"I don't think the [Clinton] campaign...generally ruled to be out of bounds in any number of areas, has a lot of authority on lecturing any else about the tone of a campaign." -- Obama campaign manager David Plouffe speaking earlier today.

The Eye is tracking at 72, 35 and 12 -- on a normal weekend the Jessica Alba thriller would be looking at something like $15 million, but tempered by Sunday's Super Bowl it may dip down to the $11 or $12 million range. Over Her Dead Body is at 65,25 and 4. Strange Wilderness...36, 25 and 2. For whatever reason the significant indicators that the Hannah Montana concert film will be extra-big (as indicated by yesterday's Fandango report) aren't showing up in tracking...79, 15 and 4..

Fool's Gold...Read More

How will Warner Bros. and the Dark Knight team handle Heath Ledger's unrecorded looping sessions? Slate's Kim Masters is reporting that "it would be unusual for director Chris Nolan to have all the sound that he wants at this early stage [for a film coming out in July], and that on a big-budget franchise picture like The Dark Knight, a producer opines, "looping would be the norm."

The obvious solution would be to use a voice artist "and there are rumors that the studio will do that," Masters writes...Read More

"Feb. 5th isn't going to decide anything for Obama or against, and tomorrow night isn't the American Idol finale. Remember [that] the Democrats don't play the 'Winner Take All Game' with delegates that the GOP does. I expect Obama to lose California, but lose close. At the end of the day though, he's going to come away with a huge chunk of delegates from California. And Feb. 12th isn't going to settle much either. In a way, look to April...Ohio, Pennslyania.

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The unrated extended edition DVD of American Gangster coming out on 2.19 will run 174 minutes vs. the 157-minute theatrical version. As I said in my original review, I could easily rolled with a three-hour theatrical cut.

The usual February dog days aren't as canine as they could be. Screenings of City of Men, The Eye, Young at Heart, Diary of the Dead, The Hottie and the Nottie, Cover, The Witnesses, Snow Angels. (What about Vantage Point?) In Bruges, The Band's Visit and Fool's Gold (HE favorite Matthew McConaughey!) opening on 2.8; Be Kind Rewind, The Counterfeiters and Vantage Point on 2.22; Chop Shop on 2.27 in NYC; Chicago 10 (limited); City of Men and The Other Boleyn Girl...Read More

How does a neutral observer square "more WGA progress" and "things are looking very good" (posted two days ago by the WGA-friendly Nikki Finke) with Michael Ceiply's 1.31 N.Y. Times report about Phil Alden Robinson's United Hollywood 1.29 post saying the DGA deal is wrong for the WGA and calling for a toughened bargaining position?

I'm not getting a conciliatory let's-build-upon-the-DGA deal, things-are-starting- to-coalesce vibe at all. (Consider also this Alan Rosenberg/Doug Allen letter...Read More

Imagine the complex thoughts and emotions being experienced by those ten L.A. motorcycle cops as they roared down Coldwater Canyon last night (actually this morning), accompanying an ambulance carrying the permanently fried, baked and scattered Britney Spears, the ultimate meltdown/basket case of our times, along with two squad cars and a handful of SUVs on a trip to a medical facility at UCLA. (Her psychiatrist apparently felt her frazzled state of mind demanded a lockdown evaluation.)

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Tomorrow night's Barack-vs.-Hillary debate at Hollywood's Kodak theatre will be a political version of an American Idol season finale. Moderated by Wolf Blitzer, questions from L.A. Times reporter Doyle McManus and Politico's Jeanne Cummings, no time limits -- 5 to 6:30 pm Pacific. Invited guests will be let in at 2:30 pm, doors close at 4 pm; cameras, cell phones and PDA's verboten. This column will shut down around noon or so.

There's a sublime tension and at the same time a kind of coming together in Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life ('63), which was re-issued last week on a Criterion DVD. A 1963 kitchen-sink drama about a somewhat loutish, emotionally needy rugby player (Richard Harris) blundering his way through an unexamined life, it has the usual elements -- British working-class despair, rage, sex, banging into furniture..

But there's such balm and tranquility provided by Denys Coop...Read More

"Barack Obama has now cut the gap with Hillary Clinton to 6 percentage points among Democrats nationally in the Gallup Poll Daily tracking three-day average," today's Gallup summary reads. "And interviewing conducted Tuesday night shows the gap between the two candidates is within a few points.

"Obama's position has been strengthening on a day-by-day basis...Read More

The Weinstein Company will distribute Woody Allen's atrociously-titled Vicky Cristina Barcelona sometime later this year. Figure late summer/early fall. The romantic roundelay costars Javier Bardem, Patricia Clarkson, Penelope Cruz, Kevin Dunn, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Chris Messina.

In the Jan. 14 issue of Maclean's, the Canadian news magazine, Allen says this the following during a three-page interview: "I finished a film in Barcelona this summer that's a romance. It's serious in the sense of like Hannah and Her Sisters, [but] it's not heavy at all...

For reasons no one fully understands, the forthcoming Hannah Montana concert movie is being called (ready?) Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour. The 3D Disney release comes out on 2.1.08, and Fandango's Harry Medved has passed along the following:

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Slashfilm's Peter Sciretta has posted two shots of Sean Penn in bearded, early '70s guise as the late, deeply mythologized San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk in Gus Van Sant's currently-rolling Milk. It appears as if Penn is trying to merge with Milk by wearing a prosthetic schnozz. His own nose has never been patrician or baloney-slice thin, but it does seem larger and more bulbous in the black-and-white Milk photo.

Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant's Milk; Harvey Milk

I dropped by Santa Barbara's Marjorie Luke theatre yesterday afternoon to see four short films, but mainly to take a look at Josh Brolin's X, which he directed, wrote and self-produced. A 15-minute piece about a heavily-tattooed criminal dad (Vincent Riverside) and his hard-bitten, Bonnie Parker-like daughter (Eden Brolin) sharing a violent fate in the desert, X is a first-rate effort -- well-shot, nicely paced, engagingly acted. 3 days of shooting, 96 set-ups. It convinces you that Brolin will probably be directing a feature within two or three years.

(l. to r.) X

Gentlemen of the jury, there are many kinds of silence. Consider first the silence of a man who is dead. Let us suppose we go into the room where he is laid out, and we listen. What do we hear? Nothing -- this is silence pure and simple. But let us take another case, a case put before us this very day.

Having decided to drop out of the Democratic primary race, John Edwards declined during his New Orleans speech to endorse either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama...Read More

The Sean Young-Julian Schnabel DGA video from last Saturday night. You can barely hear Young saying "get on with it!"...just barely. It's underwhelming. The irony is that Schnabel did take too long to get rolling. His on-stage behavior seems a tad affected, running his hands through his hair, pausing eternally. Not that this excuses Young's behavior.

Amused last night by Julie Chen's account of the bombed-and-belligerent Sean Young telling Julian Schnabel to "get on with it!" at last weekend's DGA Awards, David Letterman half-seriously stated (quote approximate) a hope that "this is the start of a new award-show trend -- heckling winners."

There are no rivers of Juno-hate. Stu Van Airsdale's rant aside, there never has been. There is only a sense of Juno proportion, which is where I've been coming from all along. Take shots but don't throw grenades because it's a good film about perk and snark and emotional conviction. It's smart, appealing, likable. Just not Oscar-winning. And that's not a putdown. Fox Searchlight is delighted with how it's performed and been received. It's all to the good. Count the money.

Update: Van Airsdale just wrote to say he's being "misrepresent[ed]" as a Juno...Read More

I missed this Bagger announcement last night: "Falling Slowly," the Once song, is back in the running as a legitimate Best Song contender, having been pronounced eligible and put back on the ballot by the Academy's music branch executive committee.

Terrific, guys...but why, given the well-known, not-hidden facts about Glenn Hansard having written the song for the film and he and Marketa Irglova recording it only subsequently on two other albums, was there a challenge in the first place?

The deal all along (or so I've understood) has been that since Once...Read More

Variety critic Robert Koehler and I were having a beer at Joe's Cafe this evening when a Barcelona-based journalist friend and a significant other dropped by to say hello. I asked the guy if he knew what the Spanish- language title of Woody Allen's latest film is. (The English-language title is one of the all-time worst from a significant American filmmaker -- Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) His girlfriend/wife said it was Somewhere in Barcelona, or, roughly translated, En algun lugar de Barcelona.

If you're talking spiritual analogies, Barack Obama is a little more Bobby than Jack Kennedy. In 1968, Of course. And if you really run with that analogy, as a critic friend explained this afternoon, you have to accept that Hillary Clinton is Richard Nixon.

Producer Jonathan Dana's "dumb money" assessment of the three-tiered indie-glut scene, passed along to Variety's Anne Thompson, is worth a read-through.

In keeping with yesterday's Ted and Caroline Kennedy endorsements, Barack Obama would do well in Thursday's Los Angeles debate to deliver a Hillary rip that's as good as this classic JFK slam against Richard Nixon -- something blunt and funny that makes a real bulls-eye point.

A clue about why director Mark Romanek walked away from that $100 million Wolfman shoot, from a very reliable source: "Among other things, the Wolfman script wasn't ready before the strike began."

Earlier today N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger") came up with a few fresh titles based on the No Country for Old Men acronym (NCFOM). My favorite is No Coin Flip Ordains Mercy. It took me four minutes to come up with my own: Nihilist Crazy Fulfills Oscar Majesty. Others?

"The Guild voters have not been their usual reliable selves in predicting Oscar trends this year, but the membership overlap with the academy is just too overwhelming to ignore the winds that seem to be blowing for the Coens.

"Referring to the critical landslide No Country for Old Men has received as well as the multiple critics awards for SAG's best actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, and best actress, Julie Christie...Read More

The best explanation of last night's alleged SOTU snub that I've read or heard so far, voiced by Barack Obama campaign chief David Axelrod

The less money you have to work with, the more visually creative you're forced to be. (And vice versa.) And yet Mark Romanek (One-Hour Photo) recently walked off Universal's The Wolfman (i.e., the Benicio del Toro vehicle) because, according to a Nikki Finke item, "He's a purist, an artiste, an exquisite craftsman, but he just had a budget schedule" -- a reported $100 million -- "he couldn't accomodate...he just blew the opportunity of a lifetime." This doesn't add up at all. Nobody's consumed by that much hubris...are they?

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir (whose last name I've never learned how to pronounce...do you say it like Chicago's O'Hare airport?) has an indie-film column on Salon.com called "Beyond the Multiplex", and today he has an interview with 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days director Cristian Mungiu, along with an mp3 interview that won't load.

Why couldn't I stop myself from chuckling while reading this 1.29 N.Y. Post story (by Jamie Schram and Dan Mangan) about some douchebag who scammed and hoodwinked several people (including Tom Cruise) by pretending to be Kim Ledger, the grief-struck father of Heath Ledger? Using the cloak of tragedy to exploit people's emotions (and to attempt to scam free death-swag) is beyond foul, and yet a good con man will never let a thing like decency stand in the way. It's so outrageous it's almost a movie -- The Wake Crasher.

Not to nitpick, but N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr has gotten it slightly wrong in his review of the new double-disc El Cid DVD by claiming it was "filmed in Super Technirama, a 70-millimeter widescreen process." Anthony Mann's epic was actually filmed (as was Spartacus) on a 35mm, 8-perf, horizontal-through-the-gate process that was then blown up into 70mm. The correct term would be that it was shown or "presented" in Super Technirama 70.

Otherwise, Kehr does a nice job of explaining the various financial motives and political back-currents behind the making of El CidRead More

The best interview of the '08 Santa Barbara Film Festival -- easily the warmest and most charming -- happened last night between No Country for Old Men star Javier Bardem (wearing an exquisite dark-blue suit) and SBFF director Roger Durling. Half confessional and half goof-off session, it was marked by laughter, honesty, astute insights and openly longed-for bathroom breaks.

Best Supporting Actor lock Javier Bardem, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling during last night's Montecito Award tribute

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"When Bush warned the Iranian government that 'America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf,' Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama's direction before slowly standing." -- from an account of last night's State of the Union speech by The Hill's Alexander Bolton.

Hats off, older women and Hispanics, for coalescing solidly behind Hillary Clinton coast to coast, and thereby all but ensuring the death of a beautiful dream and (bonus!) the triumph of a frosty and divisive harridan whose candidacy will unite the right by inflaming it, and whose presidency will bring back a corrosive revival of the Hate Wars of the '90s. Precisely what this country needs.

A Newsweek report...Read More

"While you won't yet find a clear front-runner among Best Picture nominees, it's never too early for Oscar observers to pile on the movie they don't want to win," writes Vanity Fair Daily's Stu Van Airsdale. "Crash and Little Miss Sunshine kept the bile churning in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and it appears now that Juno is bracing itself for this year's hater backlash.

"My colleague Tim Long...Read More

After 30 years on the movie beat, N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews is packing it in and heading off to Oregon to write books. (Specifically "a long-gestating novel about the college co-ed considered by many to have been the Zodiac's first victim -- a murder I covered as a cub reporter," he says.) Jack is a good fellow, shrewd but fair-minded, known and liked by everyone...best to him. I will never stop banging it out. One is either busy being born or busy dying. I know where I stand. Die at your desk.

Hollywood Elsewhere will have a seat at L.A.'s Kodak Theatre (i.e., where the Oscars have happened for the last few years) this coming Thursday for the final Democratic Primary debate -- Obama, Clinton, Edwards -- prior to "tsunami Tuesday" on 2.5. The show will air from 5 pm to 7 pm Pacific.

Past Deadline's Ray Richmond has passed along an "undeniably pessimistic and hardcore but I believe at least semi-plausible theory" about what may soon be going on regarding WGA-AMPTP negotiations:

"The studios make a deal with the Directors Guild, whose residual guarantees don't come close to matching what the WGA is seeking. A producer rep circulates around the idea that things are looking up and informal talks have commenced. There is a resumption of in-person bargaining, followed quickly by an abrupt break-off...Read More

Having delighted at the aesthetic development and career-growth arc of the great Guillermo del Toro over the last 15 years (i.e., from 1993's Cronos to Hellboy 2), I'm a tiny bit sorry to read that he's on the verge of taking a job to direct back-to-back installments of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, according to the Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit.

Guillermo will do an excellent job, I'm sure, for his employers -- producer Peter Jackson...Read More

"If you're ready to stop settling for what the cynics tell you you must accept, and finally reach for what you know is possible, then we will win these primaries, we will win this election, we will change the course of history, and light a new torch for change in this country -- and 'the glow from that fire can truly light the world.'"

"What's going on here? What's going on here? What's going on here? What's going on here? What's going on here? Put that down...what's going on here? What are you doing? What are you doing.....[are you going] to talk to me? You're actually a paparazzi guy? Oh, 'cause you're filming? If that was off I'd be whipping your ass up and down the street."

One thing that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has been really, really good at this year is disqualifying or dismissing Oscar-worthy contenders. They disqualified Jonny Greenwood's There Will be Blood score. The foreign committee scrubbed The Band's Visit and 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. And now, according to N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.a. "the Bagger"), there is talk that "Falling Slowly," the beautiful love ballad from Once, may be ruled ineligible for a Best Song Oscar.

...Read More

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days "is not an issue movie," writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane in the current issue. "We are not being forced to vote, and the characters are defined less by any stated beliefs than by the moral texture of their actions.

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"Heath was bursting with creativity. It was in his every gesture. He once told me that he liked to wait between jobs until he was creatively hungry. Until he needed it again. He brought that attitude to our set every day. There aren't many actors who can make you feel ashamed of how often you complain about doing the best job in the world. Heath was one of them." -- from a 1.26 Newsweek tribute piece by Dark Knight director Chris Nolan.

I made good on my word this evening. I blew off a Santa Barbara Film Festival movie, walked down to the Fiesta Five and plunked down ten bucks to see Rambo. Maybe it was because I've been watching nothing but festival movies for the past week and a half, but it's so relentlessly blunt, so absurdly violent in a '70s exploitation vein, so visceral and depraved and elbow-deep in jungle blood & guts that I loved it.

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Jamie Stuart's Sundance '08 video short, just posted and costarring George A. Romero, Ellen Kuras, Stacy Peralta and "strange text messages." Takes a while to load, run 8 minutes and 39 seconds.

"The Coens are freaky little people, and they made a freaky little movie...whether you like the ending or not." -- the close of Josh Brolin's acceptance speech after the No Country for Old Men gang won the Best Cast award at the finale of tonight's Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Other winners: Best Actor -- Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood (a reserved and eloquent acceptance speech that primarily paid tribute to Heath Ledger); Best Actress -- Julie Christie, Away From Her; Best Supporting Actor -- Javier Bardem, No Country for Old MenRead More

Lou Lumenick's 1.27.08 review of the recently-released El Cid DVD doesn't mention a tidbit included in one of the making-of docs, which is that Charlton Heston didn't have much affection for Sophia Loren during filming (and vice versa), and that one result of this discomfort (according to a female eyewitness who was around during the shoot) is that Heston avoided eye contact with Loren during their scenes together.

John Fraser, Charlton Heston in El Cid (pic stolen from DVD Beaver's El Cid page)

Once you've heard this, the watching of El Cid...Read More

Red Carpet District's Kris Tapley has passed along two stories of vibe-rupture at last night's DGA Awards -- a reportedly drunk Sean Young heckling Julian Schnabel from the audience, and a crack by Michael Clayton director Tony Gilroy ("George Clooney, who couldn't be here tonight, but we'll tell him it was all about him...") not going over all that well.

Last night's South Carolina victory was splendid, and the Obama endorsements by Caroline Kennedy (in today's N.Y. Times) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (the formal announcement will be made tomorrow) are well and good. But the bulk of Obama's support is from better educated, higher-income Democrats, the independent sector and the under-30s, and this is not enough of a coalition to put him over in the Feb. 5 "tsunami Tuesday" Democratic primaries.

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Last night the legendary Cate Blanchett -- the great actress of our day, the under-40 Meryl Streep -- did the old stage-chat-and-film-clips routine with Leonard Maltin at Santa Barbara's Arlington theatre. She's compulsively honest, a marvellous wit, fast on her feet, always with a good story or a fresh thought. And she's about six or seven months pregnant, to judge by the size of her kangaroo pouch.

Leonard Maltin, Cate Blanchett at last night's Santa Barbara Film Festival "Modern Master Award" tribute at the Arlington theatre -- Saturday, 10.24.06, 6:25 pm

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Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's Meet the Spartans, which no one with a semblance of taste wants to see much less write about, earned $18.7 million at 2605 theatres this weekend. Running a close second was Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, which most critics have dismissed but some HE readers have said good things about, with $18.2 million on 2751 screens. I plan to actually pay to see it sometime later today.

Joel and Ethan Coen won the the DGA's best feature award for No Country for Old Men at last night's ceremony in Century City. Obviously this means what it means as far the Oscar situation is concerned. Here, courtesy of The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, is an mp3 of Martin Scorsese announcing the award and of Joel and Ethan accepting (and giving special thanks to NCFOM producer Scott Rudin).

Ethan Coen, Martin Scorsese, Joel Coen

The winner of '08 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury prize in the drama category, decided last night, is Courtney Hunt's Frozen River -- one of many Sundance '08 films I didn't get to see. Presumably it will open theatrically down the road. It's been described as "a somber and suspenseful film about two desperate women who smuggle illegals into the United States," etc.

Ben Kingsley, Josh Peck in The Wackness

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Strange as this sounds, TMZ is reporting that "sources intimately connected with the Heath Ledger investigation" are saying "it's possible the actor died of natural causes due to alleged findings that the toxic drug levels in Ledger's system was "low enough that it may not have caused his death." TMZ's sources are saying that Ledger's heart simply "stopped...it could have been a heart attack but it's not certain, at least not yet." The report acknowledges the bizarreness of a non-obese 28-year-old dying of natural causes, but says "it happens."

The Obama victory is South Carolina is a "rout," according to the AP -- 58% Obama, 28% Clinton, 13% Edwards (who needs to quit, quit, quit tomorrow morning...it's over, man!). And "roughly 6 in 10 South Carolina Democratic primary voters said Bill Clinton's campaigning was important in how they ultimately decided to vote." For a brief moment, a cool breeze.

The main image on the official Warner Bros. Dark Knight website (after you click past the initial bat-shadow thing). (Thanks to HollywoodChIcago's Adam Fendelman.)

A true Democracy cannot function and is in fact doomed without the participation of an alert, educated and impassioned electorate. Every malignant turn that has happened in the political primary process over the last few months is due to the absence of this, and it is why we are basically fucked as far as the chances of really turning things around.

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When that Heath Ledger Joker-trauma quote began making the rounds last Tuesday -- the late actor confiding that playing "a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy" in Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight caused him to sleep only "an average of two hours a night" -- it seemed lurid to even suggest that his acting in the forthcoming Warner Bros. film had obliquely contributed to his apparent sleeping-pill death. But Jack Nicholson's comment about Ledger's death in London three days ago -- "Well, I warned him" -- means that this allusion/association isn't going to go away.

"Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read -- kept saying the same thing: They've suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.

"The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing...Read More

If you know Ted Kotcheff's First Blood ('82) and you fancy yourself as any kind of amateur Sylvester Stallone imitator (i.e., the kind that performs at parties in front of their friends), you know that the key line to use in your act is "they drew first blood, not me."

Now, I'm pretty good with this line. (I'm also not bad with my imitation of Stallone reading the Edgar Allen Poe...Read More

The Philadephia Inquirer has endorsed Barack Obama for President of the U.S.; the N.Y. Times editorial chieftains -- traitors! home-town capitulators! part of the problem! -- have endorsed Hillary Clinton. Consider their opposing rationales:

"In some respects, Clinton is much better prepared than was her husband, Bill, when he, as Arkansas governor, was elected president in 1992," reads the Inquirer editorial. "The senator from New York could be a strong leader, comparable to Britain's Margaret Thatcher, but with a compassion for children's issues that could glue the nation's focus on its most precious asset.

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The hard-luck Christian Brando, the 49 year-old son of the late Marlon Brando, "died this morning at 1:47 a.m. at the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles," according to the N.Y. Post. The poor guy -- never caught a groove or a break, cursed by the neuroses of his parents (his mother was the high-strung, irrrationally-behaved Anna Kashfi), an erratic upbringing and a murder on his conscience.

CB: "Hey, dad." MB: "Christian! You're here! Give me a hug. Wait...what year is it? There are no clocks or calendars in heaven." CB...Read More

Julie Christie's visit last night to the Santa Barbara Film Festival was pleasant enough. Cheerful at times. It could have been wonderful if her on-stage chat with Leonard Maltin had upgraded into a Charlie Rose Show-type exchange, but that wasn't in the script. Christie obviously dislikes "campaigning" and being fawned over, but she was a good sport about watching film clips and trading memories. But she clearly has a lot more on her mind. Has she been on Rose's show? If not, it should happen.

Leonard Maltin, Julie Chirstie SBFF director Roger Durling backstage after last night's event

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Here's a re-run of a piece I did a little more than two years ago about Heath Ledger's visit to the 2006 Santa Barbara Film Festival, and a q & a he did at the Lobero Theatre with Pete Hammond. The article was called "Measure of Ledger." I was reading it earlier today and was struck by the second paragraph. The last line in particular:

Heath Ledger -- Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:32 pm.

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Tomorrow's "It Starts With the Script" screenwriters' panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, a two-hour event set to begin Saturday at 11 am at the Lobero Theatre, has been cancelled because everyone except three writers (two of the loyalists being Enchanted's Bill Kelly and The Great Debater's Robert Eisele) called up and went "waaah, I'm sick" or "waaah, I'm afraid to drive up to Santa Barbara in the rain."

The significant cop-outers were Diablo Cody (Juno), Glenn Gers (Fracture, Mad Money) and Nancy Oliver (Lars and the Real Girl...Read More

In order to boost her chances of winning the Best Actress Oscar for her much-admired performance as a victim of Alzheimer's disease, Away From Her star Julie Christie has, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to submit to a gala tribute by the Santa Barbara Film Festival this evening. It starts three and a half hours from now.

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The Daily Mail's Paul Scott has written a standard Daniel Day Lewis hit-job piece. I'm not disputing the accuracy of this or that, but if I wanted to I could write a similar piece on almost any actor or non-actor you could name, and I could make that person seem just as weird and fickle. It's not hard, believe me. You just need the will and the attitude and the rest falls into place.

"Some critics just seem to want to hate the films. If I came in with that attitude I would slit my wrists. Also I am keenly aware when reviewing a film of trying to relate its plusses and minuses to the audience I am writing for.

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Responding to a question from Harry Knowles about whether he's looking to shoot a horror film as his next project, Paul Thomas Anderson said "this is news to me. I thought I just made a horror film..."

"I hope you don't mind if I speak about this. I feel very unsettled at the moment. I suppose it's because I only just saw the news about Heath Ledger's death. It seems somehow strange to be talking about anything else. Not that there's anything to say really except to express one's regret and to say from the bottom of one's heart to his family and to this friends that I'm sorry for their troubles.

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In his latest non-fiction comic-strip interview, Mike Russell speaks with Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi.

By calling the next James Bond film Quantum of Solace, the producers are announcing their intention to stay with the dark-flirting, psychological-emotional realism that began with Casino Royale. It will be no big deal at all to write a main credits song for this -- just ignore the title. Who cares if the singer literally belts out the words "quantum of solace"? Better this than something in the vein of Goldeneye or Octopussy or whatever. It's a title that says "if you're looking for a check-your-brain-at-the-door thriller, look elsewhere."

I wasn't sure about who was in the cast of Scott Frank's The Lookout when I first saw it early last year, so when the cute redhead showed up I was initially persuaded I was watching Amy Adams. It was actually Isla Fisher, whom I'd first noticed in '05's The Wedding Crashers.

Amy Adams, Isla Fisher, etc.

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I got the hell out of Dodge -- i.e., Park City -- yesterday afternoon at 5:30 pm, slept a few hours, piddled around and then drove early this afternoon to rain-soaked Santa Barbara. Cats and dogs, cats and dogs...and I didn't bring an umbrella. Flu gone, cough lingering...and the solution to all woes and precipitations is to hike eight or nine blocks in this scatalogical downpour from the Santa Barbara Hotel upto the Arlington theatre for the SBFF's opening-night presentation: Adam Brooks' Definitely, Maybe (Universal, 2.14).

Snapped somewhere within Santa Barbara's city limits

Maybe but Most Likely Not...Read More

Manohla Dargis's N.Y. Times review of Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days is one of the best she's ever written. I haven't been this gob-smacked by Dargis since she wrote three and half years ago about Michael Mann's Collateral:

4 Months director Cristian Mungiu, star Anamaria Marinca.

"In 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed...Read More

Cody: "In my opinion? The best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly who you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what-have-you...the right person will still think that the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with."

Wells...Read More

"Everyone knows life is cruel and unfair. But it shouldn't be this cruel and unfair." -- "Renaissance Blogger" posting on N.Y. Times "City Room" page on the death of Heath Ledger.

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"I'm at Sundance right now, and after seven years of covering the festival for various outlets, I'm still taken by surprise whenever I hear the public perception of the Sundance Film Festival, as it's so alien to the reality of actually being here," writes San Francisco Chronicle columnist/blogger James Rocchi.

"I asked a friend of mine, as a Rorschach test, to say the first thing she thought of when she heard the words 'Sundance Film Festival,' and her reply was as swift as it was blunt: 'boring and pretentious...Read More

Only a few hours after the passing of Heath Ledger, an enterprising Best Buy store manager in San Diego's Mission Valley had this display up. I'll wager that hundreds of video store managers across the country did the same thing yesterday. Any sightings? There used to be an idea that you should wait a few days after the death of a celebrity to reap the commercial benefits, but no longer. How long did record stores wait to exploit the death of Elvis in '77? (Thanks to Best Week Ever's Michelle Collins.)

Fox Searchlight has paid $5 million for most of the world rights to Clark Gregg's Choke, adapted by Gregg from Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name. Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston costar. Coming to theatres in...August? September? Early '09?

With the death of Heath Ledger, director Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is in a tight spot, to put it mildly. Ledger is/was the star of Gilliam's fantasy film, which shot exterior scenes in London last month but, according to a Wikipedia summary, has more shooting to do in Vancouver.

Heath Ledger during last month's London filming of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

Parnassus is set in London, so the Vancouver scenes will presumably be interiors, which usually constitute the bulk of any film unless you're shooting Lawrence of Arabia...Read More

The Sundance Film Festival is a 10-day event, but it's always over as of Wednesday morning, or five and a half days after the opening-night festivities on Thursday night. The voltage turns down, there are fewer people on Main Street, all the presumably hot titles (i.e., name casts, advance-hyped) have been screened. I was going to stay until Friday but with this virus in my system and the general enervation and lack of excitement I'm figuring "screw it." I'm on the phone to Southwest right now, get myself on a plane tomorrow morning.

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The life and career of Heath Ledger, a deeply talented guy who sometimes played romantic heroes and at other times quirky loner roles that worked against his dashing good looks, is over. The brooding 28 year-old was found dead in a Manhattan Broome Street apartment earlier this afternoon.

A CNN report says "a possible drug overdose was suspected" but a city desk N.Y. Times story says "signs pointed to a suicide."

This is not a cause for weeping as much as a cause for anger and indignation...Read More

I have a virus-fever in my system and it aches, it's exhausting and it's slowing me down with the postings. An hour ago I leaned over on the bench at the Star Hotel breakfast table and went to sleep. So we're lookiing at a Sundance shut-down today and perhaps also tomorrow. Staying indoors, drinking liquids, sleeping (if I can). I'll try and get into more stuff when I wake up.

Listen to this Patti Smith stage rant called "Declaration", which is heard in Patti Smith: Dream of Life. Her monumental rage and phrasings are electric, breathtaking...especially during the last half. Smith told me she re-records and re-posts it on her website every year.

Not quite the full remainder of this morning's Oscar nominations, with predictions and quips:

BEST FOREIGN FILM: Beaufort, Israel; The Counterfeiters, Austria; Katyn, Poland; Mongol, Kazakhstan; and 12, Russia. The year's finest foreign language film is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The people who excluded it are morons and need to be identified and divested of power. What Will Win?: Nobody cares. The whole category has been soiled by the 4 Months brouhaha.

BEST ANIMATED FILM: Persepolis, Ratatouille and Surf's Up. What Will Win?: Ratatouille.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: ...Read More

Just for the record, this morning's Academy nominations plus predictions and scattered reactions:

BEST PICTURE: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. (Juno doesn't belong with the other four -- in a better world, being "really likable" and making lots of money wouldn't translate into a Best Picture nom, especially with masterpieces like Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford being cold-shouldered, and with a much more affecting spiritual delight like Once also getting the shaft.) What Will Win?: ...Read More

With a Best Picture nomination under its belt, I guess it's not appropriate to use "poor" as an Atonement adjective any more. The fact that Joe Wright didn't get a Best Director nomination means the Academy voters liked it mainly for "soft" reasons -- Brideshead Revisited vibe, moving love story, period sets and costumes. But Atonement nonetheless received three prestige-level nominations -- Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Saoirse Ronan) and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The four "soft" Atonement nominations are for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Score and Best Costume Design.

As noted elsewhere, ...Read More

Sundance rigors have made me sick -- bod feels enervated, head feels virusy -- but in my limited capacity I'm seeing at least one surprise among the just-announced Oscar nominees: Tommy Lee Jones being nommed as Best Actor for his performance in In The Valley of Elah. I called it for Jones in the Oscar Balloon all along, but I'm not aware of many other Oscar handicappers who did the same. This seems to me like a back-pat for the movie, for director-writer Paul Haggis...and a little bit of a slapdown for all the Elah dissers.

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I could run a final Oscar nomination prediction list (like Nathaniel at thefilmexperience.net has done), but I think I'll just let it happen tomorrow morning and react at will. We've been over and over and over this, and Sundance is a demanding taskmaster. What will be will be. Part of me wants poor Atonement to get a Best Picture nomination, but that's all I'll say.

Steven Sebring's Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an authentic spiritual adventure film -- a mostly black-and-white exploration of Smith's life, loves, history, poetry, music, alliances, relationships, etc. It feels at times like a companion piece to D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (the monochrome classic about Bob Dylan touring England in the mid '60s), at other times like a patchwork meditation, a home movie, a concert film, a fashion show. It's about music, heroes, rants, chants, parents, deaths, declarations and determinations.

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A cell-phone image posted by dlpreviews ("a peer-reviewed entertainment review blog -- A Doctor, A Lawyer and A Priest") on 1.20. Taken at the AMC 24 Stonebriar in Frisco, Texas (a Dallas suburb) on the evening of Saturday, 1.19.

"You don't need creativity to describe Park City this week," the Salt Lake Tribune's Robert Kirby wrote this morning. Meaning that for sheer entertainment value, all he had to do last Saturday was cruise the streets and observe the after-chaos with Park City Police Sgt. Annette Ellis.

"The sun was up, but Friday night wasn't over. Cops were still cleaning up the mess caused when the power on Main Street went out just as the bars loosed several thousand drunks. Also, some idiot stealing a flat screen TV from the Main Street Mall fell off the roof.

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