because suddenly there won't be a picket line to go to or a march to attend, and it'll be back to struggle and loneliness before a flat screen for writers and budget meetings and power lunches and getting their car detailed by their favorite detail guy for producers.

Strikers won't be laughing, lobbing quips at visiting reporters, shooting YouTube videos and making each...Read More

If you ask me, an action flick about Jesus Christ having an evil twin brother is the sort of thing that only Alejandro Jodorowsky could have done justice to, and only if he'd made such a film in his late '60s-early '70s heyday. The fact that Reuters reporter Tony Tharakan filed a story about director Robert Sigl and producer Mario Stefan announcing an interest in tyring to make such a film (it's to be called The 13th Disciple) is one thing, but why Reuters ran it is another.

Charlie Wilson's War will have its first elite media look-see screening tonight in Los Angeles. Universal reps are "pretty confident" about it so "nobody's expecting an embargo." I don't see what the big deal is about being the first to respond, although there's always one or two eager beavers who drive right home and put something up by 11 pm or 12 midnight.

And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg (no relation to Harvey Fierstein) has posted a fairly strong shoot-down of David Poland's report that the Weinstein Co. will be promoting Cate Blanchett I'm Not There performance for Best Actress...not! "I can now confirm that Blanchett's performance will remain under awards consideration for Best Supporting Actress, not Best Actress," he reported at 6:46 pm east coast time.

"A senior official at The Weinstein Company has made this unmistakably clear," Feinberg writes. Blanchett "is still supporting as she always has been."

I haven't made any calls this afternoon to Weinstein Co., but my...Read More

Brian Stelter has profiled Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke in an 11.26 N.Y. Times piece because of the huge daily numbers she's been getting due to her bang-bang Maxwell's Silver Hammer Writers Strike coverage. Since the strike began Finke "has published 142 posts about it, [has] worked almost around the clock for three weeks, and fallen asleep at the computer four times. She estimated she had received 2,000 e-mail messages a day."

Finke's heart is obviously pro-WGA but so what? Good accurate reporting is essential but not enough. If you don't lay something personal on the line, you're not earning your page views.

New Line's "For Your Consideration" site is trumpeting three '07 releases -- The Golden Compass, Hairspray and The Last Mimzy. In a normal year the obvious third-ranked contender would be Gavin Hood's Rendition, which hasn't much of a shot at anything but has some decent performances to its credit. Peter Sarsgaard and Meryl Streep are stand-outs, and Esquire recently hailed Jake Gyllenhall's lead perf as a conflicted CIA guy. But it's all been tossed aside so that a vanity project can enjoy a nominal day in the sun.

Cate Blanchett's I'm Not There performance seems an extremely safe bet to win a Best Supporting Actress trophy or two from critics groups later this year (perhaps even a bagful), and is a near-certain lock to be Golden Globe- and Oscar-nominated in this category. And the category itself is correct because she's part of a six-actor Dylan ensemble. But now, according to David Poland, certain parties want to mess with this groove and reset the table.

Even the clueless Academy types who aren't fans of the film (exemplified by that woman who told Pete Hammond "the...Read More

I blame the "leave us aloners" for blowing off the Iraq-themed films willy-nilly, especially the really good ones like In The Valley of Elah. But I can't blame anyone for passing up Brian DePalma's Redacted, a very difficult sit that died a pauper's death this weekend.

Laura Linney's WGA "Speechless" short (#1) is certainly the best-acted and perhaps the best of the bunch -- earnest and solid, but at the same time dryly funny. "Hi, my name is Laura and I'm an actress without a script. I realize that my life has become unmanagable in this situation, so I've decided to take a step forward and ask my higher power for guidance and help." Creative team: George Hickenlooper, Alan Sereboff, Kamala Lopez and Jill Kushner. Tech team: Joel Marshall, Justin Shumaker, Anthony Marinelli and Clint Bennett.

Plus "Speechless" #7 with Andre Benjamin, Speechless #8 with Bill...Read More

An odd recollection can be found in David Carr's 11.25 N.Y. Times interview with No Country for Old Men costar Woody Harrelson. The feminist attacks upon The People vs. Larry Flynt "sort of broke my heart,” Harrelson says, “because what people were saying really had nothing to do with the work and what it was about. It was just politics.” And so he took five years off to lick his wounds? I've lost count how many times I've had my heart broken and wanted to hide out in some faraway place and do nothing. But it wasn't an option.

Christian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is getting a one-week Oscar qualifying run in Los Angeles starting on 12.21. This will make it slightly easier for various critics groups to give it their Best Foreign Film prize, if they're so inclined. Before the December date was anounced, the plan was to open it through IFC First Take on 1.25.08.

HE reader Mary Chan wrote yesterday with observations about the shift, to wit:

"As you know, IFC had planned to release 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days through IFC First...Read More

A straight-reporting piece by Time's Rebecca Winters Keegan about the WGA's "Speechless" spots as well as other online diversions on You Tube, etc. Latest fave: www.lateshowwritersonstrike.com. A slogan from a Justin Stangel piece: "More money, Les Moonves."

Enchanted was steady but flat yesterday. The new five-day projection tally has dropped to $49,086,000, just a nose hair below yesterday's figure of $49,198,000. Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason, who sometimes tends toward generosity, is projecting a five-day tally of $53 million and change. It be It would be entirely natural for Disney distribution execs to claim $50 million-plus in today's trade box-office stories, and -- who knows? -- the real Monday figures may bear this out.

Phil Donahue has told Politico's Jeffrey Ressner that he's "feeling his way along the wall of a dark hallway" in terms of finding theatrical distribution for Body of War, the documentary about a wounded Iraq War veteran he co-directed with Ellen Spiro. The movie can't get arrested because the leave-us-aloners won't pay to see Iraq War dramas with movie stars in the cast, which makes distributor interest in a doc along these lines next to nil. It will obviously help if Body of War becomes one of the five Best Feature Doc nominees (it's on the short list), but...be optimistic!

An 11.23 L.A. Times essay by critic Michael Sragow about the links between No Country for Old Men, Sam Peckinpah, Norman Mailer, Tommy Lee Jones and Roger Deakins.

Touched by his performance as a blind former college professor in Curtis Hanson's In Her Shoes, I interviewed the 90 year-old Norman Lloyd at his Brentwood home a couple of years ago. The producer-actor is still going strong today (healthy, plays tennis, gets around town in a Jaguar) and currently the subject of career retrospective doc, Who Is Norman Lloyd?, which opened yesterday at Manhattan's Film Forum.

Norman Lloyd in his Brentwood home -- Tuesday, 9.27.05, 5:45 pm.

I haven't seen Matthew Sussman's doc yet, but presumably a Los Angeles screening or...Read More

Enchanted's five-day projection keeps falling, falling...it's now dropped to under $50 million for five days. $49,198,000, to be precise, with $34,398,000 for the three-day weekend. This Christmas is looking at $27,296,000 for 5 days and $18,800,000 for the weekend. Beowulf will end up with a 5-day tally of $23,399,000. This will bring Robert Zemeckis' 3-D fantasy up to a $56,445,000 cume -- it'll be a push to hit $100 million. Hitman keeps on dropping..$20,800,000 for the weekend.

Other 5-day totals: Bee Movie -- $15,700,000. Fred Claus -- $14,600,000. August Rush -- $13,800,000. American Gangster -- $13 million even.

The...Read More

Three additional thoughts about Amy Adams' performance in Enchanted. You'll never read these on The Envelope because they're not cheer-leady enough, but they're true from a certain perspective.

One, the animated version of Giselle, her fantasy-land heroine, is right out of the Snow White mold, which is to say younger than springtime with a creamy peach-blossom complexion. But within seconds of her arrival in Times Square as a biological presence it's obvious that Giselle is no spring chicken. Adams is 33, and has the smile wrinkles to prove it. She's being called a semi-new...Read More

I've read David Halbfinger's 11.23 N.Y. Times piece about how the studios are enjoying a certain advantage in casting this and that actor twice now, and I still don't get the gist, and I don't k now that it's important that I do. It reviews the backstage shufflings in the wake of Brad Pitt's departure from State of Play and more particularly the effects of the WGA strike upon the schedules of Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp.

With WGA strike talks resuming on Monday, 11.26, the key phrase in Halbfinger's piece is "the chance of a quick settlement." The...Read More

Consider Eduardo Ciannelli's electrifying "kill, kill, kill!" speech from Gunga Din. The striking if antiquated element, of course, is how Alfred Newman's music emphasizes every other line -- it's almost a musical number of sorts. This sort of thing disappeared from soundtracks long ago -- it would be laughable if James Horner or Mark Isham were to try anything like it today -- and yet the effect works in this instance. And the visual element -- Ciannelli's eyes shining like beams against his dark facial makeup -- augments all the more.

A day late and a dollar short, but here are the fourth, fifth and sixth WGA "Speechless" video spots.

Rod Lurie's prison visitation short (#6) with Kate Beckinsale and David Schwimmer, shot on the set of Nothing But The Truth, is easily the best. Schwimmer perfectly conveys just the right amount of futility about being unable to speak to Beckinsale (and vice versa). Spot #4 stars Jeff Garlin (I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With). Spot #5 features the cast of Ugly Betty.

Three new videos are debuting daily throughout Thanksgiving weekend -- morning, afternoon and evening -- so...Read More

Enchanted is a huge hit with the public (a five-day gross in the mid-$50 million range) and critics alike (a 93% positive Rotten Tomatoes score), and even hard-core sourpusses need to admit it has four or five scenes that succeed beautifully. But fans are turning a blind eye to an inescapable fact. The concept (four Snow White-ish cartoon characters catapulted into 2007 New York City) is great but Bill Kelly's script is flimsy and hackneyed. Because of this, a film that could have been marvelous barely makes it across the finish line.

And yet several things...Read More

The current consensus is that 2007 has come close to being another 1999 -- an exceptionally rich and bountiful year in terms of sheer quality. The likelihood, however, is that the Best Picture elimination process that prevailed eight years ago will happen again this year -- most of the truly great ones ignored, two or three good ones championed, and a couple of mediocrities working their way into the fold.

The best '99 films were Election, The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, The Limey, The Sixth Sense, Magnolia, The Straight Story, The Cradle Will Rock, Run Lola Run, Any Given Sunday, The Hurricane,...Read More

An IMAX-produced featurette is up about the decision to shoot "certain sections" of Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight (Warner Bros., 7.18.08) in IMAX and the challenges that went with this.

Warner Bros. publicity has invited elite and geek press to a special screening of selected portions of the IMAX Knight footage at the Universal Citywalk IMAX theatre on or about 12.5. The three talking heads are director-writer Nolan, dp Wally Pfisterand steadicam operator Bob Gorelick.

Nolan: "No one's every done this before...shooting certain sections of the film in IMAX would give us the biggest...Read More

Yesterday's projected five-day figure for Enchanted was reported as $68 million instead of the correct $58 million. A mistake, plain and simple.

Yesterday's box-office projection reporting was ridiculous -- the rudimentary Wednesday figures led to overblown and misleading three- and five-day figures on the studio-calculator side, and I misheard (i.e., failed to double-check) two figures that compounded the confusion. Hurried, blurred, holiday fatigued...no excuse.

Enchanted then took in $6.8 million yesterday, down 16%, which has resulted in an adjusted five-day projection of $54 million and a three-day weekend figure of $39 million.

But the studio calculators still don't know enough and...Read More

Craig (a.k.as. "Goodvibe61") wrote this evening about No Country for Old Men, and said certain things about it in a cleaner and more eloquent way than I've managed so far.

"I really admire this film," he began. "It's a truly inspired work of art. What's really gotten to me are all the complaints on the web from movie fans who are either disappointed with the sudden ending of the narrative, or mad because they don't seem to understand what happened. I read all this stuff out there and I ask myself why audiences ask so little of themselves when they watch a...Read More

I don't feel an obligation to state what I'm thankful for because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. I feel thankful 24/7/365. I'm sorry that some people out there feel entitled to their good fortune, but you can't teach perspective and humility. And with those words...

The trailer for Martin McDonagh's darkly comedic In Bruges. The '08 Sundance opener stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleason and Ralph Fiennes. The trailer's from Alliance; Focus Features will open it on 2.8.08. It would be good to see this before leaving for Boston on 11.30. (I'll be staying there all through December). Only long-leaders are being waved into screenings as we speak.

"The madness...the music...the movie of the holiday season!" Homey, mom's-apple-pie narration for a G-rated, family-friendly TV promo for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. No missing Johnny Depp's straight razor in the final shot, but otherwise the truth-in-advertising factor is...well, par for the course.

Red Carpet District's...I mean, In Contention's Kris Tapley has dinged Rob Reiner's The Bucket List by calling it "a heavy layer of schmaltz that doesn't settle into anything that feels genuine or ultimately enjoyable, given the potential in front of the camera."

My God...Reiner dishing schmaltz? Doesn't calculate. I need to step outside and take a walk and kick this around.

"I'm not going to offer a full pan of the film, because it doesn't really deserve that," Tapley goes on. "Its heart is in the right place and it should be a fun...Read More

You won't find much debate about Roger Deakins being locked to win the Best Cinematography Oscar (for the combination of No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and In The Valley of Elah). It also seems as if Tony Gilroy is locked to win the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Michael Clayton (i.e., as a consolation for not winning Best Picture or perhaps not even being nominated), and that Joel and Ethan Coen are locked to win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for capturing the pruned-down essence of Cormac McCarthy in their No Country screenplay....Read More

Here are the first, second and third WGA "Speechless" video spots, conceived by George Hickenlooper and Alan Sereboff. WGAW chief Patrick Verrone has given Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke an exclusive internet window as a reward for her ceaseless pro-WGA strike coverage.

Laura Linney, Sean Penn, Harvey Keitel, Holly Hunter

Three new videos will show daily throughout Thanksgiving weekend -- morning, afternoon and evening. The ones up so far -- the first with Holly Hunter, the second with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss and...Read More

In Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters (Weinstein Co., 12.25), a primarily true period story (set in 1935) about student debaters from the African-American Wiley College in Texas having a climactic match with debaters from Harvard University, the 17 year-old Denzel Whitaker plays James Farmer, the renowned founder of CORE and civil-rights leader who was one of the Wiley debaters.

(l. to r.) Great Debaters costar Denzel Whitaker; James Farmer in the '40s; in the mid '60s

Listen to this recording of Farmer, and you can sense his debating skills...Read More

Complaining once again about not being cast in JJ Abrams' Star Trek remake, William Shatner has said "how could you not put one of the founding figures into a movie that's being resurrected?"

Once again, the answer: In Rob Burnett's Free Enterprise ('98), Shatner traded in the legend of the stalwart Cpt. Kirk for the persona of an amusingly deranged septugenarian actor. That was nine years ago, and the wackjob routine -- a career rejuvenator -- has fed into Shatner's acting (it's obviously in his Boston Legal character) and pretty much taken over. His cameo time in Abrams' Star Trek would...Read More

Happy Thanksgiving wishes to N.Y. Post critic/bogger Lou Lumenick and his ninth annual Turkey Awards, despite the bizarre hostility shown to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Brad Pitt didn't "stink up empty theaters posing and mumbling his way through the title role" -- he gave something close to the finest performance of his career. And Andrew Dominik's film wasn't "longer than its title" -- it was a time-travel journey so immaculate I never once thought about my watch.

Cheers once more to Warner Brothers for releasing this phenomenal film...Read More

Enchanted is #1 by far -- did about $8 million yesterday, projecting $41 million over 3 days and $58 million over the full 5-day holiday. This Christmas is #2 -- $4 million yesterday, $28 million for 3 days, $38 million for 5 days. Hitman is #3 with $21 million for 3 days, $31 million for 5 days. Beowulf is projecting $18 million for 3 days, $28 million for 5. ("Not very good," the numbers guy says. "Five-day second weekend should exceed the first three days, but instead it matches it. Cume is now under 70 million, going into post-turkey dead time...not good.")

I...Read More

How come the only time the internet seems to confuse the studios is when it's time to pay the writers for it? A short video brief starring Bob Iger, Sumner Redstone, Ben Silverman, Rupert Murdoch and Les Moonves. (Originally posted 11.12.07.)

(In honor of the the limited opening of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, a repeat run of my 9.11 Toronto Film Festival review): Anyone who says this isn't an essential film to see -- not just for the portions that "deliver" but the ones that are radiantly, eye-poppingly alive -- is operating without the DNA of a true movie lover...it's that simple. This is a great poetry-weave film, a reanimation of '60s spiritual-cultural energy like no feature I can recall, and a magnificent head-tease that is always arresting, even during the fumble portions.

It's not...Read More

Frank Darabont's The Mist is a moderately cool little film during the first act when none of the characters knows what's happening, when all they know is that the heavy mist -- call it thick fog -- enveloping their small town is a bringer of something wicked. But once it moves out of Twilight Zone territory and becomes a slimey-ass monster film, forget it. That's all you need to hear.

David Fincher's Zodiac "is another movie that isn't gaining Oscar momentum," writes Variety's Anne Thompson. One reason this hasn't happened is that good journalists like Thompson have been dismissing its Oscar chances all along. She acknowledges it was "well-reviewed last summer" (despite having opened last March) and that "many critics may include it on their ten-bests," but says "its time has come and gone."

Thompson is probably right, but I take no satisfaction in admitting this. If this racket has taught us anything, it's that conventional industry wisdom is truly the poison mist floating across...Read More

Peter Yates' The Friends of Eddie Coyle ('73), still unavailable on DVD, is playing tonight and tomorrow at the Brattle theatre in Cambridge as part of a "Boston Filmed" series. I've heard about that bootleg version that's been mastered from an old VHS tape, but who in their right mind would want to watch such a thing?

The Envelope's Pete Hammond is reporting that Todd Haynes' I'm Not There didn't play very well with a smallish Academy group. The Bob Dylan epic "lived up to its title and gathered a much smaller academy group that saw a few walkouts," he writes, "according to two members who were both unimpressed -- even by Cate Blanchett's bravura supporting turn as one of six Dylans.

"'I think the only people who will like this thing are the ones who love this guy's music," one academy voter told Hammond. Once again, obiter dicta -- "this guy's...Read More

Just acknowledging what I've failed to point out (despite everyone else having done so), which is that Michael Clayton will probably break even -- made for $20 million (George Clooney took nothing), now at $37,181,284, will hit $40 million -- so that early rap of being a financial under-performer that was slung around its neck for a few weeks doesn't apply. For a smart, mildly grim, somewhat challenging film about corporate lawyers pulling this and that string, that's an accomplishment.

Pete Hammond has written about having done a recent post-screening q & a with Clooney, and...Read More

Choosing big-category favorites each week for the weekly Envelope Oscar prognosticator chart is not something I look forward to. I sit there and I choose, but it's like throwing darts. It feels vaguely irritating because I can't quite give myself over to saying this film or that performance is "better." Something's not kicking in. All I'm certain of is that I don't like the idea of choosing a comfort-blanket movie for Best Picture simply because it's soothes, caresses and reassures.

The aroma, the prevailing winds and the dandelion pollen hall have all but convinced me that Charlie Wilson's War and Sweeney Todd...Read More

A relaxed, amusing and wide-open Charlie Rose sit-down with Joel and Ethan Coen, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin.

I was talking with Bardem, Miramax chief Daniel Battsek and some others associated with the film at the No Country party during the Toronto Film Festival, and Bardem said at one point, "We are all very lucky." And I was immediately struck by his perfect delivery of this line. Not in a champagne-toasting, smiling, cheers-around-the-room sort of way, but with an air of relaxation and matter-of-fact acknowledgement. He wasn't saying that good fortune was rote -- he was smiling and he meant it...Read More

We all know how how some tunes seep in at odd moments -- most often in the car -- and sometimes hang around longer than you might expect. Some never leave. It's strange how this one has sunk in since first hearing it a year or two ago. It has something to do with the no-discernible-lyrics aspect (due to that ancient backwards-tape trick of 35 or 40 years ago) and the way it all comes together at the very end (which, in this case, is the very beginning). On top of which susceptibility increases around the holidays. We all listen to...Read More

90% agreement on this Oscar-race thought from Jamie Stuart: "I'm just thinking about the ubiquitous Oscar blogging, and various ideas of what is and isn't an Oscar film. There are four movies this year that will one day be recognized as classics that will not win Best Picture: No Country for Old Men, I'm Not There, Zodiac and There Will Be Blood.

"Only one of thse may be nominated, at best. Something to think about. 35 years ago they'd all have been nominated." Exception: I'm not sure that...Read More

I'd love to get into Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters, which I saw this evening, but it's early yet. Discussions and terms await. But it's essential to mention Nate Parker, who plays one of three African-American debaters (the other two played by Jurnee Smollett and Denzel Whitaker) from Wiley College in 1935 who wound up debating the Harvard University team, under the guidance of Washington's Melvin B. Tolson.

Nate Parker

I've never seen Parker before, but he's got it. He's charismatic, good-looking...a "tan" Paul Newman (as Newman was in The Young Philadelphians) who looks people in...Read More

It's a relatively rare thing for a famous actress to take a role in a film that she knows without question is going to be absolutely despised by anyone with a smidgen of taste or refinement. Such is the case with Sienna Miller, holding her nose for a total paycheck job, agreeing to star in Stephen Sommers' G.I. Joe. Like the immensely successful Transformers, G.I. Joe will be a live-action film based on a toy line. There is synchronicity also in Sommers being regarded, like Transformers helmer Michael Bay, as a major demonic figure. Paramount is funding, shooting begins in mid-February '08, and...Read More

Pre-Thanksgiving tracking suggests a newbie race between Enchanted (78, 36 and 13) and Hitman (60, 35 and 13) -- the latter has young males and something of an edge. August Rush will bring up the rear with 53, 34 and 9. Stephen King's The Mist is just behind at 63, 31 and 8, and No Country for Old Men is at 49, 33 and 6. (It's the best reviewed and most talked-about film of the last couple of weeks and a big buzz title since Cannes, and half of the Lazy-Boy potatoes contacted for the tracking survey have never heard of it.)

The...Read More

Today's big Writers Guild march down Hollywood Blvd. was well-attended and appropriately raucous. Sandra Oh, Akiva Goldsman, Frances Fischer, Jeanne Tripplehorn and others helped carry the lead banner with WGAW president Patrick Verrone in the point position. Alicia Keys sang two songs from a sound truck before it all began. The march was supposed to start around 1 pm, but didn't begin, movement-wise, around 1:40 or so.

WGA marchers at Hollywood Blvd. just west of Ivar -- Tuesday, 11.29.07, 1:43 pm

Button -- Tuesday, 11.29.07, 1:30 pm

EW columnist Mark Harris recently ran a list of things to remember in calibrating the Oscar race, including four that apply to online columnists:

1. "Don't trust any handicapper who's beating a drum too loudly," Harris warns. "In the last few years, bloggers have blurred the line between Oscar prediction and advocacy -- something that has had no discernible effect on the nominations, but has lowered their batting average. Nine out of 10 bad calls are made because you love or hate a movie so intensely you're blind to reason. Everybody relishes making an out-on-a-limb guess...Read More

Zodiac isn't "just about a serial killer -- it feels like it was made by one as well...for my money one of the finest films of the decade...host Kent Jones wasn't the only one confessing to having seen the movie five times or more...one man prefaced his question with such ecstatic praise that [director] David Fincher interrupted him before he could even get to the question: 'Thank God for you, sir." -- from Vadim Rizov's Reeler coverage of Monday night's screening of the slightly longer Zodiac director's cut at NYC's Walter Reade theatre.

Question: No pictures...Read More

"The term 'entertainment journalism' has practically become an oxymoron, often uttered derisively," writes The Reeler's Lewis Beale in an 11.20 posting. "It has become more and more difficult to pitch stories with any kind of depth. Except for a handful of publications -- the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post and occasionally Entertainment Weekly -- almost no one is covering the film industry as an industry anymore, and even fewer are dealing with it as a cultural force whose images influence billions of people around the globe."

Which is one more reason why print -- excluding the above publications and the...Read More

With two lines and one fell swoop, Time's Richard Corliss has simultaneously given Charlie Wilson's War a nice pat on the back and damned its Oscar chances with faint praise. Death quote #1: "It could be the one war film people will enjoy seeing." Death quote #2: "Audiences should have a great time watching it."

Corliss is saying the film has a decent shot with the "leave-us-aloners" who've avoided all the Middle Eastern sand movies thus far. He's not saying it's a lock with this crowd -- words like "should" and "could" in this context are obviously fraught with qualification --...Read More

Barack Obama is finally whipping Hillary Clinton's ass in Iowa. A just-out ABC News/Washington Post poll is reporting that the Illinois senator has the allegiance of 30% of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa, compared with 26% for Clinton, 22% for former senator John Edwards and 11% for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. "Significant signs of progress for Obama and harbingers of concern for Clinton," a Post story declares.

Alison Hope Weiner's N.Y. Times profile of producer Brian Grazer covers the bases (smart guy, dreams up ideas for films, people don't know him as well as they do Jerry Bruckheimer). But nothing says it like Monica Almeida's photo of Grazer in his Malibu office. I'm not saying it shows a "producer's heart of darkness" or anything along those cliched lines, but there's an amazing amount of current in that expression and especially in those eyes.

Those hooray-for-the-WGA spots that I described yesterday -- directed by many (Paul Haggis, Rod Lurie and George Hickenlooper are three I know about), numbering 50 and with the participation of William H. Macy, Sean Penn, Ed Asner and Woody Allen -- will debut on Thursday, 11.22 (Thanksgiving Day) on Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. Finke has excellent ties with the WGA (her strike coverage has been unmatched), and so attention and respect has been paid to that fact.

A quick little chime in from HE reader James Kent on No Country For Old Men and the whole funny ending thing: "I saw it this past weekend and it's a great film. And you are spot on -- it is one of those movies you can't emerge from and talk about right away. You need a couple of hours to digest the thing. Did I love the ending? No. But does that diminish the love I have for the film? Absolutely not.

"Look, if the Brothers Coen had found a different way to resolve the film in some awesome, slam-bang way...who...Read More

A 30th anniversary, 3-disc, triple-dip Close Encounters of the Third Kind DVD came out on 11.13. It's a Blade Runner package in that it has the original '77 version, that awful extra-footage, inside-the-mother-ship version that came out in '80, and the director's cut that came out in '98 or thereabouts. Reading about it reminded me to never, ever see this film again.

Tomorrow's "Labor Solidarity with Writers" march down Hollywood Boulevard is a must-attend. Good photos and sound ops. The westward march will start at 1 pm from the corner of Ivar and Hollywood Blvd., and end somewhere before La Brea.

WGA member Phil Alden Robinson has composed a "story notes" memo addressed to tough-guy producers' negotiator Nicholas Counter regarding his Stonewall project. Special attention is paid to Counter's use of "Orwell speak" in addressing various strike issues.

David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon (which Ron Howard lent his name to as a "present"-ing exec producer) is one of the most stirring "heart" docs I've seen all year. It's a shame it didn't make the short list of Best Feature Docs.

Congrats, though, to the ones that did: Autism: The Musical (dir: Tricia Regan), Body of War (dirs: Phil Donahue, Ellen Spiro); For The Bible Tells Me So (dir: Daniel G. Karslake), Lake of Fire (dir: Tony Kaye), Nanking (dirs: Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman); No End in Sight (dir: Charles Ferguson), Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (dir:...Read More

The Cloverfield 2 trailer (i.e., the one that preemed iin theatres last weekend in front of Beowulf) is up. Great stuff. No monster glimpses -- just the old throaty Godzilla roar, lots of herky-jerky photography, lots of running around Manhattan. Helicopters, subway tunnels, walls collapsing..."what's that?" Underneath the monster-movie trappings, producer J.J. Abrams isn't trying to hide the fact that it's basically a 9.11 revisiting. "Whatever it is, it's winning."

In Bruges, the first film from British playwright Martin McDonagh (The Pillowman) with Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, will open the '08 Sundance Film Festival on 1.7.08 in good old overdeveloped Park City, Utah. I saw the trailer last weekend while watching a film at the new Arclight Cinemas in Sherman Oaks. You can tell it's antsy, angular and a bit nuts -- a crime story about a couple of boob-level London assassins who may be a target of a hit themselves while staying in Bruges, Belgium -- with fast punchy dialogue.

The only...Read More

213.net's Jason Coleman has provided very precise descriptions of the nine (9) additions on the 162-minute Zodiac Directors Cut DVD (due January 8th), including (a) a scene with Detectives Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Lee (Dermot Mulroney) speaking to a superior on a voice box about the details that make Arthur Leigh Allen a prime Zodiac suspect and (b) the famous black-screen sequence in which the passage of four years -- from the early to mid '70s -- is conveyed with a sequence of songs and news stories from the period. The Paramount executive(s) who forced this sequence to...Read More

Two Alec Baldwin thoughts via an 11.18 Huffington Post-ing: (1) "I saw Sean Penn's Into The Wild this weekend. Give Emile Hirsch the Jim Caviezel Award for the greatest suffering on film. I have not seen an actor put through this much in quite a while. Good job by Sean and Co." and (2) "I miss my make-up artist, Stacey Panepinto. I miss my hairstylist, Richard Esposito. I miss all of the 30 Rock cast and crew, whom I don't see anymore because of this motherfucking, motherfucking, motherfucking strike."

No clue when this Tom Cruise shot was taken or on what film set, but it seems to call into question his 11.12 statement that he has "no iPhone, no mobile."

Walk Hard, Knocked Up and Superbad producer-writer Judd Apatow has told N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr that "the business model that is driving the studios' hard line is a little backward. Digital or not, well-written content can be a lucrative business.

"One of the problems is a lack of creativity," Apatow says. "The studios spend enormous amounts of money making these massive spectacles when they could be making much better written, lower-cost movies. A few less of those and they could fund a settlement for years. There would be no reason for this strike."

Polls are saying the public is far more supportive of the striking Writers Guild members than the studios and producers they're striking against. Sensing a headwind, numerous name-level director-writers have recently shot a series of short spots intended for viewing either just before or soon after Thanksgiving that will presumably boost the WGA's profile even higher and...whatever, energize the membership. As many as 50 spots will push the standard but irrefutable notion that screenwriters are absolutely invaluable and certainly deserve a small piece of the internet revenues to come.

Three of the spots have been directed by...Read More

Kevin Bowen, who writes well, posted a fascinating piece last night about the certain names, places and events that may have inspired Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In particular one Jamiel "Jimmy" Chagra, whose last name isn't all that different from "Chigurh."

Every year the gulf between between those who judge films for what they actually are (or seem to be) and those who like or dislike films based on what the films do for them seems to get wider and wider. Industry lowbrows tend to favor comfort-blanket movies; others get their comfort blankets at Bed, Bath and Beyond and deal with movies on a slightly more engaged or inquisitive or cultured basis.

Case in point: Kris Tapley's item about No Country for Old Men screening at the Academy yesterday afternoon, and, according to one witness, how...Read More

Everyone's noted the parallels between Sarah Polley's Away From Her, which is about an Alzheimer's-afflicted older woman (Julie Christie) gently rebuffing her husband as she falls in love with another man (a syndrome common to sufferers of this disease), and the recently reported story about Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's Alzheimer's- afflicted husband John falling for another woman.

Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband John March 2004

Gordon Pinsent, Julie Christie in Away From Her.

This will almost certainly push Academy members who haven't seen Away From Her to...Read More

A voice is telling me that writers and producers will come to terms before Xmas, and if that doesn't happen then by early to mid-January. I can't see it going much further than that. Nobody wants an unscripted, sloppily improvised Oscar telecast, for one thing. And once films delayed or sidelined by the strike start to really pile up (Oliver Stone's Pinkville and Ron Howard's Angels & Demons are the first two victims), producers' resolve will start to crack. How many deaths will it take 'til they know that too many revenue opportunities have died?

My source says Beowulf went up 5% from Friday to Saturday, and is now expected to take in $27,286,000 as of late tonight. Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is reporting that Robert Zemeckis' motion capture fantasy went up 20% from Friday and will tally just over $30 million. Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke is reporting that Beowulf gained only 6% Saturday and will end up with $28.1 million. Add it all up and the verdict is that Bewoulf showed vigor and performed fairly well.

It may be difficult if not impossible to find a photograph of phantom New Jersey screenwriter Kelly Masterson, whose original script of Before The Devil Knows You're Dead (written in '99) finally made it to the screen this year. Directed by the great Sidney Lumet, it's become one of '07's best reviewed films. Masterson's reclusiveness is not on the level of Thomas Pynchon or Glenn Gould. He takes part in WGA picket lines and has given the occasional interview. This one with with AICN's Elston Gunn -- not given in person or over the phone, of course, but via e-mail -- is...Read More

"Seeking a way out of an acrimonious relationship at Paramount, the DreamWorks principals David Geffen and Steven Spielberg have been negotiating to move their operation to NBC Universal," according to N.Y. Times reporters Sharon Waxman and Brooks Barnes. They add, however, that "negotiations have hit a wall over financing."

One thing's for sure -- I will be on serious pins and needles until Geffen and Spielberg finally settle on a happy partnership. Knowing that they feel unfulfilled and unappreciated by their current partners at Paramount concerns me a great deal. Here's hoping things work out with NBC Universal. I'm pulling for...Read More

Esquire's Mike D'Angelo has written that Cate Blanchett's Bob Dylan performance in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There "goes beyond mimicry, capturing not only Dylan's adenoidal mannerisms but his unruly prankster spirit. Whether needling pompous journalists or muttering random aphorisms, her 'Jude' greets the world with an expression of perpetual bemusement, as if enjoying some strange private joke.

"It's an uncanny approximation of the Dylan seen in Don't Look Back -- so convincing that you often forget you're watching a gender-reversed stunt, and so mesmerizing that you can't help but feel disappointed every time...Read More

I dropped by the Four Seasons two days ago for a chat with Keri Russell. Not to talk about her latest film, August Rush (Warner Bros., 11.21), a Claude Lelouch-ian musical fantasy which I haven't written about yet, but Waitress, which Fox Searchlight opened last May and which will re-open on DVD on 11.27. Directed by late Adrienne Shelly, it did well by reviewers and earned $20 million domestically.

Keri Russell -- Thursday, 11.15.07, 3:45 pm.

Russell is friendly, casual, open. Like any successful actress, she knows how to charm without making it...Read More

George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr's masterful Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (Paramount Home Video, 11.20) is one of the best making-of-a-famous-movie docs ever made, but the new DVD looks like a VHS tape. It could have looked much better if the original elements had been remastered, but Apocalypse director Francis Coppola, who narrates the DVD along with wife Eleanor, provided PHV with "the same 1" inch tape that was used when they struck the materials for the 1991 videotape," says Hickenlooper.

No remastering, tweaking or upgrading...brilliant! It's almost 2008 with high-def video setting...Read More

The Other Boleyn Girl (Sony/Focus, 2.29.08), based on screenwrirter Peter Morgan's adaptation of the historical novel by Philippa Gregory, is about a sort of romantic competition between Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman) and her older sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson) for the love and allegiance of King Henry VIII (Eric Bana).

We all know which sister lost her head in real life. (Those of us with a high-school education, I mean.) I'm not sure if the film delivers this particular climax, but it will apparently depict a romantic triangle...Read More

In a cottonball interview with Rose McGowan by some worshipping fanboy, McGowan is asked about the Robert Rodriguez Barbarella project, which the N.Y. Observer's Spencer Morgan reported last month was in doubt because Universal doesn't believe McGowan is a big enough draw to topline a $100 million sci-fi fantasy.

McGowan tells the fawning suck-up that she "can't answer that question just yet" but says that "anything negative that has been written about me doing this film is utterly and completely untrue." Perhaps she's speaking about Morgan's piece (everyone reads the Observer), but perhaps...Read More

My weekend Beowulf figure says $25,886,000 but Fantasy Mogul's Steve Mason says Beowulf took in $10.4 million yesterday and will probably reach $30 million by Sunday night. (Who can you trust? Every day brings deception.) Bee Movie will edge out American Gangster, $13,801,000 to $12,792,000, for the #2 and ##3 slots. And Fred Claus, believe it or not, dropped only 32% -- a pretty good hold. Critics and others with actual taste buds detested it, but the low-rent family audience will line up for almost anything cheery, glossy, broad and kid-friendly.

And yet they didn't support Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, which will...Read More

The Last Great Hope of the 2007 Oscar season is Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters, which isn't saying much. "Hope" doesn't mean zip in this context. No one has seen the Weinstein Co. release (the first screening happens on Tuesday, 11.20) and there are concerns that Debaters' inspirational story might be (a) a little too familiar and (b) take a little too long to unfold. But Washington's a focused and confident director and I've been told the film works very nicely, so let's see.

I'm saying this because the other presumed award-level contenders -- Charlie Wilson's...Read More

It was announced an hour ago that WGA strikers will resume negotiations with studios and networks on Monday, 11.26 -- 11 days from now. Nobody can meet next week because everyone on both sides will be totally consumed by extensive travel, shopping and food-preparation arrangements in order to share Thanksgiving dinner with numerous friends and loved ones for a 90-minute period on Thursday, 11.22.

Outed ex-CIA spy and Fair Game author Valerie Plame spoke earlier this week to Politico's Jeffrey Ressner about the movie version of her book, which will be produced by Jerry and Janet Zucker and Beautiful Mind screenwriter Akiva Goldsman for Warner Bros.

Plame told Ressner that (a) "the script follows the book fairly closely, but obviously the writers take [liberties]. It's factual up to a point, and where there were areas I couldn't speak to them about, they drew from their vivid imaginations"; (b) it's "a story of political intrigue, an espionage story and a love story...about the loss of innocence,...Read More

Robert Stone's Oswald's Ghost, a comprehensive re-review of the Kennedy assassination particulars and their cumulative effect upon the American psyche, will open in NYC opening on Friday, 11.30, and then in L.A. at Laemmle's Grande on 12.7. It will then be aired on Monday, 1.14.08 on PBS's "American Experience" series. I couldn't fathom what new information or slant could possibly be brought to this topic, but I watched it anyway. I got one thing from it -- Norman Mailer's theory about Lee Harvey Oswald's motivation in killing JFK. It's fairly convincing, certainly worth listening to.

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, the one foreign- language film of '07 that could arguably be called a masterpiece, was seen by one of the four color-coded Oscar screening committees on 11.2, and the reaction, according to three people in the loop, was "definitely mixed," as one journalist friend puts it.

The result of this reaction, the journo says, is that "it may not even make the short list." He means the 12 or 15 foreign language films that will be re-screened and re-evaluated in early January '08 with producer and senior committee...Read More

Slowly easing into a holiday mood, I happened upon this early '80s SCTV John Candy bit, apparently based on a tape of the actual Orson Welles recording a British frozen-peas audio advertisement.

We all knew Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour wouldn't make the short list of Best Documentary Feature contenders (which have previously numbered 15), but the Academy committee has also given the boot to Seth Gordon's The King of Kong. Donkey Kong guy...out! People loved your film, we didn't relate, life is hard, tough darts.

Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight. Michael Moore's Sicko and Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire made it though -- good calls. Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking, Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming and Sean...Read More

Brian DePalma's Redacted pretends to be a video verite account of some horrid homicidal behavior on the part of some U.S. troops (based on an actual incident) with a third-act stab at depicting the moral penalty for such deeds. I saw it as a sloppy film about a group of badly directed actors playing soldiers, and the rank agony of being surrounded by pretension gone wrong. I've never seen a worst-acted film by a major-league director in my life. DePalma has no ear -- no ear whatsoever -- and those who see Redacted will suffer because of this.

...

A friend has passed along some Beowulf attendance numbers from back east ("not stupendous but fairly strong"), and it looks like the Robert Zemeckis/Paramount fantasy will come in with a very respectable weekend figure in the mid 20s, and possibly nudging towards $26 to $27 million.

In the '68 election many Democrats were reluctant to support Hubert Humphrey because he was seen as a machine candidate who was Lyndon Johnson's lapdog. His supporters argued okay, we hear you, but at least he's better than Richard Nixon. Out of this came the slogan "hold your nose and vote for Humphrey." If bumper-sticker makers are smart, they'll start cranking out stickers for lefties like myself -- "Hold Your Nose and Vote for Hillary."

In fact, if anyone wants to take this slogan and Photoshop a good-looking bumper sticker (you know...as if serious ad-design people...Read More

What were those two pep-rally booing incidents about during last night's debate? Barack Obama got booed when he got into a tussle with Hillary Clinton about social security taxes and said "this is the kind of thing that I would expect from Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani where we start playing with numbers in order to try to make a point." John Edwards also got hissed when he got in a shot at Clinton for her staff having recently planted questions.

Hillary's supporters were obviously organized and out in force, but booing is a goon-squad tactic...Read More

I heard yesterday about John Edwards' plan to join the WGA picketers in front of NBC on Alameda today, but I didn't know about the hour -- 2 pm -- until I read it in Nikki Finke's column.

I deliberately didn't get into Envelope columnist Tom O'Neil's ecstatic response to the 17-minute preview of Sweeney Todd that screened the other night at Lincoln Center. O'Neil, passionate fellow that he is, is invested in his love of great musicals and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd B'way show in particular, and he wants to see it all brought full circle. And that's fine.

Sweeney Todd's sound and visuals are still being mixed, so it's not being shown. But there have been enough preview excerpts of upcoming big-ticket films in the past to feel suspicious about the decision...Read More

CHUD's Devin Faraci is reporting there were re-shoots done on I Am Legend "as late as last week." I can only shrug if this is true. I didn't care about a devastated, post-apocylaptic urban future with mutants running around when it was a Charlton Heston movie, and I don't care at all about a post-apocalyptic Manhattan with mutants running around with Will Smith manning the fort. Does anyone? And does anyone find the prospect of being asked to believe that Smith could be a brilliant scientist a little challenging? In film after film Smith plays nice guys who are smart, amiable and...Read More

Two major-leaguers and an ambitious scrambler at the legendary post-premiere party for One From The Heart that followed a Radio City Music Hall gala premiere in February 1982. I found this in my Norman Mailer folder last weekend. I was speaking with Coppola first (having recently done a long phone interview with him) when Mailer walked up. I stepped to the side and listened. I remember Mailer calling Coppola's film "photo-realism" and saying at the end of their chat, "I salute you."

A new Cloverfield trailer will run in theatres with Beowulf beginning tomorrow morning. (Reason in itself to buy a ticket?) In the meantime, atrocious camera-phone video footage of the trailer has gone up at zshare -- clip #1, clip #2, and clip #3 -- and been linked to by New York's "Vulture" column.

The new December Esquire came out yesterday (or the day before), with six actors being celebrated on the cover for having given the mag's choices for "Performances of the Year." Denzel Washington in American Gangster, Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Robert Downey in Zodiac, Emile Hirsch in Into The Wild and Jake Gyllenhaal in...Rendition?

December 2007 cover of Esquire featuring choices for the Best Movie Performances of the Year

It's not that Gyllenhaal plays his Egypt-based CIA guy badly or ineffectively, but that Egypt-based CIA guy is written...Read More

Kyle Smith's review of Beowulf on Kyle Smith Online is, I'm sorry, quite hilarious. Sorry because I don't feel that derision is the right way to go, but your funny bone had its own mindset. For what it's worth, Beowulf producer and co-writer Roger Avary said it made him laugh also. The gist of the joke is that Beowulf has much erotic (and homoerotic) undercurrent going on, and is so intense that some (like Smith) feel the need to alleviate this with humor.

"With long, straight blond hair and a headband, Beowulf seems like Bjornborgowulf,...Read More

They've stuck it to The Band's Visit again! Following an unfortunate AMPAS precedent, the HFPA Golden Globe committee in charge of foreign pix has announced that this small, heartfelt Israeli comedy is ineligible for the best foreign film prize because it has too much English in it. I've seen The Band's Visit and know for a fact this is an ignorant and deeply unfair way to categorize this tender, at times Chaplinesque little film. Bah humbug! to the HFPA and anyone else who doesn't get that English is the worldwide second language for all cultures today, and that everyone speaks it when...Read More

In her 11.14 L.A. Times/Envelope piece called "So Bad, They're Good," Lisa Rosen notes that "a lot of good actors went bad this year. Real bad. Surly, mean, reprehensible, criminal, unforgivable and pretty much irresistible.

"Critics and audiences alike have been enjoying the nasty performances of the likes of Denzel Washington in American Gangster, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Russell Crowe and Ben Foster in 3:10 to Yuma."

The fact that Rosen waits until the very end of the piece to mention...Read More

L.A. Times "Big Picture" columnist Patrick Goldstein "spent much of last week talking to studio executives, eager to hear a good explanation for months of one-sided negotiations, where the studios essentially presented a series of rollback offers and then bashed the writers for not embracing them. None of the studio chiefs would talk on the record, but if I were to sum up their views, I'd put it this way: The future is too uncertain for us to give anything away."

Goldstein explains that Hollywood "has always been...Read More

Hillary Clinton's performance in the 10.30 debate made her seem vulnerable for the first time. And now Robert Novak is reporting that "an 11.6 Zogby poll of 502 likely Iowa caucus-goers showed Clinton's lead had shrunk to three points -- within the survey's 4.5% margin of error. The narrowing, however, is mostly due to an Obama surge, from 19 percent in Zogby's August poll to 25 percent."

A N.Y. Times assessment, based on a Times/CBS News poll, finds the Democratic contest "essentially tied in Iowa" between Clinton, Obama and Edwards. The mind-blower is that a strong majority of respondents said that...Read More

Margot at the Wedding "isn't a story of neurotics struggling to be loved" but an example of director-writer Noah Baumbach "struggling to validate middlebrow narcissism," writes N.Y. Press critic Armond White. White can be oddly hilarious when he goes after someone, and in this case he outdoes himself by comparing Baumbach to a rodent. [Note #1: Running this item shouldn't and doesn't indicate agreement with White about the analogy, but I chuckled at it.]

Margot at the Wedding director-writer Noah Baumbach (l.)

Baumbach "perverts lessons in humanity taught by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and...Read More

In an 11.12 Commentary piece, Kyle Smith straddles the line between praise and derision in this short essay about Cate Blanchett's already-legendary Bob Dylan performance in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. When Blanchett "pops up it is immediately clear" -- and as was the case with her appearance as Kate Hepburn in The Aviator -- "that this is an Oscar role," Smith says.

Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There

What he means is that it's one of those "look at me!" performances, and is more about Blanchett wanting attention for being adventurous in...Read More

After listening to Tom O'Neil talk about the No Country for Old Men situation with Pete Hammond this morning, I called Hammond and asked if he'd mind discussing the same stuff with me also, and he said fine.

Indy 4 kowtow, down on their knees, obeisance before power.

Although he's now allowing that No Country for Old Men will probably eke its way into one of the five Best Picture slots, The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting, based on five or so conversations, that the widely-admired Coen brothers film is eliciting respect but not a lot of great passion among Academy fudgeballs.

O'Neil speaks here to Envelope columnist Pete Hammond about No Country's lofty rep among critics, and how this will most likely translate into Academy-level support. Unless, that is, the softies dig in their heels and "just say no," either...Read More

Newsweek's 1968 issue -- "the year that made us who we are" -- has a strong, finely woven article called "The Worst Week," about the five-day span in which LBJ announced his decision not to run that year and the assassination of Martin Luther King. This mp3 of Kennedy delivering his famous speech in Indianapolis in which he announced King's death is still pretty moving. Who among the current Presidential candidates could have delivered an impromptu speech of this calibre if they'd been in the same position? Not Mitt Romney.

Ira Levin, the original writer of Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil, has passed on. Levin's book of Rosemary's Baby was engrossing, quietly chilling and well-crafted but Roman Polanski's film was somewhat better. And yet Levin's books of The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil were much, much better than the films. Not great literature and not trash, but crafty, well-shaped reads that were definitely a cut or two above "airport fiction."

Has anyone heard when and where the Charlie Wilson's War junket is taking place? Just asking.

I sat down earlier this evening with There Will be Blood costar Paul Dano. We know the same people and have talked at a couple of parties, but this was the first interview. Dano plays a dual role -- twins, actually -- in There Will Be Blood. "Paul" is a bright, mature, realistic fellow; "Eli" is an opportunistic evangelical creep. Dano delivers on the intensity and then some. He and Daniel Day Lewis have a helluva final scene together.

Here are two mp3 files of our talk. The first is longer than the Read More

As promised, here are those three Daniel Day Lewis clips -- #1, clip #2, clip #3 -- from last night's WGA discussion following a screening of There Will Be Blood. Newsweek's David Ansen moderated; costar Paul Dano and director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson also participated.

Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson

I love the gentle British inflections in Lewis's natural speaking voice. When was the last time he used them in a film? Not recently. And not The Age of Innocence, not The Crucible, not In The Name of the Father. Was it A Room With a...Read More

Apologies to readers and Beowulf producer and co-writer Roger Avary alike for screwing up the sound link to our chat the other day. (Two days of virus issues scattered my synapses more than usual.) Here's the real deal -- a chat with Roger about the ongoing Beowulf animation issue.

A couple of readers on Deadline Hollywood Daily suggested a nice fantasy gesture -- i.e., that showbiz bloggers urge readers to boycott all movies and TV shows en masse for a single agreed-upon day over the Thanksgiving weekend to show support for striking writers. Hitting the producers and studio chiefs where it hurts is pure Frank Capra, but I love it. Like those good citizens of Bedford Falls pouring into George Bailey's home on Christmas eve to help him raise that $8 thousand, only withholding instead of giving.

The problem, of course, is that most Americans are lifestyle junkies and drunkards --...Read More

I recorded most of last night's conversation between Newsweek's David Ansen and There Will Be Blood costars Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano and director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson following last night's WGA screening. I created three mp3 files out of three interesting Lewis riffs, but they've been sitting all day on the frozen laptop. It's been repaired, thank fortune (the Geek Squad guys just called), so I'll put them up later tonight.

Daniel Day Lewis, David Ansen at WGA theatre -- Monday, 11.12, 10:05 pm

Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ansen -- 10:40...

I realize it may have occured to some that Oscar-chasing season (mid-July through late February) is about power and prestige and so on. There's also the satisfaction of winners knowing that the term "Oscar" is certain to appear one day in their New York Times obituary. There's also the underlying current about wanting to affirm certain emotions, values and viewpoints by celebrating movies that express these things, but let's put that one aside for now. What I'm about to say is nothing remotely new, but I'd just like to reiterate it for the record.

There are two prime motivations driving Oscar handicappers in...Read More

Another half day has been lost to virus issues. While picking up my finally virus-free laptop at Best Buy last night I was talked into buying the respected Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0 software to guard against future problems. I installed it this morning and lo, within ten minutes my newly repaired, running-like-a-charm laptop had ceased all functionality. Nothing would click open; it was like the disk drive has been covered in cold maple syrup. I couldn't even get into safe mode.

I had to take the damn unit back to the Geek Squad guys and explain that everything was fine until I...Read More

The Envelope's Mark Olsen has thrown together a mildly amusing riff on how an award-quality performance can be countered-buzzed or kibboshed by another high-profile performance given by the same actor or actress in the same year that isn't as widely admired.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's performances in The Savages, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and Charlie Wilson's War overlap to some degree, but they don't (or won't) tarnish each other in the slightest.

The best-known example of this syndrome, he notes, is the case of those Norbit billboards having killed Eddie Murphy's shot at winning the...Read More

All film journalists and critics are obliged to write at least one essay about why people cry at movies. Today, Washington Post critic Desson Thomson wrote his. He doesn't expose his personal soft underbelly, though, and that's what you're supposed to do when you write these things. Unload, let it out, confess.

For me, unleashed emotion in the womb of a movie theatre is about as primal as it gets. I've had many, many more emotional floodgate moments in a theatre seat than I've allowed myself in real life. (Most guys tend to keep things in check when someone's watching, even trusted...Read More

Beowulf producer and co-write Roger Avary, just back from the film's London premiere and international press junket, called to debate the ongoing Beowulf animation issue as I was editing the Paul Thomas Anderson interview earlier this afternoon.

(l. to r.) Gaim, Beowulf director Bob Zemeckis, Avary

I brought up the fact that basing animated human images upon live-action footage -- a Beowulf speed-bump issue for some -- is a technique that goes all the way back to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As I understand it, Disney animators used a primitive...Read More

There Will Be Blood director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson called a couple of hours ago to chat about the film. We spoke for about 25 minutes. I threw out some half-decent questions and did what I could to keep my obsequious impulses in check. Anderson has a shy, circumspect way of putting things. It's axiomatic that most first-rate directors will shy away from "selling" their film or trying to explain it in any kind of relentless detail. But it was exciting to get a word in and run it all down as much as possible.

"The horror that is Paul Thomas Anderson's fifth feature, There Will Be Blood, is not simply an amplified feeling of distress but distress itself: a seething perpetual pressure, unremitting, brutal, always on the brink of eruption," writes House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight (excellent name!).

Two days ago at the Denver Film Festival a trade critic called to say he'd been told by a Fox rep he would be physically blocked from a public festival showing of Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Fox Walden, 11.16). I ran an item about this late Saturday afternoon I was told this morning by Fox Walden spokesperson Jeffrey Godsick that the incident was some kind of misunderstanding, that an "overzealous" festival rep had conveyed the physical blocking threat ("a weird little thing") and not a local Fox rep, that the film has in fact been screened for certain critics including Richard Roeper...Read More

"Oddly, the same executives who speak with absolute authority about the horrifying injustice of paying residuals [to writers] seem to turn into bewildered children, lost in a fogbound forest and helpless to see even two feet ahead, when they confront the other big issue: income from streaming video, new media, and the Internet.

"Writers, like everybody else with a brain and a computer, have figured out that this is where a large chunk of the future of movie and TV revenue resides, and they want a piece of it. To which the producers have essentially responded: 'What's this newfangled interweb you're talking...Read More

Time magazine is running an article that summarizes the ten best moments from various Coen Bros.films over the last 22 years. It's a decent appreciation, but as I happened to notice the piece on Sasha Stone's Awards Daily earlier today, I couldn't help but notice Greg Gingold's Coen Brothers gag reel video that Stone included as visual filler.

Gingold's reel is a typically shallow thing -- rapid-fire clips aimed at snagging the attention of infants and cultural primitives. The Coens have always had a distinctive visual sense, of...Read More

Susan King posted an interesting Envelope piece yesterday (11.10) about the impact of the writer's strike upon the various awards show, if and when it continues into January and February -- the Oscars, Golden Globes, DGA and WGA awards and Film Independent Spirit Awards. The patter on some of these shows is bad enough as it is (the Globes especially) but can you imagine how grotesque these shows will seem without guild writers chipping in at least an occasional decent joke? This more than anything other presentation issue should force a settlement before New Year's Day or soon after.

"I wear jeans, socks and a shirt -- all totally normal," Tom Cruise has allegedly told the Post-Dispatch. "I get my hair cut on set. I have no iPhone, no mobile, no email address, no watch, no jewelry, no wallet."

I believe 80% of that statement. The "no wallet" and "no mobile" is bullshit. Everybody carries a driver's license and a couple of cards around -- you have to. (I've seen photos of Cruise driving a motorcycle down Robertson Blvd.) And Cruise expects people to believe that if he's with his daughter and God forbid an emergency were to happen, he's...Read More

Someone take Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean Means aside and quietly explain that Ben Foster is an almost certain no-go for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his psycho-wacko bad guy in 3:10 to Yuma. There are three reasons why, and if you can't remember them just have Means read this item.

One, Foster has built his relatively young career out of playing nutters with glaring eyes and arterial neck veins pumping furious red plasma, so it's not a big deal that he's done it again in a gunslinger vein.

Two, Foster let his makeup person gunk his face with...Read More

Saw this on Kris Tapley's Red Carpet District, snickered, wondered what it actually meant, smiled, thought it over, reminded myself that John C. Reilly's character didn't seem all that rude or insolent in the product reel I saw, decided it's a good sell-job regardless, etc.

In his N.Y. Times profile of Margot at the Wedding director-writer Noah Baumbach, Dennis Lim notes that Baumbach has always "specialized in characters whose verbal acuity outstrips their emotional maturity. In Margot at the Wedding, family members use information as a weapon, disguise cruel judgment as insightful concern and extend or withhold intimacy as part of a power game.

"It's a family where if you show your belly, people are going to pounce," Baumbach tells Lim. And, Lim says, no one pounces as often or as recklessly as Nicole Kidman's Margot, a seething bundle of anger...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is wondering if No Country for Old Men is as much of a lock for Best Picture nominee status as it seems to be this weekend, with the 95% and 94% positive ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively, and its impressive $41,000 screen average in 289 situations. O'Neil figures it may be a "testosterone rush" critics' favorite, by which he means...what?...it's not emotional or "musical" enough, and because some are flummoxed by the ending?

It's not really a testosterone movie at all, Tom. Testosterone movies can be stupid or smart (The Bourne Ultimatum), but...Read More

Jacket art for Paramount Home Video's "Director's Cut" edition of Zodiac, a two-disc affair that's due on 1.8.09

With Saturday's figures now in, one will argue with the concept of Fred Claus being a major flop, especially in relation to cost. The total weekend projection for the Warner Bros. release has been lowered to $17,781,000, or about $2 million less than Friday's projection. A popular family film usually gets a bump of about 50% on Saturday, but Claus only went up about 20%. It'll be a push to make $50 million on this thing, which won't begin to match the combined production and marketing costs. Plus it stannds a good chance of suffering a drop of over 50% next weekend (11.16)...Read More

"While Daniel Day-Lewis may appear a bit rough, his demeanor is courtly," writes N.Y. Times profiler Lynn Hirschberg. "You have to possess something utterly to push it away, and whether it's his extreme good looks, which he obscures beneath the trappings of a bohemian pirate, or his cultured background, which he disparages, Day-Lewis has an intense attraction to the opposite of whatever he came by easily.

"He is particularly compelled by the idea of spontaneity, but there is nothing sloppy or haphazard about him, and that lends Day-Lewis, despite his careworn clothes, a quality of...Read More

A critic friend who recently saw Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line, 11.16) said that in the wake of No Country for Old Men that it was difficult to fully accept Javier Bardem as Florentino Ariza, a romantic-minded guy who's conflicted but more or less normal. The critic said he had a hard time blocking memories of Anton Chigurh. Ariza is about sadness and unrequited love, but the critic couldn't stop thinking about that gas-powered stun-gun.

I'm sure this is temporary, but what other actors have been so indelible in a certain...Read More

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (20th Century Fox, 11.16), directed and written by the once-hot Zach Helm and costarring Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman, is a family film that most likely blows on some level. But I wasn't sure how bad it was until I heard today that Fox publicists made it clear to critics (or at least one unnamed critic I spoke to) that they would physically block them from attending today's 2 pm Denver Film Festival showing at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House.

The ticket-buying public was free to attend the showing. There was...Read More

Norman Mailer's passing this morning feels to me like the loss of a beloved uncle. He wasn't much of a filmmaker, but he was a genius, a great writer and a literary superstar for the ages. And a very decent and considerate fellow to interview and share thoughts with.

Mailer had the reputation in his middle-aged years of being susceptible to hubris and brutality, but he became a much better human being when he got older. (As many of us fortunately do.) I developed a sense in the late 1980s and '90s, in fact, that he'd...Read More

It was going to be neck-and-neck between Fred Claus and American Gangster with both in the mid 20s...wrong. Claus is going to come in third with $19,463,000, and will probably end up in the $50 million range, at best, which makes it a shortfall in relation to production costs. A stumbler, a groaner...an occasion for long faces.

And they're going to get longer next weekend. Mr. Magorium's Emporium will be strong family-trade competition starting next weekend (11.16), and then Enchanted opens on 11.21, not to mention the Claus word-of-mouth effect. (It's not very funny --critics despise it.) Exhibition has only two more weekends...Read More

It's not a stretch, not a reach, and pretty much incontestable that David Fincher's Zodiac is one of the five best films of 2007. I don't mind reminding people of this obvious fact. It's a blazingly original, perfectly made, deeply haunting landmark film that's not only about an obsessive search for an elusive serial killer, but has the genius to embody its own theme by being obsessive itself -- an amazing synchronicity that echoes back and forth into infinity.

Ten years from now most of the films being talked up for Best Picture will on the...Read More

Here I am late as usual in posting stuff, but Todd McCarthy's Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema -- an affectionate tribute to one of the craftiest and most unapologetically fierce-minded cineastes in motion picture history -- is playing at the AFI Film Fest three hours from now (at 6:30 pm). Then comes John Landis' Mr. Warmth, a "pretty great" documentary about Don Rickles. On top of which these guys could be separated-at-birth twins. A fairly spirited double bill with in-between time for some fast food.

With its 94% rating, No Country for Old Men is Metacritic's second-best reviewed film of '07 (Ratatouille being the slightly higher-rated with a 96% score) as well as the tenth-best reviewed film in the site's entire database.

I've been trying to get it up for a Lions for Lambs review for several days now, and it just wouldn't happen. The truth is that I don't like three second-tier things about Robert Redford's new film -- the photography, the Aghanistan mountain-range combat sequence, and the use of generic title cards -- and I was trying to articulate what I feel about the first-tier aspects so as not to seem trivial. But sometimes the trivial things aren't trivial but proverbial "blades of grass."

The truth is that I admire Redford's audacity in having made such a...Read More

When a truly exceptional film comes along, it sometimes inspires critics to do their best writing. N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick is expected to keep his prose plain, unadorned and borough- friendly, which means he can't do an A.O. Scott, an Armond White or a Lisa Schwarzbaum. But his No Country for Old Men review has exceptional conviction and a pure-of-heart quality.

NCFOM "is the first movie I've seen in a very long while that deserves to be called a masterpiece," he begins. "It's such a stunning achievement in storytelling that, when the...Read More

I should have posted this early yesterday evening, but many thanks to Anne Thompson for the kind words.

"The studio executives are not going to suffer. The union leaders are not going to suffer. The writers on strike are not going to suffer. These are people that have money. The electricians, the grips [and] the set designers are the people suffering because they will not get paid now and they are out of work." -- California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as quoted by KFSN-TV. Schwarzenegger has said "he will get involved in contract talks if asked."

"One of the subversive conceits of No Country for Old Men is that for all the experience and skill" tucked under the belt of Tommy Lee Jones' Sherill Bell, "he is more of a passive character than an active one, functioning as a kind of Greek chorus who comments on and contextualizes the action rather than being at the heart of it." Thank you, Kenneth Turan, for specifically agreeing with HE on this point.

Today's east coast and midwest attendance figures for No Country for Old Men are in, and it's looking very strong. Joel and Ethan Coen's masterpiece is playing in 28 situations with a minimum expectation of $25,000 a print, although the Miramax release could end up with a per-screen average above $30 thousand, which will translate to $700,000 for the weekend.

Red Carpet District's Kris Tapley believes that The Great Debaters, Juno, The Kite Runner and Once may have an Academy edge this year because their feel-good currents are more instinctually appealing than the rampant downerism of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, In the Valley of Elah, Into the Wild, Margot at the Wedding, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Beowulf, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, Zodiac, etc.

I can sympathize with anyone who felt bothered or brought down by Margot's relentless neuroticism, but the other dark-toned dramas listed by Tapley are -- hello? -- major...Read More

There's one film I've seen that will, I believe, benefit from a general hunger out there for positivism and bliss vibes, and that's Marc Forster's The Kite Runner. It's the one Middle Eastern-based film that creates a sense of intimacy, kinship and bonding with Middle Eastern (i.e., Afghan) characters, which is something that I suspect most viewers want to experience, even if they don't know it yet.

And I'm including in this equation the "leave us alone"-ers (i.e., the donkeys who are refusing to see any film tethered to the current Middle-East situation). Because The Kite...Read More

The Valkyrie trailer is up and running on Yahoo. Tom Cruise talks like Tom Cruise -- no European inflection or accent of any kind, and no attempt at even a mid-Atlantic accent in order to sound like he's from the same rarified heritage as the British-accented Kenneth Branagh, Terrence Stamp, Bill Nighy, etc.

And that's fine. Movie stars don't do accents. If Kevin Costner had just spoken like his Bull Durham self in the Robin Hood film, he wouldn't have been the butt of all those jokes. Nobody would have said anything. He would have...

In response to yesterday's Beowulf piece that said (a) Ratatouille's producer John Lasseter has been against the idea of Beowulf being classified as animated, and (b) there is no sensible explanation for anyone taking this position (i.e., the fact that it began with actors emoting in front of green screens is only one component in a very sophisticated visual scheme), Beowulf producer and co-screenwriter Roger Avary has sent along a statement. And as much as I defer to Roger's authority, I can't say I'm with him 100%.

"The thing about Beowulf is that it's a hybrid,"...Read More

It's going to be neck-and-neck between the reportedly painful Fred Claus -- 77, 37 and 14 -- and American Gangster if it only drops 40% or so, which could happen given the good word-of-mouth. They're both likely to reach the mid 20s, although Claus could be closer to $30 million depending on the kid turnout. Lions for Lambs -- 69, 28 and 8 -- is getting most of its support from the over 30 crowd. It will be lucky to reach $10 million.

"One year from now..."

Lions for Lambs director and costar Robert Redford, who's lived in Utah since the early '60s, has told Washington Times reporter Kelly Jane Torrance that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's campaign personality is "plastic." I would used the term "folksy grotesque," but sometimes understatement works better.

Robert Redford; Mitt Romney

Utah Mormons "are very adept at not being fazed and speaking fluently and gracefully," Redford says in the piece. "Why? Every single male who's a Mormon goes on a mission for two years when they're 19 or 20, so they learn how to deflect...Read More

It's starting to be a common view that the qualities that help a candidate win the Democratic presidential nomination are the same qualities that don't necessarily play in Redville in the general election. After Kerry lost in '04 I told a friend that the next Democratic candidate is going to have to "bubba up" to win. Today the stats seem to suggest that Barack Obama, who reportedly only has about 25% of likely Democratic primary-voter support, does better with the conservatives than Hillary Clinton probably will in the big election next fall. The Republicans are wetting themselves over the prospect of attacking Clinton...Read More

A friend of Pixar animation chief John Lasseter has written to say Lasseter has no axe to grind against Beowulf, and that Beowulf director Robert Zemeckis is "on the record having said that Beowulf was not animation...anyone can be mislead by the mixed signals from that camp."

He also claims that "a former Sony exec called to express shock that the academy said it was animation, as he'd worked there when the company developed it, he's seen it, and can't believe it is animation, which means frame-by-frame technology, which includes puppets, stop motion, etc."

"Puppets" and "stop-motion" were animation or special...Read More

Politico.com's Jeffrey Ressner and Ben Smith reported last night that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has "spoken" to opposing sides in the WGA strike situation and "has had staff members reach out to both sides, as well as to the federal mediator trying to get them to hammer out a deal about future residuals and other issues."

Ressner-Smith also repeated a Deadline Hollywod Daily report that "an e-mail [has] made the rounds intimating that an 'ex-president'" -- Bill Clinton? Jimmy Carter? -- "has offered to serve as a buffer between the two sides."

Director Guillermo del Toro has alternated fanboy movies (the Hellboy flicks, Blade II, Mimic) with adult-level dramatic spookers (Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, Chronos). But it appears that his next film, a sci-fi thriller called Champions, which he'll direct, write and produce for Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's United Artists, is a departure. The material is based on a late '60s British TV series about government agents "who are rescued from a plane crash by an advanced civilization and given superhuman abilities," according to an 11.7 Variety story by Tatiana Siegel.

For the time being, it's probably best to hold up on whatever excitement you may be feeling over the re-teaming of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Righteous Kill, which Overture Films will bring out sometime next year.

The first concern is the fact the director is Jon Avnet, whose previous films include Red Corner, Up Close & Personal and The War. None of these films were hugely flawed, exactly, but I don't recall anyone doing cartwheels or back-flips over their quality when they first came out. (The late production designer Richard Sylbert...Read More

Beowulf has been approved by the Academy's animation committee as one of the twelve animated features eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar! I've confirmed this twice with an Academy spokesperson...amazing news! Robert Zemeckis, Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman's film now stands an excellent chance of taking the prize because it's such an eye-filling mind-blower -- a truly revolutionary step in the delivery of 3D thrills and animated envelope-pushing.

What this decision really means is that it's now down to a contest between Beowulf (emblematic of the new realms and wonders of mo-cap digital animation that are...Read More

"Parents who empower their children" sooner or later discover that "ultimately their children leave," Youth Without Youth director Francis Coppola has told Vanity Fair writer Bruce Handy.

"But you can be satisfied, you can be happy you did that," Coppola explains, because having kids like this is "better than kids who are hanging around, sort of dependent on you or something. My kids are not like that."

Coppola's wife Eleanor, he says, "always tells me that, because I lament, 'Where are my kids? Where are my grandkids?' And my wife says, 'Well, you gave...Read More

The only thing that scares me about Roman Polanski's intention to direct an adaptation of Robert Harris's "The Ghost", a just-published political thriller, is a statement given to Variety's Tatiana Siegel by Harris that "most of the story takes place in an oceanfront house during the middle of winter," which Harris called "classic Polanski territory."

What Harris means, I suspect, is that an oceanfront home is precisely the same kind of setting Polanski used in Death and the Maiden (1994), a well-written parlor drama that ranks in everyone's memory as a respectable but middling, and even a touch boring....Read More

There's plenty to get into each and every day about the Writers Strike, but every time I start to investigate an avenue or tap something out there's a voice inside that wonders if anyone outside the industry cares all that much. I care about fairness and decency and about the plight of writers everywhere so I want to stay on it. On top of which a reader guilt-tripped me yesterday about being a slacker about this. But I know deep down if I hadn't run into Diablo Cody yesterday the interest in my little Paramount Studios Bronson gate visit would have next...Read More

Here are a couple of YouTube clips -- clip #1 and clip #2 -- that seem to just cut through the crap and spell out the strike situation clean and plain. The cleanest and most Sesame Street-y, posted on 11.5, is a primer about what the writers want and what the studios are offering/not offering in response.

On the DVD front, it basically says that writers get 4 cents from the sale of a $19 or $20 retail DVD, and that what they're looking for...Read More

MTV's Josh Horowitz: "Francis Ford Coppola recently told Esquire he doubted how hungry you are for roles anymore. Did those comments upset you?

Jack Nicholson: "He called me. I've known Francis for a long time. I didn't even bother making him explain it. I just told him if anybody in the world understands being burned by an interview, I do. Don't give it a second thought. [But] if that's what he said, and that's what he meant, and now he feels he said something he shouldn't have, that's fine by me [also]. I'm hungry in the sense that I always was. Do...Read More

A classic sequence from The Train, the very last big-budget action film shot in black and white. I know that your average dipstick action fan doesn't want to know from monochrome, but it would be a great innovation in today's market to make a hard-core, black-and-white action flick. You could make it more of a wow if you shot it in 3D. Talk about a visual must-see event. Black and white didn't hurt Sin City...why not an action or adventure film?

There's a good-vibe antidote to the bad-vibe quote in that 11.4 N.Y. Post piece by Susannah Cahalan in which the real-life Richie Roberts said that American Gangster depictions of Frank Lucas -- Denzel Washington's Harlem drug-dealer -- "as a family man are ludicrous...to make him look good and me look bad."

I'm speaking of last Friday's Charlie Rose Show discussion between Roberts, Lucas, New York writer Mark Jacobson and American Gangster exec producer Nick Pileggi.

The Post piece made it sound like Roberts was pissed and taking swings at the film. That is not the impression he gives during...

Jonny Greenwood "was really one of the first people to see There Will Be Blood. And when he came back with a bunch of music, it actually helped show me what his impression of the film was. Which was terrific, because I had no impression.'' -- TWBB director Paul Thomas Anderson explaining the genesis of the score to Entertainment Weekly's Chris Willman in a piece that's mainly a q & a.

I spoke to famed producer-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (1408, Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt) and Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody (a.k.a. "the new Tarantino") during my early afternoon visit to the Paramount Bronson gate entrance. They and maybe 25 other picketers were doing what they could to visualize and perhaps energize the Writers Guild's resistance to the greed and bluster shown so far by the studios and the producers.

Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody outside Paramount Bronson gate -- Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:55 pm

Neither had much to say about the WGAW goals except to repeat what everyone...Read More

About 90 minutes ago I was soaking up some WGAW strike vibes at the Paramount Pictures' Bronson gate. Some guy brought along a boom box and was playing some Motown, and some of the female picketers were doing a slow slinky shing-a-ling as they held their signs aloft and went "whoo-hoo!" to the cars that kept driving by and honking out their support. (Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski was calling it "the funky Bronson gate.") Here are two slow-loading videos -- one of the Bronson gang, the other of the picketers at the main Paramount gate.

Bronson gate...

With all the late-night talk shows doing re-runs because of the WGA strike, movie marketers are losing out on the big promotional bumps that come from celebrities visiting Leno, Letterman, O'Brien, Ferguson and Ellen DeGeneres. No way you can't call that a signficant hurt factor. But the Oprah Winfrey show isn't affected by the strike (it's technically regarded as a news show, like Larry King's) and so the attention she'll be giving to The Great Debaters (Weinstein Co., 12.25), which she's one of the producers of, will be unaffected also. I've been told that research screenings have been "through the roof." One...Read More

Here's a clip of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and Richard Roeper going gah-gah for No Country for Old Men. Scott mentions at the end that Josh Brolin shoots a dog in both American Gangster (Denzel Washington's) and No Country (a pit bull that has it coming).

A 2 and 1/2 minute trailer for Bryan Singer's Valkyrie has been attached to prints of Lions for Lambs that have gone to theatres for debut this Friday. UA spokesperson Dennis Rice says the trailer will have its broadcast debut tomorrow (after being teased tonight) on Access Hollywood and online tomorrow at Yahoo's trailer site.

There's also a Valkyrie featurette on Apple.com today.

In any event, a U.K. projectionist has watched the trailer for the WWII thriller, which concerns a German military plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler with Tom Cruise...Read More

"Another theory I've been working on is the 'murder your darlings' [one] that says that the film everyone thinks is the frontrunner, or the film a publicist or studio tries to position as the frontrunner, is the one that is doomed to lose the big prize," Awards Daily's Sasha Stone wrote earlier today.

Wildebeest herd in Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya

"Murder your darlings -- if you want a movie to win best pic, don't position it as the frontrunner going into Oscar season unless it's Schindler's List, Titanic or Return of the King."

Variety's Dave McNary wrote this morning about screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Ed Wood) having "made a major fashion statement" outside Paramount Studios with a red T-shirt emblazoned with a reprint of a recent LA Times story headlined: "Viacom profit shoots up 80%."

Fine, very clever, typical Karaszewski move . But why didn't McNary's story have a photo of Karaszewski's actual T-shirt (i.e., with Karaszewksi wearing it) instead of a fake Photoshop simulation, and a simulation of a female T-shirt at that? If Karaszewski writes or calls, I'll meet him tomorrow (or...Read More

I don't care that the real Richie Roberts has accuracy beefs with American Gangster. I'm glad Ridley Scott and Steve Zallian made stuff up...good! Russell Crowe plays the former detective in Scott's film. Two days ago Roberts told N.Y. Post writer Susannah Cahalan that the film "whitewashes" the facts about former Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas and misrepresents aspects of Roberts' life. Fine!

No surprise that the trailer for Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters (Weinstein Co., 12.25) is smart, engaging, and clearly presented. Since there's no question about Washington (Antwone Fisher) being an above-average director it'll be no surprise if it turns out to be a good or exceptional film.

But let's be honest and admit it'll be a surprise if this inspirational true-life story delivers any surprises. We all know the inspirational movie template. We've seen these films time and again (i.e., gifted teacher inspires underdogs to think and perform like winners, resulting in a third-act...Read More

Catching a 2 pm plane back to Los Angeles. Back on it sometime late this evening, I suppose.

With the exception of four or five X-factor types, every person I spoke to at the No Country for Old Men premiere party on Sunday night said they loved it and called it beautifully made and superbly acted and all, but 90% also said "except for the ending, which I'm not sure about."

That's it, I said to myself. If supposedly hip industry types are saying this over and over, it's inescapable. It's going to be a huge refrain among the heartland ticket-buyers when No Country opens on 11.21.

The discomfort boils down to a certain...Read More

The Reeler's Stu Van Airsdale has done some reporting on the WGA picket line in Manhattan. He got some fairly good quotes from Peter Hedges, Scott Coffey, Adam Brooks, etc. He meant to send it along earlier but, he says, "it's still pretty fresh."

I chose to attend Sunday night's No Country for Old Men premiere and after-party rather than attend the Mighty Heart screening and Angelina Jolie q & a that happened at the same time at Paramount studios. I wish I could've done both because I respect Jolie's performance as Mariane Pearl, the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and would have liked to take it in again.

Roughly 450 people attended, according to a Paramount publicist who wrote me about it yesterday. The q & a between Jolie and Maxim critic and Envelope columnist...Read More

Some were cold or indifferent to it, but most of the viewers I spoke to after last night's Castro theatre screening of There Will Be Blood were either very approving or admitted to having been powerfully moved. Consider the cheers and applause that greeted the closing credits. Here's my final interview of the night with a huge fan. And here's a longish recording of several people offering various reactions. (Sorry for the ambient wallah-wallah, which makes it difficult to hear some of what's being said.)

Snapped an hour before the Castro Theatre sscreening began...

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is one of those legendary, go-for-broke, fiercely psychological big-canvas art movies that you need to see twice -- the first time to go "whoa!" and recoil and get all shaken up and bothered about, and the second time so you can reconsider and see what a masterwork it is, despite your feelings about the malignant emotional content. If you're a film maven of any kind you can't let your piddly emotions get in the way of recognizing diseased greatness.

Daniel Day Lewis's portrayal of the remarkable Daniel Plainview -- a...Read More

Fred Claus blows, according to Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt. Won't matter...never matters! The family audience will fork over for anything Hollywood cranks out as long as it's kid-friendly and well-marketed with two or three big names. (I often refused to take my kids to crap like this when they were young in the early to mid '90s. Well, most of the time.)

Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti in Fred Claus.

"Even more confounding than this mirthless, misanthropic mess," Honeycutt writes, "is the involvement of such talented people as Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, Miranda Richardson, Rachel Weisz, Kathy...Read More

I respect Shia Lebouf's on-screen energy, but I haven't been a huge fan. There was no choice but to feel badly about his Transformers performance, and with his casting in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull he became known as Steven Spielberg's little protege. He has seemed too young, too obsequious, too eager to please his elders. All is forgiven, however, in the wake of his Chicago Walgreens bust a day and a half ago.

It's obviously not a good or admirable thing to get drunk and then arrested, but Lebouf has...Read More

Got into San Francisco of the BART train around 1:45 pm. Another 15 minutes to find my way to the Triton Hotel, which looks cool from the outside (a kind of 1950s neo-Jetsons design) but the rooms are laundry closets with beds and TVs jammed inside. The girl at the front desk said mine was one of the hotel's biggest rooms. In other words, they have the effrontery to cram people into rooms that are 2/3 or even half of this size. Two and a half stars for the Triton Hotel! Make it two!

Link pic snapped from...

I'm off to LAX to catch an 11:50 a.m. plane to San Francisco and this evening's Castro theatre screening of There Will Blood. I'll be silent until the late afternoon.

The Saturday Night Live opener two nights ago was a skit about a Halloween party thrown by Bill and Hilary Clinton and attended by all the Presidential candidates. Moderately funny material with the usual pointed thrusts (i.e., Hilary is a witch, nobody likes her), but the wow element came when a guy wearing a Barack Obama mask walked in, took off the mask and turned out to be the Real McCoy.

Barack to Hilary: "And may I say you make a lovely bride?" Bill: "She's a...Read More

This parody reel isn't all that clever or special -- it's simply a Hollywood movie countdown from 100 to 1 -- but the clips are nicely chosen and very well-timed. Some dude named "AlonzoMosleyFBI" assembled it, claiming it was his first effort and his first YouTube post. It was previously linked on Roger Ebert's Answer Man column. Thanks to HE reader Richard Swank for the tip.

Because Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa kicked some surprising box-office ass ($80 million domestic, $150 million int'l) last year and similar-type earnings from his aging-Rambo remake may be in the offing, the MGM guys -- holding high the attitude and aesthetic of Cannon Films in 2007 -- are "in talks" with Stallone to direct and star in a remake of Death Wish, the 1974 Charles Bronson-Michael Winner film.

The belief seems to be that audiences weren't into Jodie Foster and Neil Jordan's The Brave One, which was almost a literal Death Wish remake, because they thought it was too womanly-emotional. But...Read More

Where credit is due: OK! is reporting that Katie Holmes ran the entire 26-mile New York City Marathon yesterday. She reportedly finished the race in 5 hours, 29 minutes and 58 seconds. Hats off, show of respect, eat my words.

Josh Brolin shared an observation earlier today about Lewellyn Moss, his No Country for Old Men character, that had never come to mind. The first and only time Lewellyn really smiles in the whole film is at the very end, when he's talking to that woman sitting next to the pool, the one who wants to share some beers.

I mentioned that I loved the first intimate scene between Lewellyn and his girlfriend Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) because of how they sit close and don't look at each other...casual, unforced...you know in less than 10 seconds these two have a great...Read More

Laundry-listing the violent movies of November-December, N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James wonders if viewers "really want a river of blood" at this time of year or any for that matter. The turn-off factor is not blood or bleeding itself -- it's the sense that the director is indulging some kind of blood-pain fetish and trying to arouse the audience into sharing in it the way a master chef will tantalize diners with a whiff of some special sauce.

The only '07 movie that seemed to play this game, by my standards, wasDavid Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, which James acknowledges is "probably the...Read More

As she writes about speaking with Into The Wild's Hal Holbrook, who is perhaps the lead contender for Best Supporting Actor at this stage by virtue of being the reigning old-guy veteran who finally deserves an Oscar after all these years (a.k.a., the Alan Arkin rationale), Awards Daily's Sasha Stone writes that "from the day your kids are born you can never do enough, never be enough, never give enough compared what your hopes and dreams for them are. And parenting is nothing but a long series of mistakes, with minor miracles here and there, that you hope amount to something good...Read More

"The general formula for most filmmaking could be broken down thusly: concept + stars + brute-force marketing = hoped-for payday. The studio system, with a need to appeal to plenty of people with huge opening weekends, does not generally lead to great cinema. But when the hydraulics of prestige are introduced into that equation, odd and wonderful things can happen.

"Big paydays are forgone by actors, directors work with (and for) far less money, and studios put money and promotion into films that have limited financial horizons. Actors, producers and directors know that when all is...Read More

It didn't seem worth posting at first, but I've watched this Jerry Seinfeld. vs. Larry King clip about four or five times now, and Seinfeld's facial reaction when King asks him if he ended his long-running series on his own or if he was cancelled gets funnier every time. This is the beginning of the end for Larry King. No shame in this -- you forget stuff when you get older, but you really start forgetting stuff when you hit your '70s.

A link offered by friendly Romanian columnist Laura Gutanu to yesterday's Cristian Mungiu interview regarding 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.

At a party last night a guy who usually knows what he's talking about told me to forget Amy Adams as a Best Actress contender in Enchanted (Disney, 11.21). Not to be mean or dismissive toward Adams, who's always very winning whatever the role, but because the film holds back too much -- it reeks of too much caution and timidity and wanting to keep things "safe."

In other words, it's not enough to be "really good" in a part. The film you're part of has to at least aspire to being an award-level...Read More