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...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...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...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...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 it as a Ryan Phillipe-Abbie Cornish love story that ...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.

...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.

...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 played by 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...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.

...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...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.

...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...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...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 (...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...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...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...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." 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...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.

...Read More

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...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...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."'

...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...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" pieceRead 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...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.

...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...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.

...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...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 of

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?

...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...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.'"

...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.

...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 BrazillRead 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...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...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...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."

...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."

...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...

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 Ahab in John Huston's Moby Dick

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 ...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.)

...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.

...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...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...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...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."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...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...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.

...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...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...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...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