Earlier: A 24-slide powerpoint presentation from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, focusing on Obama's strengths in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Georgia Nevada and California.

Starting Out in the Evening director Andrew Wagner depicts the relationship between novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) with an admiring student (Lauren Ambrose) and his wayward daughter (Lili Taylor) "with some delicacy -- perhaps too much delicacy," writes New Yorker critic David Denby. Someone who was vaguely irritated with this film....finally!

"Schiller is meant to be a survivor of the New York Jewish literary renaissance of the 1950s and 60s, but the movie, for all its considerable intelligence, dries out his temperament too much. Anyone who remembers that vanished tribe of New Yorkers knows that, even in their later years, they made...Read More

The clock with strike midnight in Paris very shortly as we speak. Here's an Eiffel Tower webcam, refreshable every three to ten seconds.

"I saw There Will Be Blood again Friday here in bluer-than-blue New York City. They showed the preview for Stop Loss and you could feel a palpable sense of dread and disconnect in the audience. The room which had been so buzzy and excited before this, just went dead. Luckily the Kung-Fu Panda cell-phone announcement came on next and brought everyone back to life. Seriously." -- HE reader "tophertilson."

Red Carpet District's Kris Tapley has posted a rundown of the big award-related dates in January. Here's my edited version with the who-cares? events removed:

1.6.07: BFCA hosts the Critics Choice Awards (live on VH1). 1.8.08: DGA feature film nominees announced (Directors Guild of America). 1.10.08:: DGA documentary nominees announced. 1.10.08: WGA screen nominees announced (Writers Guild of America). 1.12.08: AMPAS nominations polls close, end of Oscar voting. 1.13.08: Golden Globe Awards -- probably no TV, phone reporting, webcasts. 1.16.08: Leave for Sundance Film Festival. 1.22.08: Oscar nominees announced at he crack of dawn. 1.25.08: Return from Sundance Film...Read More

The Benazair Bhutto "Zapruder tape" is a little hard to sort out. I had to watch it three times before spotting the assassin. You need to watch the other one too, which also has sounds of gunshots and an explosion.

The visuals of the Ray Ban-wearing assassin and the sound of gunshots strongly suggest that Ms. Bhutto didn't die by hitting her head on a lever of her car's sunroof during the attack, as Pakistan government spokespersons have claimed in a stab of almost Duck Soup-like surrealism. The N.Y. Times reports that yesterday Pakistani newspapers "covered their front...Read More

Bill Clinton talked up Mike Huckabee a day or two ago in Sergeant Bluffs, Iowa, and said he wasn't surprised by Huckabee's rise. He "seems to be the only one who can give a speech, tell a story, or tell a joke," Clinton said. "It's pretty dour crowd on the other side, and Mike's pretty funny."

In other words, the electoral Dating Game principle -- the standard that gave us two terms of George Bush -- is alive and thriving. Give us a president we can enjoy having a beer with, and who excues personal charm and can make us laugh....Read More

What do we do with this? We think we've got a really good film here and we're dead with the leave-us-aloners, just like with every other sand movie. What other options do we have? The lifestyle-holics don't want to know about anything remotely connected to Iraq. It's a settled issue and the paying public is a bunch of ADD iPhone escapist junkies. Don't want to be a pessimist but we're screwed, we're toast and there's no way out. Or is there?

Wait...can we get some traction by selling...Read More

Nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of New Year's Eve -- the refusal to (a) attend a New Year's Eve party or take part in any mass celebration thereof, or (b) to enjoy myself if I weaken and attend some kind of New Year's Eve soiree regardless. I hate the idea of celebrating renewal by way of a clock, and especially in the company of those who make a big whoop-dee-doo about it.

My all-time best New Year's Eve happened in Paris on the 1999-into-2000 Millenium year -- standing about two city blocks in front of the...Read More

Politico's Jeffrey Ressner on the year's top ten political movies -- No End in Sight, The Lives of Others, Breach, Sicko, In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, A Mighty Heart, Persepolis, Charlie Wilson's War and The Bourne Ultimatum. Of these, my personal favorite is The Lives of Others, which I keep processing as a fall of '06 film and not an early '07 release (which of course it was). The second best, hands down, was In the Valley of Elah -- the most neglected top-drawer film of the year.

Two days ago Red Carpet District's Kris Tapley said I was "back on the 'Oscar prognostication should be about spotlighting quality' thing again." No -- last Thursday's post was about how the Oscar race is about the debate -- pushing and ragging on this and that contender and what the various views and convictions that emerge say about who and what we are -- and not the winners, which nobody except Oscar queens ever remembers.

This okay but unexceptional Chicago Tribune piece about great movie endings reminds me that no matter what you may or may not think about There Will Be Blood as a whole, the ending -- the final line, I mean -- is almost certainly the year's best.

The second best ending, of course, belongs to No Country for Old Men -- the combination of that final line ("Then I woke up"), the cut to a silent and meditative Tess Harper across the kitchen table, and then back to Tommy Lee Jones...beat, beat, cut to black.

The year's third-best ending -- I'm not...Read More

Not a misprint, misunderstanding, misnomer or mis-anything: Woody Allen's Barcelona-based film, due in '08's late summer or early fall, is really going to be called Vicky Christina Barcelona -- one of the most atrocious titles ever conceived by a first-rank film maker, regardless of subject matter, theme, metaphor or what-have-you.

This on top of VCB being Allen's third Johansson pic over the last four is, I suspect, giving even his most ardent admirers, particularly in the wake of the disastrous Scoop, an uncertain feeling.

The romantic triangle pic (Spanish painter Javier Bardem and two American expats...Read More

Eight miles high...back in the early afternoon.

"Whether it precedes a biographical film or a historical drama, 'based on a true story' has come to convey several, often contradictory, ideas simultaneously to wary filmgoers: The events about to transpire on screen really happened, to the very people you're about to see, at the same time, and to the same end.

"Except, of course, when they didn't happen and the people didn't exist and we scrambled the time frame and changed the ending. (Hey, we said 'based on.') This is our story, we're sticking to it, and we've left the fact-checking to picky historians, outraged family members, alert critics and Wikipedia."...Read More

The lip-synching is off here and there and they should have found someone who sounds more like Mel Gibson, but otherwise this 12.29 WGA strike video is pretty good. I laughed out loud three times. The Frank Morgan/Wizard of Oz finale is best, followed by the Star Trek: Wrath of Khan bit.

"From Wall Street's perspective, we estimate the impact of accepting the [writers'] proposal is largely negligible," Bear Stearns wrote in a report last week.

If the AMPTP gave the striking WGA everything its negotiators are asking for, the world-renowned banking, brokerage and investment firm estimates that "the $120 million figure would carry an average impact of less than 1% on annual earnings per share for the media companies.

"That does not factor in any concessions by the writers' side (the WGA), where the principal issue is a desire for a piece of ad dollars from new-media distribution. The potentially...Read More

Anytime I hear anyone say "Eye-rack," it's hard to avoid thinking that he/she is perhaps a bit of a rube...no offense. Xenophobic, midwestern or southern, doesn't quite get it, a football fan, possibly Republican or in the military. I used to think the correct pronunciation was "Eehr-rahq" until I met a French director who'd been to the region and said that world-traveller types pronounce it "Uhhr-raq." I don't say it that way to this day (it sounds affected), but "Eye-rack" is impossible. It's almost embarassing to bring it up, but so many people seem to pronounce it this way.

HE reader Pelle Vehreschild, writing from Germany, informs that the German trailer for Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage uses quotes from four sources to sell it to the viewer, in this order: Der Spiegel, Time magazine, Hollywood Elsewhere and Variety. Here's the kickoff page.

I guess some of us aren't fully appreciating what a huge crossover hit Juno has become, so interested parties are pointing this out by comparing Juno's numbers with the four biggest indie hits of recent times -- Little Miss Sunshine, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Sideways -- which also became Best Picture nominees.

Juno grossed $3.285 million on 998 screens last night (i.e., Friday the 28th), Sideway's best Friday gross was $1.69 million on 1694 screens, Crouching Tiger's best Friday gross was $2.3 million on 693 screens, Brokeback Mountain's best Friday gross was $2.019 million on 1196 screens and Little Miss...Read More

Back in Boston with a gentle reminder: There Will Be Blood is having a midnight sneak in various blue cities across the map. I wonder how it'll play in Redville. I actually have my suspicions. A friend predicted earlier today it won't enjoy good word-of-mouth among the plebes and will taper off once all the ubers have all seen it.

More trains and automobiles today, so no more action until later this evening, if that. Meanwhile a question for anyone who's given the matter any thought -- what films due to open in the first quarter of '08 are HE readers most anticipating other than Cloverfield? I can't think of a single one other than Sundance premieres. Anyone?

"I fully anticipate this will be a film that will be hard for many people to choke down," Ain't It Cool's "Moriarty"/Drew McWeeny has written about There Will be Blood. "Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is one of the most flawed and disturbing 'heroes' in film history.

"But it's obvious that Paul Thomas Anderson fell in love with the character as he was writing him, flaws and all, and decided to follow him to whatever end occurred, not worrying about making it safe or whether or not we'll 'like' Plainview.

There Will be Blood "is unapologetic. It...Read More

"Forget Fight Club and Se7en. If you're looking for the real reason to consider David Fincher a major-league American director, all the evidence is right there in Zodiac. [This] is at once an epic true-crime police procedural and a genuinely chilling study in the nature of unfulfilled obsession. I should know: I've seen it three times already." -- from Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere's 10 Best of the Year piece ("Skepticism was a Convincing Force," 12.28). I've seen Zodiac seven times -- four times in a theatre, the regular DVD once, and the Director's Cut DVD twice. I'll be posting an audio...Read More

Sooner or later all partnerships come to an end. Sad but not tragic. The important thing is to orchestrate the dissolution as gently and smoothly as possible for the kids' sake.

Friday, 12.28.07, 3:35 pm

A Manhattan-based online correspondent** has pointed out that There Will Be Blood's $100k per theatre average this weekend in two theatres "puts it up there with some of the Disney animated movies, Dreamgirls and Brokeback Mountain, all which ended up making over $70 million.

"It looks like there's far more initial demand to see the movie than either Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love, although they also opened in more theatres.

"This doesn't necessarily mean Blood might get a Best Picture nom but it certainly seems that the buzz created by the early praisings has generated exceptional interest and that...Read More

People have been screwing up their No Country for Old Men capsule plot descriptions in a small but important way for weeks now. The Age's Chris Mathieson, in a 12.26 interview with Javier Bardem, provides the latest example.

He starts with the usual: "When antelope hunter and Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a drug deal gone wrong, he finds a succession of bodies and a bag containing several million dollars," blah blah. Then the wrongo. Matheison says that Moss dooms himself and his wife, his young wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), to a fugitive existence "once he takes...Read More

N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply is saying pretty much what Variety's Anne Thompson has also reported, which is that all signs indicate that the WGA strike will keep the Golden Globe awards from being broadcast by NBC on 1.13, and that at best the show will be an internet webcast as far as the outside world is concerned.

"Panicked at the prospect of having to confront strikers as they walk up the red carpet, celebrities have sent what Hollywood publicity executives describe as a near-unanimous signal: If striking writers show up, the stars will not," Cieply writes.

"NBC, so far, is...Read More

The 12.21 Charlie Rose Show in which There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis appeared. The interview runs 55 minutes.

"You're never as open to wonder and horror as when you're a child," Orphanage producer Guillermo del Toro tells MTV.com's Josh Horowitz. "When you're a child, you can really be enthralled and reach an absolutely ecstatic stage of joy with any wonder in the world. And by the same token, you can reach an incredibly deep paroxysm, like a panic of horror, deeper than any adult.

"It [therefore] takes a lot for an adult to regress to those intense emotional stages. And in the movies, obviously, the best way to present a fable or a...Read More

I'm sorry for not being a devout watcher of The Wire (there's always the DVD box sets), but HE reader Tim Sherrick has pointed to an interesting featurette on the final season dealing with the media entitled "The Wire: The Last Word."

Don't look for anything too fierce or scorching from HBO's Recount, a multi-layered account of the backstage drama that took place in Florida during the disputed 2000 Gore-Bush election.

A strikingly lean Al Gore at the 2000 Democratic National Convention

A story posted two days ago by Politico's Jeffrey Ressner implies that the two-hour telefilm, directed by Jay Roach and set to air next May, may have been slightly softened in order to keep Bush operatives -- those lockstep political strategists generally credited with having helped steal the 2000 election (with the crucial compliance...Read More

Two opposing views of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood -- the yea from Matt Zoller Seitz, the nay from N.P. Thompson.

Blood "isn't perfect or entirely satisfying, but it's so singular in its conception and execution that one can no more dismiss it than one can dismiss a volcanic eruption occurring in one's backyard," Seitz observes. "It cannot be diminished -- as Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia could, and to my mind, rightly were diminished -- as another instance of a facile, energetic director hurling homage at the audience."

Having seen it on 11.28, Thompson writes...Read More

A Strategic Vision poll released Friday "finds that John Edwards has the support of 28% of likely Democratic caucus-goers, his best standing in Iowa over the past six months. Edwards now trails Clinton by only one point and Obama by two points, well within the poll's margin of error of 4.5 percent."

Okay, fine...Edwards has been surging lately, which is generally good news for the anti-Clintonites. But a new L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll has Obama a distant third behind Clinton and Edwards...what? Is this some kind of last-minute shudder by Iowa's closet racists? Is the Times/Bloomberg pollers missing out on the...Read More

With zero chance of the WGA strike being settled by 1.13, Variety's Anne Thompson is reporting that "word from within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is that one possible scenario is for the Globes to proceed without the live NBC telecast."

Uhhmm...is there another option? Faced with a choice between staging the Golden Globes without the TV broadcast and cancelling the whole shebang (due to nominees declining to cross WGA picket lines and writers unable to contribute quips and podium repartee), it would be pretty damn surprising if the HFPA chose the latter option.

I agree with Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet's belief that the Best Actor Oscar is pretty much Daniel Day Lewis's for the taking. If any one scene from There Will Be Blood is the clincher, I suspect it's probably the one called "I've Abandoned My Child!," which Brevet has posted along with five others.

Lewis shows us Daniel Plainview's reluctance to play the part of a sinner, and then his irritation at the goading from Paul Dano's Eli to really and truly atone before God, and then his increasing rage at Eli's turning up...Read More

This is another travelling day, which means more down time. I'm looking forward to the day when I can file from cars, trains and planes without breaking a sweat. I foresee some kind of check-in around 5 or 6 pm eastern.

Re-edited on 12.28: The thousands who complain each and every year about the shallow obsessiveness behind the Oscar race reporting keep missing a basic fact, which is that tracking and handicapping the possible nominees and likely winners isn't primarily about picking winning horses (although it is), or the gowns worn by female nominees or the Oscar telecast ratings or any of that other stuff which we all know to be transitional effusions of little if any value.

The reason the Oscar race grabs us the way it does each year is because it's primarily about the championing of values. Day-to-day values, eternal values,...Read More

May angels protect us from the moral absolutists, the bullies, and from the generally maniacal Middle-Eastern fraternity of wing-nuts who talk to God.

Will Smith was quoted two or three days ago saying he'd been misinterpreted over a recent remark he passed along to a reporter for the Scottish Daily Record about Adolf Hitler. "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today,'" Smith said. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good."'

Exactly. Of course. Each and every person believes that whatever the world might think of them or their deeds, they're basically decent, reasonable-minded folk whose mothers and in-laws...Read More

I spoke to an older Academy member the other day about The Orphanage, Juan Antonio Bayona's genuinely creepy ghost movie that is Spain's offical entry for the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar. And his response was "well made, frightening...but why did Spain submit it?" Amazing -- he regarded it as a straight genre exercise without any thematic or emotional subcurrents to speak of. The answer, of course, is that when a "genre piece" is this immaculate, all bets are off, thematic elements abound and all prejudices are set aside.

Before 2008 begins, a Cloverfield statement for the ages. I'm not saying the following will happen or that it needs to happen, but the highest expression of the Cloverfield idea would be to never show the beast. A bringer of horror and havoc that doesn't finally exist except in our heads. There's a way for a movie like this to be done right -- all omens and tremors and chaos-around-the-corner -- and if it was nailed just so, it could be beautiful. But of course, there's the moronic-masses factor to consider. 97% of the mob out there would revolt if Cloverfield played this...Read More

I'm dying to see J.J. Abrams' Cloverfield. That's all that matters now....for the next few days. Forget the awards season, forget the strike. It's all Cloverfield, Cloverfield, Cloverfield...the ultimate 9.11 flashback freakout movie of early '08.

A famous Manhattan armageddon shot from When Worlds Collide

"After 9.11, we all thought this was going to be a verboten practice, that no one would ever dare show New York being attacked again in movies," says James Sanders, the author of "Celluloid Skyline," about the history of New York in movies, in a 12.26 N.Y. Times "City Room" piece by...Read More

Getting into a car, heading for Connecticut...no action for the next four or five hours.

A PDF of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood script (i.e., one that doesn't reflect the precise coloration of the Lebowski ending) is still up. Move fast.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting that pirated copies of Oscar contenders like The Great Debatersand The Bucket List showed up online before opening in theaters. He then did some snooping around about when Oscar voters got their last DVD screeners. Sweeney Todd arrived on Christmas Eve, apparently -- two days before Oscar ballots are shipped on 12.26.

Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason has posted some 12.25 figures: National Treasure: Book of Secrets, $14.75 million and a 5-day holiday total of $14.75 million. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, $9.48 million. I Am Legend, $8.85 million. Alvin and the Chipmunks, $6.66 million. Charlie Wilson’s War, $4.16 million. The Great Debaters, $3.49 million. Sweeney Todd, $2.82 million. The Bucket List (NY & LA) with a $10,000-plus per-screen average.

Rob Reiner's The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25), the Jack Nicholson-Morgan Freeman movie about dying from cancer but also getting to fly around the world in a private jet, has been flunked by the Rotten Tomatoes chorus. It managed only a 48% positive (and if you read the presumably positive red-tomato reviews you'll realize they're half-and-halfers at best).

Best slam quotes: (1) "Any moron can make a bad movie, but it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List -- Salon's Stephanie Zacharek; (2) "It''s a picture about two cancer patients confronting...Read More

Another strong indication that the WGA strike is going to drag on and on and that the Golden Globe and the Oscar award telecasts are more or more likely to be unscripted and shorn of strike-honoring movie stars has come from Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke in a 12.24 posting:

"The CEOs are deeply entrenched in their desire to punish the WGA for daring to defy them by striking and to bully the writers into submission on every issue, and [think] that the writers are sadly misguided to believe they have any leverage left.

"I'm told the CEOs are determined to...Read More

"There's subtlety, and then there's invisibility. Charlie Wilson's War director Mike Nichols offers us champagne-sparkle charm and whimsy and aw-shucks hijinks. If a film really wants to tackle the covert actions of the Cold War and their long-term consequences, it needs to provide short sharp shots of truth as raw as whiskey, one after the other. [Instead] we get the buzzy, boozy, bonhomie of Charlie's crusade.

"What Nichols has done is eliminate the historical hangover of unintended consequences. Charlie Wilson's War is timid where it should be reckless, clever where it should be cutting, funny where...Read More

The trend of more and more movies being made digitally is, according to a 12.23.07 N.Y. Times story by Michael Cieply, a storage problem. Key sentence: "Suddenly the film industry is wrestling again with the possibility that its most precious assets, the pictures, aren't as durable as they used to be."

It's all there in dollars and cents, Cieply says, in a study called "The Digital Dilemma" that was released last month. The subject is the digital archiving of movies, written by the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

"Busy walking, or dodging, the...Read More

I missed this idea from Ironicsan's David Friedman when it was first posted on 12.4.06, but it's a seriously cool idea that Tokyo's city fathers should absolutely run with: "The people of Tokyo should construct a giant building shaped like Godzilla. Imagine what it would do to the city's skyline, and to the tourism industry. People would come from all over to take pictures.

"His eyes could flash red so airplanes don't hit him. There could be an observatory in his mouth so people could look out over Tokyo. One of his arms could house...Read More

One of the finest opening paragraphs in the history of movie reviewing came from N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in his 5.25.01 review of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor: "The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is From Here to Eternity."

Three things about Michael Kidd, the award-winning choreographer (Guys and Dolls and Can-Can on stage, The Band Wagon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in films) who died Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles. One, he was straight. Two, he talked like a New York cab driver or newsstand vendor. And three, he gave a snappy and amusing performance as a choreographer hired to finesse a stage show for a Santa Rosa teenage beauty pageant in Michael Richie's Smile ('75).

(l. to r.) Michael Kidd, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen on the set...

At the end of the day, voting for a Best Actor performance is a vote for the character, as in "I'd like to know that guy or at least have a drink with him" or "I may not like this guy, but I understand why he acted as he did and I respect him for that." What Best Actor Oscar winner has played a character who didn't impress viewers in one of these two ways?

A Best Actress vote comes from a similar but somewhat different place. People vote for this or that female character, yes, but mainly they vote for her...Read More

If Daniel Day Lewis wins his second Best Actor Oscar for There Will Be Blood, he'll be joining a fraternity of only seven other two-time winners -- Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Fredric March, Jack Nicholson and Spencer Tracy. As far as I can reason, there are two things working against Lewis joining the club.

One, his Blood character, Daniel Plainview, is a single-minded misanthropic fiend -- the person many workaholics fear they might actually be deep down, which is not a pleasant notion. Plainview has a certain malignant burn-through quality, yes, and he really is quite the powerhouse,...Read More

Continuing their mission to persuade every big-name French actress to doff duds (and in the wake of their recent Juliette Binoche coup), the editors of the January 2008 French Playboy have landed Ludivine Sagnier as their latest agent provocateur. Sagnier is best known for her lead role in Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool ('03). She was also in Ozon's 8 Women, Laurent Tirard's Moliere, Christophe Honore's Love Songs and the recent anthology film Paris, je t'aime.

Bucket List director Rob Reiner tells N.Y. Times guy David Halbfinger that he first read the script "with the eyes of a 62-year-old baby boomer increasingly mindful of his own horizons, artistic and otherwise. 'I like to think of myself as a very young old person,' Reiner says. 'But you start thinking, how many years am I going to have to be productive?' Especially in our business, youth is so stressed. You start thinking, how many more movies am I going to get to make?' Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll make five more.'"

There is only one calculation and one motto for any...Read More

Drunken hooligans dressed as Santa Claus ransack New Zealand Hoyts multiplex...let's go to the videotape.

"There's one documentary that's been put out recently that has generated a lot of interest called Freedom to Fascism. And we're moving in that direction. Were not moving toward Hitler-type fascism, but we're moving toward a softer fascism.

"Loss of civil liberties, corporations running the show, big government in bed with big business. So you have the military industrial complex, you have the medical industrial complex, you have the financial industry, you have the communications industry. They go to Washington and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That's where the control is. I call that a soft form of fascism, something...Read More

This 12.23 N.Y. Times piece by Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann, called "Holiday on Thin Ice," is a pseudo-transcription of an argument Apatow and his actress-wife have every year. Their discussion has two themes: (a) Apatow is a mildly inconsiderate, passively selfish gift-giver and (b) Mann can be testy and grasping when she puts her mind to it.

And as long as we're talking back-and-forth dialogue, it goes without saying that "Holiday on Thin Ice" doesn't begin to compare to "Dont Have a Cow, Man," that famous exchange of e-mails between Apatow and Mark Brazill, the creator of That '70s Show,...Read More

Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd numbers "are more like art songs than show tunes, attempts at Brechtian insight and scale, which I presume is Sondheim's design: Anyone looking for hummable toe-tappers of the 'chicks and geese and ducks better scurry' variety should go play elsewhere. Only a shallow person would expect an actual melody to accompany lyrics of such nihilist significance as 'There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it's filled with people who are filled with shit/ And the vermin of the world inhabit it.' This is complex, important music, people! Not for simple, cheerful folk by any...Read More

Over my decades of watching and loving movies, I've had a big problem with one and only one cinematographer -- Janusz Kaminski. He's obviously a widely-admired pro, but I've never liked and never will like those bleachy, sunny flood-lit shots that he's put into so many Steven Spielberg films. When I hear he's the dp I think right away, "Uh-oh, here we go with the milky desaturated colors again." It's just hit me that he's a side reason that I'm not as big a fan of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as I could be. That said, I love his work...Read More

14 cities (including Boston!) are being treated to a special midnight sneak of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood on Saturday, 12.29. PTA put together this special "haircut" video for fans to announce the sneaks. The Paramount Vantage release opens in NY & LA on Wednesday, 12.26.

The updated Movie City News list of journo/critic picks: No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Once. Is anyone taking this in? Two films that have long been considered dead in terms of potential Best Picture consideration -- Zodiac and Once -- are, in the view of dozens of top-dog writers whose lives are devoted to evaluating movies as best they can, among the top five of the year. Hats off to the Zeligs, go-alongers and Academy fuddy-duds who turned their backs months ago.

Two Huffington Post-ings about the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy situation, one from tabloid editor Bonnie Fuller (yes, Bonnie Fuller) full of moral outrage, another from New York comedian Andy Borowitz.

HE reader James Kent just wrote the following: "With the whole WGA strike going on, what impact do you think that could have on Best Picture nominations this year? As the entire academy nominates Best Picture, I'm wondering if there might be enough bad blood among SAG, WGA and DGA members that they might steer away from a big studio production in favor of the little guy?"

In other words, if it comes down to a choice between nominating a deserving big-budgeter like Sweeney Todd or American Gangster and a deserving mid-level or low-budgeter, will the rank-and-file vote against the expensive movie as...Read More

"This is one of the few years where it is easy to imagine the DGA nominations being off of Oscar's Top 5 by at least two directors," David Poland wrote in his most recent "20 Weeks to Oscar" column. I've read this sentence five times and the sucker won't ring true. Let's try it this way: "This is one of the few years in which it's easy to imagine the DGA's Best Director nominees being, in at least two instances, different than the directors of the five most likely Best Picture nominees."

Cut to the chase and Poland is more or...Read More

"Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama," writes N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a truly fascinating column. The thrust of her 12.23 entry is that Bill Clinton, for the strangest and most tangled-up of reasons, may be subconsciously sabotaging Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

The seed of this suspicion is a friend of the Clintons having told Dowd that "for the first time since the Marc Rich pardon, Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him."

"Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification...Read More

"There is also a growing tension between critics -- who take film seriously as art and are increasingly scornful of the vituperative blog culture -- and Oscar pundits, who with their wacky statistical analysis come off more like breathless racetrack tipsters than film admirers. The root of all this evil, of course, is that everyone writes entirely too much about the Oscars (my newspaper included). With all those special issues and Oscar blogs to fill, the occasional astute observations are drowned out by the 24/7 blather." -- from a 12.18 Patrick Goldstein "Big Picture" column that I should have acknowledged earlier.

Sweeney Todd is not only consumed by vengeance but goes mad with it, finally destroying himself and taking others down with him. In a way the visual signature of his derangement is his white shock of skunk hair. It's interesting to note that the last movie character who had the same skunk 'do was also obsessed by vengeance, so lost in rage that he's prepared to sacrifice his life, the lives of his crew members and even his ship to find and destroy his nemesis.

Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd; Gregory Peck as Captian...

I clicked, I saw, I chortled...a little lame but not too bad..."you, sir!"

Two articles about There Will Be Blood appear in today's L.A. Times/Calendar section -- a Daniel Day Lewis/Paul Thomas Anderson profile by Michael Ordona and one by Paul LIeberman about the casting of young Dillon Freasier as Lewis's "purported" son. A third piece by Reed Johnson examines how "the planetary and human costs of overconsumption [are] a major cultural theme" examined in Blood as well as Sean Penn's Into the Wild.

"Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, which I will write about in detail when it opens on Wednesday, and David Fincher's Zodiac, which I wrote about when it was released in March, together constitute my 1 through 10," writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a 12.23 article.

"These aren't necessarily the year's best (impossible to determine given the glut of films), just the two that matter most to me, that dug in the deepest and rearranged my own givens. They made me feel like the woman in the start of Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil who says, 'I’ve...Read More

Sweeney Todd suffered a disastrous 23% drop in terms of its projected weekend earnings from Friday to Saturday. This appeared to be a result of the Redville cognoscenti finally figuring out it's not a London-based Jack Sparrow adventure of some kind but a (choke...gag) Stephen Sondheim musical. (Fantasy Mogul's Steve Mason has reported an 11% Friday to Saturday downturn. The 23% drop is based on Friday's projection of a $12 million weekend vs. Paramount's own reported weekend tally of $9.3 million.)

Realizing they'd been boondoggled (after ignoring the internet chatter for months), a significant percentage...Read More

A final remembrance of The Lives of Others star Ulrich Muhe, whose death last July was, for me, the saddest and most unexpected of the year. Coming in the wake of having given one of the most moving performances of the 21st Century and experiencing the greatest international success of his career and then bam...over.

I felt a huge kinship with Muhe himself, partly due to interviewing him at the Toronto Film Festival (also chatting at a couple of festival parties) in September '06, partly because I knew that his own disturbing history with the...Read More

For the first time, Barack Obama has nudged ahead of Hillary Clinton in a New Hampshire primary voter survey. Behind her by 14 points in early November, now at 30% to her 28% according to a just-published Boston Globe survey. McCain is surging also in the Granite State. 15 points behind Mitt Romney in early November, he's now trailing by only 3 points -- 25 to Romney's 28.

This Jamie Stuart video portrait of Atonement director Joe Wright is, as usual, "different", personal, whimsical...a promotional piece that doesn't promote or smooch celebrity butt as much as burrow in with some kind of view askew. One big problem: it was released two days ago, but it begins with a title that refers to a screening of Atonement that happened over three months ago at the Toronto Film Festival. My first reaction was "what...it took Stuart three months to slap it together?"

Check out this Top Ten of '07 list at Movie City News. Growing and evolving, might rearrange in a few days. No Country for Old Men at the top, of course. But look at #2. So it's not just the British critics and four or five other guys (myself included). The total absence of Zodiac as a Best Picture winner with all of the various award-giving groups so far amounts to some kind of disconnect.

Ten years ago James Cameron's Titanic had been playing for one week (it opened on 12.14.97) and had made $28 million and change. Nobody knew how far it would go or how deeply it would connect, but I suspected -- as did a lot of movie journalists and industry types who were invited to the first wave of screenings -- it would be huge.

I had first seen it on a rainy afternoon in late November on the Paramount lot. I took Matt Drudge as my guest, and I remember feeling shaken and moved as I...Read More

"I attended the Friday 4:35 pm screening of Sweeney Todd at The Grove. A full house at the beginning, though numerous walk outs [happened] during first two songs. The film was not sold as a musical and I believe these people were Pirates fans who were caught off guard." -- HE reader Jerry Beck, 12.22.07, 9:43 ayem. Surprised male moviegoer: "What a rook! They screwed us! Let's ask for our money back!" Wife of surprised male moviegoer: "You won't get anything back. Let's just sneak into another film."

Leaving aside the Bagger's japey suggestions about how to have an Oscar Awards show without writers or talent in the seats, I was taken by the declaration at the start that the Oscars "are TBTF -- Too Big Too Fail. Strike-ridden, snakebit, say what you will, but some kind of the show will go on. Too much money and ego are riding on it for a workaround not to emerge." The fact that the DGA will cut a deal with the AMPTP a lot sooner than later (i.e., early next month?) will probably affect the WGA talks. Unlike the WGA and...Read More

National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets will be #1 this weekend with about $54 million and $14,000 a print. (I may actually pay to see this today.) I Am Legend is down 52% from last weekend but still at #2 -- $36.9 million for the weekend. Alvin & Chipmunks will be third with $31.7 million, down 26%. Sweeney Todd will take in $12 million and $9600 a print for a fourth-place showing.

The fifth-place performer, Charlie Wilson's War, is appealing strictly to a 30-and-over crowd that doesn't tend to go to movies in any real strength until Xmas Day, so it might...Read More

Walk Hard has become the first Judd Apatow-produced comedy since the Apatow hot streak started three years ago to fall on its face. It's expected to make a lousy $4,450,000 for the weekend at $1600 a print....finished, kaput, off to the showers. It's funny, clever, sharp, absurdist..what happened? My theory in a nutshell: (a) people figured that a spoof of Walk The Line and Ray wasn't vital enough to see in theatres, and (b) John C. Reilly isn't a star, doesn't put butts in seats.

HE reader Jamie Rosengard, writing from a secret location that may or may not be within the continental United States of America, reported this morning that he "had the pleasure of seeing Sweeney Todd [last] night at a 10 pm showing. I was initially pleased to see there was a full house. However, it quickly became apparent that few people in the audience had any idea what they were getting themselves into. When the movie finally started and the first song began there was an audible gasp -- almost no one realized that the film is a musical."

"Audible gasp"? How completely shut-off-from-the-hullaballoo...Read More

Variety's Bill Higgins, the veteran party-coverage guy, reported in yesterday's print edition that the WGA strike impasse has pushed Golden Globe after-party planners to the edge of the abyss. With the WGA intending to picket the GG awards and talent (i.e., prospective award-winners) reluctant to cross picket lines, party maestros are grappling with a growing possibility that the whole damn shebang could very well implode.

"Planners are studiously trying to avoid upsetting the HFPA by prematurely canceling their after-party," Higgins writes. "'We're trying to determine the point of no return,' one exec says. 'Nobody wants...Read More

It's not that unusual for Hollywood hotshots, especially Italians with New York-area backgrounds, to have at least a passing acquaintance with mob culture and, in line with that, an occasional no-big-deal acquaintance with maybe a guy who knows a guy who's into something. Didn't Mickey Rourke have some kind of friendly thing going with John Gotti? George Raft was friendly with Bugsy Siegel when young, so their friendship naturally continued when Siegel came out to Hollywood in the early '40s. Michael Imperioli's Christopher Moltisanti character got into the movie business and made Cleaver. In general terms there's always been a kind of...Read More

A 12.20 Zogby phone poll says that only Barack Obama would beat all the potential Republican presidential candidates. The survey says that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards would lose to some.

I'm giving HE's 2007 Worst Movie of the Year award to Steve Carr's Are We Done Yet? The aspect that made it seem more reprehensible than Norbit, Good Luck Chuck, Evan Almighty, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium or Daddy Day Camp was, for me, the fear-of-animals humor. The idea that a chipmunk or a squirrel would attack humans like a Jurassic raptor is something that only corpulent shopping-mall zombies would laugh at. Only a person who lives in a realm totally apart from nature (and therefore living in fear of it) would laugh at these asinine gags.

There's...Read More

In view of today's Sweeney Todd opening, a partial re-run of my 11.30.07 review: I went to Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount, 12.21) with a guarded attitude. And then it began, and less than two minutes in I knew it was exceptional and perhaps more than that. Ten minutes later I was feeling something growing within me. Surprise turned to admiration turned to amazement. I felt filled up, delighted. I couldn't believe it...a Tim Burton film that reverses the decline!

All my life I've loved -- worshipped -- what Stephen Sondheim's music can do for the human...Read More

A New York reader caught a research screening of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon last week near Union Square, and has some generally favorable things to say. Shot only about three months ago, this adaptation of Peter Morgan's play about the famous David Frost/Richard Nixon TV interview of 1977 is "a solid, satisfying historical drama....no knockout but it fights a good fight and lands its share of solid punches.

"Frank Langella's Nixon is very good," the guy says. " Wearing very little make-up (thankfully), his performance is fully felt and fleshed out. His Nixon is competitive and guarded,...Read More

"I think Sean Penn is the greatest living American in a certain way, because he's a man of action. I feel by being a neutralist in this area, in my actual field of endeavor I can be more effective. You do not become militant if you wish to be a successful propagandist. Because all you will do is preach to the choir and further entrench your opposition." -- Jack Nicholson speaking to AP's profiler Ryan Pearson.

"Sweeney Todd is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature. It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme -- I am tempted to say evil -- genius.

"It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I'm a little startled myself, but it's been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares. And the unsettling power of Sweeney Todd comes above all from...Read More

The first trailer for Guillermo del Toro 's Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Universal, 7.11.08), introduced by Guillermo himself. May the Gods protect this exceptional filmmaker and delightful human being from the scaly claw-clutch of Peter Jackson...please. (Thanks to UnChien for the link.)

According to the Times Online's Will Lawrence, Will Smith "is one of the most ebullient actors working today, constantly joshing and joking, the twinkle in his eye as bright as the expensive diamond studs that nestle in his ear-lobes." This is precisely why I can't stand the guy. He's a salesman first and a vulnerable human being second. The more Smith gets away from joshing and joking and giving off those Scientology-loves-you smiles (which he avoids pretty well in I Am Legend), the more tolerable he becomes.

Another early '08 dumper -- Gregory Hoblit's Untraceable (Screen Gems, 1.25.08). You can smell it off the trailer, which reveals most of the main plot bones (apparently) except for the last half of the final act. FBI agents (Diane Lane, Colin Hanks, Billy Burke) after a serial killer who uses website hits to help perpetrate killings, and thus reminding us that we're all vulnerable to cyber invasions. Gives every indication of having been a completely cynical paycheck job for everyone concerned.

The Criterion Collection Two-Lane Blacktop two-disc set is an absolutely beautiful thing to buy, hold, unwrap and feel cool about owning. It's got the two DVDs with the remastered feature on one disc and several "looking back" video shorts by director Monte Hellman, plus Rudy Wurlitzer's original script and an essay booklet. It's a first-class package all the way.

But the film, which I saw clear-eyed for the very first time this morning, is only a so-so-thing. It's great and irksome, in and out, good and mundane...but certainly not...Read More

Hollywood Chicago's Adam Fendelman talking recently to a subdued, almost whispery John Cusack about Grace is Gone.

There Will Be Blood star Daniel Day Lewis speaking to the N.Y. Observer's Sarah Vilkomerson about the film's startling ending: "To me, the symmetry was absolutely right. It may be outrageous, that last scene, but to me it seemed absolutely right. I love that there's an exuberance to it."

Exuburance...absolutely. But this scene wouldn't work without that final period, that final "Day in the Life" chord, that All The President's Men typewriter-key wham: "I'm finished." (And no, this is nothing like a spoiler. You can say these words when you've finished eating or watching a film,...Read More

Statement #1 by Oscar show producer Gil Cates to USA Today's Anthony Breznican, spoken last Friday: "The only thing I can tell you without any equivocation is that the [Oscar] show is going to go on. That's absolutely for certain."

Cates statement #2, spoken two days ago: "It's my fondest hope that the strike will be over by [2.24.08].

The Screen Actors Guild award nominations ...blah, blah. No surprises, no startling calls....everything pre-digested, pre-approved, pre-vetted. Four noms for Into the Wild -- Emile Hirsch (Best Actor), Hal Holbrook (Best Supporting Actor), Catherine Keener (Best Supporting Actress) and Best Ensemble Cast. This is nonetheless the biggest uptick for Wild since the season began.

No Country for Old Men got Best Ensemble Cast plus one each for Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem (Best Supporting Actor), and three Michael Clayton players were honored -- George Clooney (Best Actor), Tom Wilkinson (Best Supporting Actor) and Tilda Swinton (Best Supporting...Read More

Yesterday afternoon Entertainment Weekly's Missy Schwartz posted a chat with director Guillermo del Toro about the possibility of his directing the two Hobbit movies for producer Peter Jackson. Del Toro said he's "heard some rumblings but nothing official. I don't want to think about it because it's such an eventuality."

And may it go no further than that. Del Toro is way, way above Jackson's class -- his work has steadily matured, becoming cleaner, richer and more confident, with each new film. Jackson hasn't advanced a single aesthetic notch since Braindead. He's about two things and...Read More

Here's a testy little spat between The Envelope's Tom O'Neil and Oscar show producer Gil Cates about the possible effects of the WGA strike upon the late January Golden Globes awards and the 2.24.08 Oscar show.

"Awards shows are the best chance that writers have to prove how valuable they are," O'Neil said in a 12.18 AP story. "Without a script, we may finally find out how vapid and empty these stars really are. The awards shows will have no choice but to go on with the show, but not the telecast."

"That's totally ridiculous!," Cates replied in the same damn...Read More

Of all the Xmas presidential front-runner ads, I have to admit that Hilary Clinton's is a tiny bit craftier -- idea, production values, acting (i.e., lines that don't demand too much emoting), no "C" word -- than Barack Obama's, although Barack's is certainly warmer and more comforting.

"There's this whole school of thought that movies are always so great when you're 10 or 12 years old, and the reality of it is, when you're 10 or 12 years old, you've only seen 100 stories. By the time you get to be 25, you've seen 3,000. You've seen every permutation of every dramatic arc. And when somebody takes that and stands it on its head, that can be exciting." -- Zodiac director David Fincher to Variety's Justin Chang.

"Lynne Spears' book about parenting has been delayed indefinitely, her publisher said Wednesday. Lindsey Nobles, a spokeswoman for Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson Inc., said that the memoir by the mother of Britney Spears was put on hold last week. She declined to comment on whether the delay was connected to the revelation that Spears' 16-year-old daughter, Jamie Lynn, is pregnant."

It's comforting to read that New York's "Vulture" column shares at least some of my advance loathing for Peter Jackson's two Hobbit movies ("So, uh, great -- the sequel's going to be some Silmarillion- inspired filler crap, like all those scenes of Aragorn and Arwen pitching woo at each other, except not written by Jackson? Count us out.") And also that they've picked up on my thought about Juno's Oscar chances possibly being affected by the real-life pregnancy of 16 year-old Jamie Lynn Spears and...uhm, Lily Allen.

I've noticed an interesting difference between a late work-print version of Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters that I saw a few weeks ago and the release- print version that I saw last night at Harvard University. It's a big change regarding the fate of Nate Parker's Henry Lowe character -- the most charismatic and gifted Wiley College debater, although one with an occasional weakness for booze and women.

Nate Parker, snapped during a West Hollywood HE interview in late November

In the work-print version of the epilogue crawl (i.e., the what-happened-to-the- characters info that fact-based dramas...Read More

Tom Hanks was on Regis and Kelly this morning, plugging Charlie Wilson's War. At some point during the shpiel he mentioned his My Space page, and how he's often (or at least occasionally) zinged by readers with "screw you, dirtbag" or "eat my ass, Tom" or thoughts along these lines. A friend who saw the segment said that Hanks then said, in cleaned-up TV talk show-ese, "You know what? Fuck these people." This was the gist, apparently. Maybe the episode will turn up on YouTube.

There is nothing in the least bit inappropriate or off-putting in the way Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody has promoted herself. She's not doing anything Quentin Tarantino didn't do (or try to do) 13, 14, 15 years ago. "I'm not just a writer but a smart-ass character/celebrity who knows about getting attention and working the town every which way"...no big deal & totally par for the course by 21st Century hype standards. You have to synch with the ongoing scale and velocity of things as they are, not as you might want them to be.

It therefore seems...Read More

Scriptland columnist Jay Fernandez has passed along one of the best explanations or theories about why there's so little understanding and commnication between WGA negotiators and those repping the studios and producers. The latter, he's saying, are basically a "different race" who have nothing in common with the creative community because they're basically corporate pod people.

In other words, Fernandez has drawn posted an interesting analogy between the mentality of producer/suit strike negotiators and the "condescending paternalism of the Bush administration...a business and political culture that increasingly seeks to disenfranchise [writers] from having a say in huge decisions about their industry's...Read More

The reaction to 16 year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney's younger sister and star of Nickleodoen's Zoey 101, announcing she's pregnant and keeping the baby can be summed up as "what...?" (As if it was possible to be appalled by Spears family shenanigans.) But this is the third major entertainment-industry indicator that 16 year-old pregnancies aren't that weird, which obviously telegraphs to teenage girls that it's at least...you know, an option.

There's Juno, of course -- the Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody dramedy about a 16 year-old (Ellen Page) who can't go ahead with an abortion...Read More

The Set List, edited by Variety associate editor Phil Gallo, announced yesterday that Apple has posted the first trailer for Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light (Paramount, 4.8.08), the delayed Rolling Stones concert doc. This trailer was up last August, guys. I posted an item about it on 8.25.

Jeff Sneider, the AICN/Variety guy, took a group of friends to see Control at "the decrepit" Regency Fairfax on Beverly Blvd. last Sunday night, and was treated to a projection nightmare of classic proportions. Here's his story:

"We get through the commercials and trailers but then I don't see The Weinstein Company logo (newly changed to TWC at Monday night's Great Debaters screening) or the funky Northsee logo. The movie starts snd the credits roll, and it's suddenly apparent that the black-and-white Control has been upgraded to color and that Paul Schrader is the new...Read More

Just to be clear: while the Writers Guild of America West announced Monday it has blocked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association from using guild writers on its Golden Globes award show next month, and said "no" to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences about using current and historical film clips on its Academy Awards broadcast, the Academy has for whatever reason not requested a waiver for using guild writers on the 2.24.08 Oscar show.

They should spare themselves the effort. In a 12.19 N.Y. Times story on the matter by David Carr and Michael Ceiply, it is reported that...Read More

Denzel Washington dropped by the Harvard University campus this evening following a screening of The Great Debaters. He did so at the invitation of Dr. S. Allen Counter, a Harvard neuroscience professor who enjoys considerable respect in both Cambridge and Stockholm circles. The event happened at the Carpenter Film Center, smack in the middle of the Harvard campus. Everyone was dressed in tuxedos and gowns except for Jett and myself. Here's a portion of what Denzel said during the q & a, which lasted about 35 or 40 minutes.

Tuesday, 12.18, 9:35 pm

Another poll confirming very high negatives for Hillary Clinton with 42 % of third-party or independent voters and 17 % of Democrats saying they'll vote against her no matter what. Younger male voters are "particularly cold," the story says. "More than half of the adult men younger than 40 said they would use their vote to keep Mrs. Clinton from returning to the White House." The candidate with the second-highest negatives is Rudy Giuliani.

"Very much in line with recognizable Oprah Winfrey mandates, The Great Debaters promotes literacy and articulateness, highlights the significant oral tradition in black storytelling, crams in as many factual details and statistics as time will allow, and depicts a society that, however impoverished and oppressed, valued knowledge and education," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy in his 12.18 review.

"Above all, pic illustrates that the civil rights movement didn't just spring out of nowhere in the 1960s, but was preceded by nearly a century's worth of innumerable small, brave, mostly unknown steps.

"As agenda-driven and well-scrubbed as the...Read More

Throwing a bag of Mexican takeout food at a cab is not what anyone would call a mature or attractive thing to do, but that's what I did last night after a cab almost hit me as I was crossing Commonwealth Avenue. And I have to be honest and say it felt right for about three or four seconds. Then I felt like an idiot.

I turned to my left and saw a pair of killer headlights screeching towards me. Instead of leaping out of the way I went into a dead-freeze, deer-in-the-headlights mode. The cab stopped...Read More

The trailer for Fool's Gold (Warner Bros., 2.8.08), which showed before last night's Juno screening at the Leows/AMC plex near Harvard Square, promises a coarse, idiot-level romcom in the vein of Jewel of the Nile and Romancing the Stone.

You can tell right away from Hudson's food-throwing-on-the-yacht bit that director Andy Tennant hasn't lost his knack for over-emphasis. I can only presume that people like myself are going to hate most if not all of this. That seems to be the general idea, at least. Matthew McConaughey, the reigning king of the empties,...Read More

The Alliance of Women Journalists has come up with three lists and several awards covering the '07 moviegoing year. Among their EDA (Excellent Dynamic Activism) Special Mention Award winners: Norbit (Hall of Shame award), Hilary Swank (Actress Most In Need Of A New Agent), Margot at the Wedding (Movie You Wanted To Love But Just Couldn't), Viggo Mortensen's full frontal in Eastern Promises (Unforgettable Moment Award plus Best Depiction Of Nudity or Sexuality)...whatever.

The trailer for Drillbit Taylor (Paramount, 3.21), the Owen Wilson-playing-bodyguard-for-schoolkids comedy directed by Steven Brill, written by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow.

This is one of those six-degrees-of-separation deals based upon on a complete aural misunderstanding, but I feel it needs to be discussed and cleared up in this heated political season. I first saw Warren Beatty, Robert Towne and Hal Ashby's Shampoo in '74, before I was a journalist and had access to press kits and way, way before the arrival of the IMDB. So for many years I was under the impression that Beatty's hairdresser character, whose name was actually George Roundy (a mixture of "randy" and "roundelay"), was called George Romney.

George Romney...

Please forgive me for not posting anything over the last hour. I ran down to Joe's American Bar (Dartmouth and Newbury) to hoist a glass over the news that Peter Jackson and New Line have buried the hatchet and announced that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is going to be made into two films. This will give me posting material for the next two or three years. I would have even more to work with (i.e., bounce off) if Steven Spielberg were involved as an exec producer. The only bummer, according to Variety's Michael Fleming, is that Sam Raimi may direct...

Yesterday the WGA denied waivers that would allow the Golden Globes and Oscar awards show to use writers for jokes and patter. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was also told "no" on the use of clips from motion pictures and past Oscar shows -- i.e., no clips of the performances and films being nominated. The mood of the producers, who had been in denial for weeks about this possibility, is starting to side-step into freak-out mode. But if they get creative the shows could actually be more fun.

Film Experience author Nathaniel R....Read More

I saw Juno for the second time last night at a Leows/AMC plex near Harvard Square. It played a tiny bit better than it did at the Toronto Film Festival, which was mostly thumbs-up to begin with. It's a smart, ascerbic and kind-hearted film about...a bunch of things. Growing up, good parenting, working through stuff, finding true love? It grooves, it meanders, it has a heart...and I could tell that the people sitting near me in the small theatre were falling for it.

Ellen Page is still enjoyably spunky and feisty in the lead role but...Read More

There's nothing left to do now except sift through the last eleven and a half months for films to reconsider...maybe. The year is over, it's settle-down time, screenings have stopped, and Christmas is only seven days away. So how about some lookin' back, end-of-the-year love for the crazy-brave but titanically miscalculated Grindhouse, the three-hour exploitation double- feature flick that bombed so badly last April it just about sank the Weinstein Co.? It was a wank and a tank, but at least it was about an idea -- a conceit -- and it stuck to its guns.

Kurt Russell,...

"Batman: The Killing Joke is a one-shot superhero comic book written by Alan Moore and drawn by Brian Bolland, published by DC Comics in 1988. Dark Knight director Chris Nolan has said that The Killing Joke [served] as an influence for Heath Ledger's Joker character. Ledger stated in an interview that he was given a copy of The Killing Joke as reference for the role." -- from the B:TKJ Wikipedia page.

Out west we call them carpool or diamond lanes, but here in Boston (and apparently throughout the New England and mid-Atlantic states) they're called H.O.V. lanes -- i.e, lanes for "high-occupancy vehicles." In other words, people in these parts prefer a dorky acronym over plain English. I was driving into Boston the other day and I didn't have a clue what H.O.V. meant, but then I read in Glenn Kenny's L.A. Times Mike Nichols profile that Charlie Wilson's War "belongs in the H.O.V lane"...what?

Variety columnist and In Contention owner Kris Tapley has chosen his top ten films of '07. I can at least state my strong agreement with the pickings of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (#1), The Bourne Ultimatum (#3), There Will Be Blood (#5), Lake of Fire (#6) and Control (#9). The rest are a bit of a muddle.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association and VH1 have pooled forces, and part of the deal is a VH1 show called "Critics Choice: Best Movies of 2007" which kicked off last Saturday night and will be repeated throughout the month and into January, leading up to the Broadcast Critics Association's Critics Choice Awards on 1.7.07. The next airings: 12.19 at 8 pm, 12.20 at 11 am, 12.23 at 10 pm and 12.28 at 9 am. Pete Hammond handles some if not most of the on-air schpiel.

And the meaning of the U.S. release of Bryan Singer's Valkyrie being moved from to 6.27.08 to 10.3.08 is...? That Singer and producer-star Tom Cruise thought it over and decided it wasn't summer-y (i.e., dumb) enough?

"Our church is called the Church of the World...[and] we're told in the book not to discuss our faith with strangers, even ones that have been so nice and helpful." -- Daniel Day Lewis in a campfire scene from There Will Be Blood that's not in the finished film. (But is viewable here.)

"For all the wild swipes of Sweeney's razor, spattering red on the lens, was there not more threat, and mystery, in the sight of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands -- the lost soul who could kill at will but never did?" -- from Anthony Lane's Sweeney Todd review in the 12.24 New Yorker.

Shouldn't Lane be tapping out a blog of some kind? Is there a major-league film critic who writes less frequently? No one's saying that volume rules above all, but reading appetites have become much more voracious over the least five years or so and you just can't loll around...Read More

With things slowing down this week in Boston as they heat up for Barack Obama in Iowa, it's worth considering the words of former Hillary Clinton supporter and precinct captain Susan Klopfer as she explains her change of heart.

I can't suppress a couple of responses to Glenn Kenny's L.A. Times profile of Charlie Wilson's War director Mike Nichols, which ran yesterday.

Kenny cautions that "one shouldn't underestimate the Nichols touch" in having made War into a potentially popular "sand" movie, despite Americans having said "no way" to every '07 film with the slightest whiff of any Middle Eastern elements. Maybe Charlie Wilson's War will be the exception -- it's certainly entertaining enough. But nobody has a "touch" to have and to hold. Artists are touched by inspiration like lightning -- it passes through them,...Read More

The fact that more people saw Alvin and The Chipmunks last weekend than will likely see No Country for Old Men in its entire release (as pointed out yesterday by "BNick") is, I agree, depressing. But if my kids were four or five I'd have probably popped for tickets last weekend along with everyone else.

Question is, how many viewers over the age of 12 saw it for their own reasons?

This, possibly, is where this month-old YouTube essay comes in. One dispute with the guy who wrote and taped it: I believe in ghosts. I think it...Read More

Heath Ledger was, of course, obliged to make his Joker look more street-loony and smeared-up than Jack Nicholson's green-haired goblin, and make him stagger and prance and lunge around in an even more wackazoid fashion. Ledger has definitely created a Joker that owes nothing to either Nicholson or Cesar Romero. This is certainly indicated by a new high-deffy Dark Knight trailer. It's almost stunning to realize that Nicholson's Joker made his big-screen debut 18 and 1/2 years ago.

HE reader Joe Branham has just pointed out an especially insipid quote from Media By Numbers president Paul Dergarabedian in a just-posted CNN story about the $76.5 million earned this weekend by I Am Legend, which ranks as the largest December opening ever and a "personal best" for star Will Smith. "It's no wonder Will Smith feels so lonely," Degarabedian remarked. "Everyone else on earth is in the movie theater." He sometimes makes me want to scratch the paint off walls with my fingernails, this guy. I've been coping with this for years.

"When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he's actually pushing the earth down." -- Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee in a recently-released spot with the star of Invasion U.S.A.

I've gotten into this deballed Charlie Wilson's War story twice now -- on 11.29 and 12.13 -- but now N.Y. Times writer Richard Berke has jumped in with what reads like a well-reported story along the same lines.

"The Charlie Wilson on the screen is more honorable and less reckless than the real one," he writes. "Left on the cutting-room floor was a scene of Wilson in a drunk-driving accident. And the movie doesn't depict some of the book's wackier moments. There is no mention of Wilson's dispute with the Pentagon after he sought...Read More

"It's unique but gently lulling. It's about struggle and want and uncertainty, but with a kind of easy Dublin glide-along attitude that makes it all go down easy. It's all about spirit, songs and smiles, lots of guitar strumming, a sprinkling of hurt and sadness and disappointment and -- this is atypical -- no sex, and not even a Claude Lelouch-style kiss-and-hug at the finale. But it works at the end -- it feels whole, together, self-levitated."

I wrote this 11 months ago about seeing Once at the '07 Sundance Film Festival, and on Tuesday it's...Read More

6:56 pm re-phrasing: The American Film Institute brand has been sullied through over-marketing and a general watering-down. Call it the Christmas influence, but earlier this afternoon I chose to be compassionate by regarding their list of top ten 2007 films as non-alphabetical because it made them seem more decisive. The AFI, the word "integrity" and the phrase "semblance of original thinking"...whoda thunk it?

Plus it seemed agreeable at the moment that somebody, somewhere had put Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead in the #1 position and that Judd Apatow's Knocked Up would rank in the fifth-place slot.

Mark Halperin's "The Page" is a very tight, clean and comprehensive one-stop shopping site for the latest campaign turns. And by the way -- I dare anyone to say they read this headline -- "Huckabee Accused of Dead Dog Cover-Up" -- without at least a slight smirk.

When exactly did the campaign of Hillary Clinton begin to sputter and sink and Barack Obama's start to surge? I'm as amazed as anyone else that this change has kicked in over the last two or three weeks, but what was the event trigger? The notion that Obama might actually win in New Hampshire...I'm almost afraid that saying the words will jinx things. It's not in the least bit settled, but suddenly it's not insane to imagine next year's race being between Obama and Mike Huckabee.

Could it be that average Democratic voters are finally...Read More

I wrote last May that Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage (Picturehouse, 12.28) "is the creepiest sophisticated ghost story/thriller to come along since Alejandro Amenabar's The Others, and deserves a ranking alongside other haunted-by-small-children classics as Jack Clayton's The Innocents and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. It also recalls Robert Wise's The Haunting, although the ghosts in that 1961 film were all over 21."

In a 12.24 posting, Newsweek's David Ansen has now chimed in along similar lines:

"Movies like the Saw series and the Hostel franchise frighten by assault [and have] driven away...Read More

Christmas is a vibe about caring, giving, compassion for the lessers. The spirit of this holiday may not be a tangible reality until you find yourself giving five bucks to a guy begging for gas money (as I did last night -- he was probably a practiced con artist) or your car is stuck in a snowstorm and two guys jump out of their cars to give you a push (which happened to me three nights ago), but when real life comes up short a semblance of this is somewhat evident in this and that film.

Boston Globe critics Ty Burr and Wesley Morris do a video assessment of Jason Reitman's Juno...without once mentioning the name "Jason Reitman." Burr predicts that star Ellen Page and screenwriter Diablo Cody will be nominated for Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay, respectively...which no one disagrees with.

Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Ellen Page in Fox Searchlight's Juno

One of them repeats, however, the pretty-much-dismissed notion that this smart and likable pregnancy dramedy is this year's Little Miss Sunshine. It's not -- it's this year's Juno. Which is fine as far as it goes. I...Read More

Ellen Page's Juno performance is highly likable and sympathetic. You're with her from the get-go because of her indefatigable spunk and pizazz. But the first time I saw Juno (at the Toronto Film Festival), I had a thought that wouldn't leave me alone. It's going to sound a little oddball but here it is. My first thought was "how and why did Page's character get pregnant?"

More to the point, why did director Jason Reitman cast an actress based on her sass and spirit, but with no regard for the fact that in the real...Read More

I need to remember to say "woot!" the next time I want to say "yaay!"

This bad-angle camcorder video, taken before an IMAX showing of I Am Legend and posted last night, shows most of the bank-job sequence that begins Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight. It was clearly shot with impressions of the legendary bank-heist sequence from Michael Mann's Heat in mind.

I love the silhouette of the moving head of the guy in front of the camera operator in the very beginning, and the laughter than follows the "bus driver?...what bus driver?" ine. And I love how Willliam Fichtner's reading of...Read More

All local TV newscasters are Stepford robots, but the Boston newscasters are extra-offensive, I feel, in the way they reinforce feelings of fear and trepidation when heavy snow comes along. Every line of copy they read says "uh-oh, be careful, this is a concern," etc. It's challenging and inconvenient -- okay, unpleasant -- when you venture outdoors, yes, but to this Los Angeleno's eyes snowstorms are beautiful, and not just visually.

Same old corner of Beacon and Clarendon -- Sunday, 12.16.07, 8:15 am.

Like any mass imposition of adversity, snowstorms are summoners of the spirit. They...Read More

"Money makes your life easier. If you're lucky [enough] to have it, you're lucky." -- Robert De Niro, quoted in the "What I've Learned" section on page 96 of the current Esquire (January 2008, Johnny Depp on the cover).

"People who tend to go after money as a solution for whatever they feel they lack had better be careful what they pray for, because they just may get it." -- Eric Clapton, quoted on page 95 in the same issue.

"In both novel and film form, The Kite Runner recounts a simple yet shrewd story about that favorite American pastime: self-improvement. [The lead character] Amir's childhood mistake isn't a careless juvenile offense; it's a human stain that must be scrubbed out through self-abnegation, confession and personal transformation.

"Yet, watching this film, you are left to wonder whom precisely is all this suffering for -- is it for Amir? Hassan? Afghanistan? Or do Hassan and the story’s other sad children -- especially those hollow-eyed boys and girls glimpsed during the preposterous climax in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan -- suffer...Read More

Belated congrats to Paramount Vantage chief John Lesher, one of the most Clark Kent-ish, most perceptive and least pretentious studio chiefs I've ever run into, for being appointed to the post of overall Paramount Motion Picture Group top dog & grand poobah. Nikki Finke's posting last Thursday says Lesher will be calling the creative and business-affairs shots for the general Paramount operation, including the film divisions of Paramount Vantage, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET. Lesher will report directly to Paramount chairman Brad Grey.

You can be smug and use terms like "stunning" or "sobering" to describe Daniel Day Lewis's fashion sense. What it's about, really, is a kind of rural Irish attitude. I've been to social occasions in southwestern Ireland (in a town called Knocklong) and I have a recollection of what goes there. Plaid suits aren't normal -- they're eccentric -- but at the same time they don't weird people out. I would personally lose it if I was at a party in which, say, 50 guys were dressed like this, but just one is fine.

"I find it distressing that we now live in a film-culture climate where a number of very talented film critics find their column inches reduced or themseves out of work at publications that think nothing of devoting reams of print and/or online space to awards-season speculating -- most of which, as I further point out, isn't so much concerned with the quality of the awards-season films as whether or not they'll be to the Academy's liking." -- L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in a 12.11 posting.

As I've said numerous times, trying to make shrewd calls about likely Oscar contenders while...Read More

Two days ago I was told that I Am Legend would make $44 or $45 million for the weekend. The 12.14 release date, I was told, would be a bit of an issue. If it wasn't opening in the Thanksgiving-to-Xmas dead zone (i.e., a period when people pass up films in order to save money for Xmas gifts and preparing feasts for the in-laws), it would make a lot more. Plus the northeastern snowfalls would slow it down a tad. All hooey, it turned out. The big-canvas Will Smith sci-fi drama earned $28 million yesterday and is looking to nudge $70 million by...Read More

A new HD trailer for George Clooney's Leatherheads (4.4.08) -- clearly a jaunty, light-hearted thing, directed by and starring Clooney. I was going to say "comedy" but a voice tells me that's not quite the term. Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Tommy Hinckley and Wayne Duvall costar.

Now playing on myspacetv.com, the worst bootleg cell-phone video of a movie trailer ever captured. If there's a God, the person who took this will never be a cinematographer. The image is lopsided, it wobbles from time to time, somebody's head is in the way. Oh, yeah...the trailer is about Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Just as I was heading out a big white box arrived with the best Oscar-season swag I've received in years...perhaps ever. A shoulder-strap saddlebag made of tanned leather (called "tribe leather" and sold by Roots) with a subtle branding on the backside of the No Country for Old Men logo...very cool. Thanks to the Miramaxers for this. An excellent thing to have and to hold from this day forth.

Outta here, second try...the highways paved and recovered from yesterday's blizzard. I may file a few things from a Syracuse University Starbucks in the early evening.

I've watched a DVD screener of Rob Reiner's The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) three times over the last week and a half -- once for my own reasons, and the other two times to show it to friends. Nobody liked it very much. A director friend called it "a lazy, complacent old man's film." That's pretty close to my reaction. It's a mild-mannered movie about dying from cancer -- not awful or painful but nothing all that special.

Fox 411's Roger Friedman recently called it the "downer movie of the year." Not really --...Read More

This five-minute Cloverfield clip is nothing new. I say enough with the tease clips. The movie opens in four and a half weeks -- it's time to start showing it. It just hit me that Cloverfield (Paramount, 1.18.08) would actually be a work of genius if they never show the beast. Let the 9.11 metaphor speak for itself and just go with the panic...the sounds, screams, explosions, etc. It could be phenomenal on this level.

Several I Am Legend video clips, available on Yahoo.com, present the case better than any review: the dozens upon dozens of images of an evacuated and wasted Manhattan, overgrown with weeds and tall grass and populated with wild deer and the occasional lion and littered with rotting cars and buses, are worth the price of admission in themselves.

I'm a fool for CG fakery when it's this good, and each and every shot of post- apocalyptic desolation in this film -- the pastoral still-life stuff, I mean -- is as good as it gets these...Read More

This latest Boston blizzard video, taken about 90 minutes ago, is the best yet because the snowflakes are illuminated by streetlights...important visual distinction!

Blizzard burger, Harvard Ave. in Brookline -- Thursday, 12.13.07, 8:15 pm

Now this is a Best Picture lineup I can totally live with! All hail the London Film Critics for coming up with a list that makes more sense than any I've seen this month -- No Country For Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Director of the Year noms are for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others), Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood ), Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country For Old Men), David Fincher (Zodiac) and Cristian Mungui (4 Months, 3 Weeks...Read More

A 12.13 e-mail sent to Directors Guild members by DGA president Michael Apted has conveyed frustration with the WGA strike and a feeling that fresh DGA attitudes in separate negotiations are what's needed at this stage: "We have been waiting and watching [the WGA strike situation] for months. But now, with no end to the current impasse in sight, we find ourselves having to ask the hard question: is it now our turn to sit across from the AMPTP?

"We believe the answer to that question lies in one simple truth. We cannot abdicate our responsibility to all of you, the DGA...Read More

A great little Thai commercial for Sylvania lightbulbs. I don't care that's been sitting on YouTube for seven and a half months. Whoever thought it up is a fan of Terry Gilliam, Salvador Dali and Guillermo del Toro.

The drive to Syracuse was abandoned 10 miles out of Boston on the Mass Pike. Total blizzard conditions, only the vaguest visibility beyond 200 yards, tens of trillions of snowflakes dropping each and every second, traffic moving 5 to 10 mph, some cars fishtailing and spinning out. Big snowstorms means big spectacle and everything stops or slows to a crawl -- all systems are suddenly on hold and everyone's on a kind of vacation. It took me almost two hours to make it back to Brookline...a great adventure!

Somewhere in Brookline -- Thursday, 12.13.07, 2:15 pm

Here's a...Read More

I have to pick up a rental car and then drive five hours through a snowstorm to Syracuse, where Jett took his final exam this morning. Highway snowstorm photos will be posted later this evening.

I love this No Country for Old Men photo, which I came across while reading a N.Y. Times story a few days ago. Why do juicy pics like these only emerge at the end of a campaign? I would have circulated this starting last fall.

Here are HE's reactions to some of the just-announced Golden Globe nominations:

Best Drama: American Gangster, Atonement, Eastern Promises, The Great Debaters, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood. Response: What is that, seven nominations? Why not ten like the Broadcast Film Critics list? The HFPA's belief that David Cronenberg's Russian penis movie is among the year's best dramas while not even including Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is amusing, at the very least. History will judge their lack of vision and backbone accordingly.

In keeping with the lousy-projection standards theme of my 12.5 and 12.6 postings, HE reader Grant McFadden has passed along comments by director Stanley Kubrick during a 1987 Rolling Stone interview with Tim Cahill. Commercial projection is perhaps a bit better today than it was 20 years ago (certainly if you factor in standards at theatres like L.A.'s Arclight), but generally speaking only that.

Here's a portion of what Kubrick and Cahill said to each other on this subject:

Cahill: There's a rumor that you actually wanted to approve the theaters that show...Read More

The day before flying to Boston (11.29) I wrote that while I was okay with Charlie Wilson's War, I liked and admired Aaron Sorkin's 5.25.05 version of his Charlie Wilson's War script somewhat more. I said it's "obvious that the movie has been shaped in order to be less complex, much more upbeat and explicitly depoliticized, which to say scrubbed clean of all specific Al Qeada and 9.11 mentions."

Houston socialite Joanne Herring, attorney Dick DeGuerin

It appears now that the Sorkin's script may have been defanged and deballed due to legal pressure brought...Read More

"[When] a window-washing platform gave way last Friday, two brothers preparing to clean the black-glass skin of an apartment building on the Upper East Side fell 47 floors. Why did one die and the other survive, though he is grievously injured?

"Five days later, the answer can still be only guessed at. Officials and window-washing colleagues of the two brothers speculated that they tried to ride their platform to the ground, as one window washer said he had been trained to do in such an accident.

"If so, they were relying on basic physics -- the platform would have generated some small amount...Read More

It might be a good thing all around for the sourpusses out there to stop trashing Mamma Mia (Universal, 7.18.08) sight unseen. The director, after all, is Phyllida Lloyd. The suspicion that ABBA's music may be the all-time ultimate in sickening '70s Euro synth-pop needn't be a stopper. And just because Mamma Mia has been a hugely popular rube musical for years ...that's what I'm talking about. This sort of thing ends here. Wait six months. Give the film a chance.

Cinematical put up some new Mamma Mia photos today...cool.

The plot (straight from the...Read More

Broadway World has an exclusive video clip of the opening credits to Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Dreamamount, 12.21). It'll certainly give you an idea about where the aesthetic emphasis lies, or at least what's important to Burton. My favorite parts of the film have little if anything to do with vivid red plasma. I'm speaking of at least 95% of the running time.

Curious as it may sound, I have to take care of some things that require leaving the bunker. Irksome but necessary. Back on the case by 4:30 pm eastern.

L.A. Times writer Rachel Abramowitz recently did a dual interview with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman about The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) and various notions related to the film's subject, which is nominally death but primarily the things that give life value. In so doing she got three good Nicholson quotes about (in this order) life, religion and smoking.

Quote #1: "Because of living a checkered life, I have a lot of different...views about it. Really, what you'd better know is, you're in the laps of the gods about it all. I'm not an adventurer and...Read More

"As for There Will Be Blood, about which you will be reading much more in the pages of the L.A. Weekly over the coming weeks, I will say only this: There are great films (like No Country For Old Men) and then there are films that send shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake a claim on a place in the canon.

"Often, such vanguard works fail to be fully understood or appreciated at the moment they first appear, as some of the initial reviews that greeted Psycho, 2001 and Bonnie...Read More

I'm not calling this "odd," but it's certainly worth noting that two Warner Bros. releases opening within three weeks of each other -- Kirsten Sheridan's August Rush (11.21) and Francis Lawrence 's I Am Legend (12.14) -- appear to have used the exact same colonial-era or 19th Century townhouse building on Washington Square Park north (a building or two east of Fifth Avenue and a stone's throw from the Washington Square arch) for a key location in their respective films.

Either the brick building on the lower right or the one right next to it. (I think.)

Indiana Jones fans have been scrutinizing the bridge of the nose on the skull in the poster for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Dreamamount, 5.22.08). Look closely and you'll see what appears to be an "alien face." (Think "Puck" in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) Pretty damn bald of the marketing guys, no? This is naturally triggering talk that outer-space guys factor into the plot as an "extra kick" on top of the bad-guy Russians (one of whom is played by Cate Blanchett).

Kingdom of the...

The 2007 Critics Choice Award nominees from the Broadcast Film Critics Association. Due respect but no comment. Wait, here's one: If the BFCA finds the courage to not give their Best Supporting Actress award to Amy Ryan but to I'm Not There's Cate Blanchett instead, they'll be at least partially redeemed in my eyes.

Not that the BFCA needs to care one iota about my judgments in this matter. I'm just saying that the Amy Ryan thing has become a slight issue (critics groups falling over like synchronized bowling pins, one after another), and the BFCA has a real chance to...Read More

"Possibly the most striking thing about The Kite Runner, opening Friday, is that the film's lead characters are all Muslims, but not one of them is a terrorist, convenience store owner, cab driver or woman wearing an all-enclosing burqa." -- from a 12.12.07 Newsday article by Lewis Beale.

A "Lunch with David" interview with Control's Sam Riley, posted on 12.10, was live today but went dead this evening. Let's forget it, shall we?

There Will Be Blood "becomes an increasingly violent (and comical) struggle in which each man humiliates the other, leading to the murderous final scene, which gushes as far over the top as one of Daniel [Plainview]'s wells. The scene is a mistake, but I think I know why it happened.

"[Paul Thomas] Anderson started out as an independent filmmaker, with Hard Eight ('96) and Boogie Nights ('97). In Blood, he has taken on central American themes and established a style of prodigious grandeur. Yet some part of him must have rebelled against canonization. The last scene...Read More

After the fifth or sixth Best Supporting Actress critics award for Amy Ryan came in, I began to shake my head. Then I threw up my hands. Scratch a critics awards group and they'll all feign ignorance or indifference about the choices of the other groups, but c'mon...every last critic in the U.S. of A. group is in love with a vivid but broad caricature of a reprehensible low-life? AmyRyanAmyRyanAmyRyanAmyRyan, etc.

Congratulations to the San Francisco Film Critics Circle for having the character and conviction to name Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as their Best Picture of 2007. As opposed to, for example, the divided Chicago Film Critics who put up Zodiac's David Fincher as a Best Director contender but lacked the intestinal fortitude to nominate Zodiac -- a film that deserves to be honored as much if not more than any other '07 film -- for Best Picture.

I'm sorry, but I have trouble responding positively to beautiful actresses like Eva Mendes who insist on wearing mascara and eyeliner. I look at this PETA ad and all I see is the Cleopatra eye makeup and I say to myself, "Why?"

Because his brilliant, blunt-mouthed, smart-ass CIA character in Charlie Wilson's War is highly amusing, Philip Seymour Hoffman is considered a slam-dunk Best Supporting Actor nominee. But Toby Kebbell, a 25 year-old British actor, does the exact same routine in Control -- i.e., playing a brilliant, blunt-mouthed, smart-ass band manager named Rob Gretton -- and nobody has said jack squat.

(far left) Toby Kebbell as Rob Gretton in Anton Corbijn's Control

Gebbell's version is arguably more entertaining than Hoffman's, and he delivers a bit more humanity and soul in the process...and Hollywood handicappers haven't so much as...Read More

With nearly everyone admitting that the WGA strike is going to last a good while (i.e., into March or beyond, some say), producers of the Oscar and Golden Globe telecasts need to admit to reality, which is that they'll be putting on shows that are going to sound, patter-wise, a lot worse than usual because there won't be any "written" material to work with. Unless, of course, the WGA grants a variance and allows union writers to bang out the usual usual. Which they won't, of course. (Why make it easier for the producers to promote product?) In which case host Jon...Read More

Time's Richard Corliss has written a quasi-lament about the stark divide between the films that critics give awards to and the ones that paying moviegoers actually enjoy and will want to see celebrated on next year's awards shows. There's a problem, Corliss suggests, in the (likely) low viewing levels for these shows, given the probability that films like No Country for Old Men, Atonement, There Will Be Blood (an "audience punisher," says Corliss) and Sweeney Todd will be the nominees.

"Moviegoers who are TV viewers don't want horse races," Corliss declares. "They want...Read More

"Serious reporting used to be baked into the business, but under pressure from the public markets or their private equity owners, newsrooms have been cutting foreign bureaus, Washington reporters and investigative capacity. Under this model, the newsroom is no longer the core purpose of media, it's just overhead." -- from David Carr's 12.10.07 "Media Equation" column in the N.Y. Times.

In Dave McNary's 12.10 piece on the ugly verbal aftermath to the collapse last week's strike talks, an agent claims that WGA leaders have been naive in highlighting how hardline the majors have been at the bargaining table. "Of course, studios are going to be that way," he tells McNary. "Why do you think agents have jobs? Anyone who makes deals knows there are times when you loathe the person you're negotiating with, but you get over it and you make the deal, and if there's yelling, you send them a bottle of wine."

Variety critic Robert Koehler has fired back about my having characterized the L.A. Film Critics Association as being "contrarian and damn-the-torpedos in giving their Best Picture award to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood -- a brilliant, lacerating, suffer-no-softies art film that you need to see twice to get the full benefit of."

"I've cited to both Anne Thompson and David Poland the various fictions they've written about re. LAFCA's awards," Koehler begins, "namely that our pick for TWBB had to do with going against National Board of Review (Anne) or the Academy (David). And now you say we were generally...Read More

Rex Reed talking to Dick Cavett 37 years ago about the forthcoming 1970 Oscar awards (covering 1969 films). Reed was fairly cynical, of course, but what strikes me is how familiar his complaints sound. The game, the attitude and the dance steps never change.

An anonymous New York Film Critics Circle source has passed along notes about this morning's voting: "There was nothing too exciting this time. Rex Reed made a vomiting noise the first time there was a vote for Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth, which prompted NYFCC chief Stephen Whitty to quip, 'And a special award to Rex for sitting through it.' N.Y. Press critic Armond White gave a passionate speech arguing against the proposed Lifetime Achievement Award for director Sidney Lumet (Before The Devil Knows You're Dead) on the grounds that Lumet sucks and always has, but that's about it. Oh, and there...Read More

"Hal Holbrook is the only lock for an Oscar win. Marion Cotillard seems nearly as certain. Sidney Lumet has an excellent chance, certainly at a Best Director nomination. Everything else is going to waffle until game time." -- e-mail from a working DGA member, written today.

"Reports of strange deaths begin to come in from cities around the world. It's only after the main characters -- Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel -- begin their trek out of Philadelphia do they begin to realize the scope of the death toll. People everywhere are succumbing to an urge to kill themselves. [It soon becomes clear] that the deaths have been caused by the release of a toxin by surrounding plant life in an evolutionary last-ditch attempt to protect themselves from the predator that endangers them the most." -- from a 1.7.07 online script review by Rich Drees.

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