Baz Luhrman's Australia (20th Century Fox) will open down under on 11.13.08, and in this country on 11.26.08. No one I know has seen it yet, but two Australian cinemas are pre-selling tickets. One reports a duration of 170 minutes; the other reports 177 minutes. It hasn't been officially rated or timed so both could be incorrect, but someone clearly knows something.

A "Conversations With History" talk with Studs Terkel, the Chicago-based author, columnist historian, actor, and broadcaster who was born in 1912, died earlier today. He told it straight and blunt and with great flavor, had done and seen incredible things, and came to know everything and meet almost everyone. A great man, a great life. What it must have been to have been 18 years old at the start of the depression, and what a great book he wrote from it -- Hard Times, published in 1970.

The traffic around West Hollywood is murder due to Santa Monica Blvd. having been shut down for tonight's Halloween festivities. I was in car hell for over two hours because of this. I recognize that the West Hollywood Highway Patrolmen didn't stop traffic just to mess with me alone, but it was nonetheless awful. I guess I'll wander around tonight and take pictures.

West Hollywood resident Danny Lindsey in front of Holloway Cleaners on Santa Monica Blvd. -- Friday, 10.31.08, 2:25 pm

I love checking in on Vulture's "Oscar Futures" chart every Friday, despite always having disagreements with one or two calls. That Gran Torino trailer, for example, hasn't translated into a down-arrow cycle in my realm or that of anyone else I know. I disagree also with their Anne Hathaway judgment, although I chuckled at the sly way they try to stick it to her: "This category is getting pretty competitive," they write offhandedly. "Was [Hathaway] really as good as everybody thought two weeks ago?"

"Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight." -- Paul McCartney, "I'm Looking Through You," Rubber Soul.

Achtung -- Spoiler Warning!: New York critic David Edelstein today described the documentary Dear Zachary as "another dead-child saga, among the most enraging I've ever seen, and while it's fine and heartfelt and I commend it to those of you with strong constitutions, it is the film that has finally broken me. Folks, I can't take this anymore. I know children suffer and die in this cruel world; I know we can never be too vigilant on their behalf. But the number of movies [with this theme] is simply disproportionate.

"Come awards season, dead children seem to factor in every...Read More

I won't be saying anything about Doubt until the end of next week or thereabouts, but the big acting revelation for me and several others I spoke to at last night's AFI Fest screening is the supporting performance by Viola Davis, who plays the mother of one of the students in an urban Catholic school. She absolutely kills in one very intense scene with costar Meryl Streep, and I can't even find an online photo of her performing in this scene. Davis goes to the front of the line in the Oscar Balloon right now, dammit.

Fandango's Harry Medved has sent out a release about vigorous advance ticket sales for Twilight (Summit, 11.21). According to a "current Fandango survey of over 5000 moviegoers interested in buying Twilight tickets," (a) 95% of the respondents are female, and roughly 58% of these are under-25; (b) 92% of respondents say they'll see Twilight on opening weekend (duhhh), and (c) 85% say they plan to see the film more than once. Can you imagine sitting next to a group of under-25 women who've just seen Twilight in a bar after they've all had two glasses of wine? The giggling, the shrieking...good...

This 10.27 Celeb Bitch post -- four days ago! -- appears to confirm that Seth Rogen has indeed slimmed down big-time for filming on Stephen Chow's The Green Hornet, which Rogen and Evan Goldberg are co-writing. He'll revert back to his au natural form after shooting ends, of course. I knew guys who looked like Rogen when I was in my 20s, and now they look like sumo wrestlers with a drinking problem.

My latest theory is that movies that use numbers in their titles in a fun/escapist/frolicsome vein (like Ocean's 11, Three Men and a Baby, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) tend to succeed in a marketing sense but those that adopt an emotionally sincere, verging-on-solemn approach (like Four Feathers, The Number 23, Seven Pounds) send out uh-oh signals that make people a little bit wary. There are exceptions, of course. Sergeants Three, a lighthearted Rat Pack remake of Gunga Din, isn't remembered fondly by anyone. And I'm not aware of Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties having suffered for its title.

...

The new Slumdog Millionaire trailer and Fox Searchlight site, up and out.

A slight tightening of the Presidential election numbers has kicked in due to the laziest, dumbest and most sheepish portion of the electorate going "hmm, gee, I don't know." Otherwise voters are dug in, polls are static (except for two -- Fox News and Mason-Dixon -- that fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver says are off on their own beam), the new N.Y. Times/CBS News poll says that 59 percent of voters believe that Sarah Palin is not prepared for the job (up nine percentage points since the beginning of October), and I'm still picking up worried/on edge/unsettled vibes from this and that...Read More

Originally posted on 9.7.08 during the Toronto Film Festival: As far as it goes, Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make A Porno is smooth and winning, largely due to Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks' engaging, alive-in-the-moment performances as longtime pals and roommates who discover, to their surprise, that they're in love with each other while making a low-grade, hand-to-mouth porn film.

Call this one definitely better (and certainly more smoothly shot and cut) than Clerks II, heads and shoulders above Jersey Girl, a bit funnier than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, livelier and more entertaining...Read More

"The question now," as N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr wrote today, "is how many people will be left to cover it." Print people, he means. Yes, I too read this story online. I never read the print version of the Times, although, as I've said repeatedly over the last four or five years, I would be very saddened to live in a world in which you couldn't buy the print edition. As I do six or seven times a year when I'm in a sentimental, old-fashioned mood.

Clint Eastwood's Changeling, going wide this weekend, is running 74, 37 and 19 -- very heavily skewed towards older women, at least $20 million. The Haunting of Molly Hartley is at 43, 28 and 5. Rock n Rolla, going wide ,also has a 34, 22 and 1...nothing. Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno is running at 66, 33 and 13. Younger males, of course. Looking to be one of the better Weinstein Co. openings in a long while.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa opens on 11.7, and is now at 90, 38 and 9. Over-25 women with kids. Pretty good business. Role...Read More

Apparently this is the final, decided-upon poster for Valkyrie (MGM/UA, 12.26) for the U.S. market. It's a fairly riveting image -- strong, exciting, tells you it's a solid thriller -- but let's be frank and acknowledge that one reason it's working is that it's pushing familiar buttons. My first thought was "kinda Reservoir Dogs-y." Then Ocean's 11 came to mind. Not that there's anything wrong or unwise about that. These are two very popular films.

As I understand it, David Fincher was asked by Empire to write down his favorite films of all time, and to do so without thinking about it too much -- just scribble 'em down! So as an exercise, I grabbed a notebook and did the same thing. I wish I'd been a little more foreign, a little more '90s indie, a little more '30s, '40s and '50s...but this is what happened. Live with it. I could have written down another 150 without blinking. Here are the two lists:

About a month ago Josiane Balasko's Cliente, about a 51 year-old businesswoman (Nathalie Baye) paying for the no-muss, no-fuss sexual services of a younger man, opened in France. This struck me right away as a good idea for an American remake. Especially with a classy, high-pedigree actress of a certain age -- Kristin Scott Thomas or Meryl Streep, let's say -- in the lead role.

Over and over I've walked the aisles of Gelson's and Ralph's in the evening and seen women in business suits pushing their carts, alone and guarded and yet, you can tell,...Read More

No, not Elvis as a semi-vampire, which seems (am I wrong?) to be the idea in Don Coscarelli's forthcoming Bubba Nosferatu.

I'm sorry but my Space Elvis idea (i.e., a script I wrote ages ago) is better: Elvis was kidnapped by aliens in August 1977 just before he died, and flown back to the aliens' home planet. He was restored, cleaned up, de-drugged, probed, kept in a large home (facsimile of Graceland) for 32 years, and then returned to earth in 2009 as the same 42 year-old he was before only much thinner and full of vim and vigor and...Read More

A day after speaking with Errol Morris about Standard Operating Procedure on or about 4.11.08, I wrote a piece titled "Morris Should Sell Obama." The idea was to re-boot Morris's brilliant spots for John Kerry in '04, which focused on "real people" (mostly Republicans) who'd voted for Bush in 2000, but were going for Kerry that year.

Read More

Three days ago a funny New Yorker piece by David Sedaris about undecided voters appeared. "For as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters," it begins. "Who are they?" the news anchors ask. 'And how might they determine the outcome of this election?'

"Then you'll see this man or woman -- someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. 'Well, Charlie,' they say, 'I've gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I...Read More

I'm attending the big Doubt screening at tonight's AFI Fest kickoff, but because it's being digitally projected I was asked -- told -- not to review it until I see it on a clean 35mm print in Manhattan sometime late next week. That's the aesthetic exactitude of the film's producer, Scott Rudin, talking.

In line with this, Variety's Anne Thompson has reported that Rudin "was so appalled at the way the digital projection looked on the curved giant Cinerama Dome screen that he made sure the film will show on three flat screens at...Read More

An "editor friend" recently sent Variety's Anne Thompson a note about from the first long-lead screening of Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road: "The word from me is wow!....very powerful," the guys starts off.

"[It's a] two-hander for Leo and Kate, all grown up now as a married couple, unhappy but still in love. They go at it fiercely and you can sense the real-life bond that lets them really go for it, all defenses down.

"It's powerful and also beautifully written and filmed. [American Beauty director] Sam Mendes doing suburban angst again, but this time in the 1950s. I daresay it...Read More

The Weekly World News is reporting that the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain, which they call "a shocking reversal with major implications for the U.S. presidential election." Both political camps "are buzzing about the implications," the newspaper reports, "as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years."

Federico Fellini's La Strada delivers one of the saddest and most fully satisfying endings in cinema history (providing you see the entire film before it), and surely one of the most penetrating moments ever from Anthony Quinn. He's hearing words as clearly as Charlton Heston did when he knelt before the burning bush in The Ten Commandments. Did Lars Von Trier "steal" from this in a sense when he decided on the heavenly bells visual at the end of Breaking The Waves?

Barack Obama's half-hour infomercial Wednesday night didn't teach us a lot we didn't already know, " Slate's Christopher Beam wrote tonight, "except that an Obama administration would likely feature immaculate stagecraft.

"The spot opened with a shot of -- I'm not making this up -- amber waves of grain. Obama reiterated his plan to cut taxes for families making less than $250,000 in a softly lit room in front of an oak desk. He explained his Social Security plan to moist-eyed retirees in what could have been...Read More

And finally, on a note of emotional maturity, identify the actor and the film. I'm sorry, but this line has never failed to make me chuckle or at least smile, and we're talking at least 15 or 20 viewings over many, many years.

In Benjamin Schwarz's Atlantic website review of David Thomson's Have You Seen...? (Knopf, 10.14), the book's basic prejudice is explained. That is, the single-page entries are Thomson's favorites. "But he also writes about many pictures he can't stand," says Schwarz, "including the 1959 Ben-Hur ("Has anyone made a voluntary decision to see [it] in recent years?"), Kramer vs. Kramer (a work of "inane studied gentility"), and Rain Man ("the smug movie of a culture charging down a dead-end street").

"All of these films won the Oscar for Best Picture, so the reader might assume that Thomson has gathered both movies...Read More

Politico's Jeffrey Ressner reported a little while ago that Joe the Plumber -- i.e., Samuel Wurzelbacher -- is "being pursued for a major record deal and could come out with a country album as early as Inauguration Day." Don't stop there! What about using Joe to play Mr. Clean in TV ads? (Seriously.) How about a reality show about Joe trying to make his way? Trying to pay back taxes, raise the dough to buy the business, etc.

Wurzelbacher has "just signed with a Nashville public relations and management firm to handle interview requests and media...Read More

The climax of the final interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon in 1977 came when Nixon said the following about his Watergate legacy: "I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government. I let the American people down. And I'll have to carry that burden the rest of my life."

Richard M. Nixon; George W. Bush

It hit me as I was watching the Nixonified Frank Langella say these words in Frost/Nixon...Read More

George Hickenloooper (Factory Girl) and R.J. Cutler (The War Room) have put together an upcoming documentary series about Denver mayor John Hickenlooper (George's cousin) called Hick Town. Below is a 156-second teaser that includes a private moment between Mayor Hickenlooper, Senator Barack Obama and co-director George. Get out the vote, watch the show, cheer on the mild-mannered mayor, etc.

Hickenlooper-the-director describes Hick Town as "a high-end reality series about a big city Mayor keeping his office and town together. Think a real life version of Spin City or The Office. The...Read More

"I've had just about enough of the patronizing bullshit of Kris Tapley," writes And The Winner columnist Scott Feinberg. The fight began with Feinberg's responding to my quickie Milk reaction post last night, which led to Tapley bitch-slapping Feinberg over something he wrote and then it was off the races. I'm just passing this along, okay? I'm not in this.

"Incidentally, who the hell is [Tapley]?," writes Feinberg. "We're about the same age, we both started covering the Oscars in the same place, we've been doing this for roughly the same length of time, and -- acknowledging something that he...Read More

I've been otherwise engaged (which is sometimes a euphemism for "lazy") but let's get down to this, link-wise: (a) Stephen Zeitchik's 10.28 Hollywood Reporter piece about the alleged "Milk marketing conundrum" (which broke late yesterday evening as I was on my way out of the Milk screening and on my way to the Frost/Nixon one); (b) the angry response from Focus Features honcho James Schamus; and (c) a comment from Nathan Lee that echoes back into what Devin Faraci has raised today.

One of the things that's striking a lot of people about Milk is how regrettably timely it is right now, with Proposition 8 (i.e., eliminating gay marriage) on the ballot in California. Which makes you wonder if the movie should have been released before Election Day as a way to organize people to vote this measure down. In the view of CHUD's Devin Faraci, in the 30 years since Harvey Milk died we really haven't come very far in terms of gay rights.

In the 11.10 issue of People, Oliver Jones asks I've Loved You So Long star and likely Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas about her favorite review so far. "Someone compared my performance to Steve McQueen," she answers. "That's the ultimate compliment to me -- to be compared to a man!"

That "someone" would be me. The McQueen comparison is on the mp3 in this KST interview piece ("Doesn't Miss a Trick") that I ran on 10.14. What I actually said is that her ILYSL acting reminds me of McQueen's in The Sand Pebbles -- masterfully low-key, and his best...Read More

The cutting, the humor, the personalities, the conversations, the Harrison Ford turnaround -- this really works and builds and more than sustains itself, and for a nearly five-minute running time. Which is no small thing. Either Steven Spielberg directed or is "playing" the director. If it's the former, did he supervise the cutting also? If so, my hat is off.

Famed NASCAR driver and racing-team owner Robert Glen Johnson, a.k.a. "Junior Johnson" -- the guy Tom Wolfe wrote about in his famous 1965 article "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" and which led to Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero ('73) with Jeff Bridges in the title role -- has come out for Barack Obama.

Robert Glen Johnson; jacket art for Last American Hero DVD.

"Our country is in a rough spot, and we're going to need some serious change. There's only one candidate ready to deliver it...Read More

A friend who had heard and passed along some less-than-ecstatic reactions to Milk a while back wrote me last night to ask what I really meant when I wrote that "those who've been spreading the iffy stuff are, I have to conclude, by and large mean-spirited and overly demanding."

What I was trying to convey, I answered, is that anyone who would come out of this film and call it hagiography and a bronzed martyr construction and declare that there's no lump-in-the-throat at the end wouldn't necessarily be "wrong" but they would fit my definition...Read More

"For the first time in my memory, we have a major Oscar movie that actually is a gay-agenda movie," MCN's David Poland briefly wrote last night. "But on the making, it is so much more. It is a brilliant, powerfully humane piece of work that reaches well beyond the issue of gay rights or any idea that this is a gay-only film.

"Sean Penn gives an Oscar lock performance of power and subtlety that ranks with the best of his career. Great work by James Franco and Emile Hirsch. Josh Brolin may not have enough screen time or empathy for awards, but...Read More

I don't feel like writing anything now, but I'm now officially thumbs-up on Milk and Frost/Nixon. On a 1 to 10 scale, I'm giving them both an 8.5 -- and that ain't hay. Others are going to bestow 9 or 9.5 ratings, and that's fine also.

Daylight tells you this was taken prior to this evening's Milk premiere at the Castro. Photo by Randy Matthews.

I've been hearing iffy things about Milk for the last week or so, but I have to conclude that those who've been spreading the iffy stuff are by and large mean-spirited...Read More

"It's really important to tell people to go out and see W. so they can talk about it and have an opinion about it and this freedom of speech, of course, that allows us to go and talk about a film about a current sitting president." -- Ben Lyons speaking on Sneak Previews, according to Erik Childress's efilmcritc.com. The quote results in Childress calling Lyons "the Sarah Palin of film criticism."

A Daily Beast article by Paul Alexander claims that while Barack Obama is sending out signals that things are going well and that success looms, the behind the scenes mentality is fraught with concern about voter suppression as well as the Bradley Effect.

"The Obama leadership believes there is a systematic campaign," a source tells Alexander, "by the White House and the Justice Department to suppress voter turnout across the country." Hence, Obama-Biden campaign chiefs are "amassing lawyers and gearing up to counter dirty tactics on election day.

Team Obama has "one of the largest legal teams ever assembled by a presidential...Read More

Richard Dreyfuss told the ladies on The View that he played Dick Cheney in W. for "money." Well, partly. The four things actors kick around before doing a film are (a) how many of the scenes are mainly about my character?, (b) how many lines and possible close-ups do I have?, (c) how much will I get paid? and (d) how good is the overall script and/or the director?

The question...Read More

If I had a Blu-ray player and a 50" LCD or plasma flat-screen, I would be very, very cranked about the 1.27.09 Blu-ray release of the 162-minute director's cut of David Fincher's Zodiac. I've never been so floored as I was by seeing a tip-top digital projection of this film at the big Paramount theatre on the lot. It's basically a 1970s Gordon Willis film made for 21st Century gear-heads.

A group of New York press saw Milk last night," a guy I know writes. "You could hear people tearing up in the end so I suppose Oscar season has officially begun. [It has] some great Gus Van Sant creative camerawork from the pre-Good Will Hunting days. An excellent cast. Josh Brolin and James Franco are quite good, the latter especially since he doesn't have a lot to say or do but leaves his mark regardless. And yet no one really outshines Sean Penn's performance as Harvey Milk."

Film Journal editor Kevin Lally has posted a report about last night's appearance by Liv Ullmann at Manhattan's Paley Center for Media. The legendary Norweigan actress, now 69, was there to bring attention to a rare screening of Richard Kaplan's 1977 documentary A Look at Liv. The doc (which I've never seen) includes "highlights from her career, interviews with Ullmann's longtime director, friend and ally Ingmar Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, scenes of Ullman at premieres, book signings and relaxing with her young daughter, and candid conversations," Lally describes.

"Kaplan,...Read More

I love snow scenes, as a general rule. Anything showing snow-covered grounds, snow storms, blizzards, gently falling snow...any variation as long as it doesn't involve howling winds. Especially period snow, like Coppola uses in The Godfather, Part II. Pine trees covered with the stuff. Galoshes, show shovels, chains on tires, ear muffs, scarves, knitted snow hats with little white reindeers. Eisenhower-era Fords, Studebakers, Chevys, Cadillacs, Edsels and Ramblers parked on the roads and just blanketed with it.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil also reported this morning that Doubt costars Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman won't be attending the film's first public showing at the AFI Fest's opener on Thursday night here in L.A. Director-writer John Patrick Shanley and costar Amy Adams will, however.

Today will end early due to the first media-elite screening of Gus Van Sant's Milk (concurrent with tonight's benefit premiere in San Francisco at the Castro) at 3:30 this afternoon in Beverly Hills, followed by a 7 pm showing of Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon in West L.A. It's cool to write about the latter but the Focus guys aren't looking for Milk reactions just yet. There's plenty of time.

The basic idea behind the well-attended, star-studded Hollywood Film Festival Awards, which have been an annual event now for 12 years and which took place last night at the Beverly Hilton, is to put names out there -- i.e., to get people thinking about this or that contender as a major contender or even a possible front-runner when the real awards action starts happening later this year -- the critics, Golden Globes, Academy noms, etc.

Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood at last night's 12th Annual Hollywood Film Festival Awards ceremony at the Beverly Hilton -- Monday, 10.27.08, 9:10...

The news seeped through yesterday that L.A. Times Envelope editor and reporter Sheigh Crabtree has taken a buyout deal and is off to other pastures. A friend told me last night she hasn't been around that much over the past couple of weeks. If you're reading this, Sheigh, I'm sorry for the trauma and hope you land something else soon. But what is there? What in the way of nourishment or mild comfort can be had these days for a first-rate pro with a print history? Damn little, it would seem. But let's think positively.

...

I'm sorry to read about L.A. Times film critic Carina Chocano getting the hook over at the L.A. Times. Tough deal, but it's going this way for so many good critics, reporters and editors these days. I'm not sorry for my good fortune in owning a respected site that can only grow and strengthen, putting me for once on the right side of the equation with a truly secure foothold, but I've been through layoff traumas and know what it feels like. My heart goes out to all print people suffering through the Big Implosion.

When...Read More

"I thank God for Judd Apatow," Zack and Miri director Kevin Smith has told N.Y. Times reporter David Itzkoff, "because he shattered what I assumed was a $30 million ceiling." The story is basically about how the Apatow imprint is all over under-30 humor these days, and how the Apatow brand "has reinvigorated Hollywood's appetite for R-rated humor," and how Smith may not be getting full credit for working in this vein before Apatow started mining it. Caution: Itzkoff's story is dated 10.24. Three days ago!

The sudden departure of DreamWorks partner (or former DreamWorks partner) David Geffen has been written about by N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply. Which again raises the question, who cares about this stuff except industry reporters and their editors? My energy levels plummet each and every time I read about this or that corporate hotshot making a move. I'm not saying these guys aren't newsworthy. I'm saying that the reading about big dicks buying and selling Monopoly hotels offers, for me, zilch in the way of intrigue. Because it's the same story every time.

Note that Ed Meza's 10.27 Variety story about the big 70mm retrospective that'll be shown at next year's Berlin Int'l Film Festival doesn't actually say that each and every film will be shown in 70mm -- it says only that the program will show films that were shot in 70mm. I'm not assuming David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia won't be shown in 70mm (as 70mm prints of that 1962 classic do exist), but will William Wyler's Ben-Hur and Joseph L. Mankiewicz 's Cleopatra be shown in this format?

I'm not aware that 70mm prints of...Read More

A just-posted CNN.com story by Abbie Boudreau and Scott Bronstein reports that "more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been 'flagged' because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

"Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or 'purged,' from voter rolls. It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

"'What most people don't know is...Read More

AICN has exclusively posted the trailer for Susan Montford's While She Was Out (12.12), an effective, pared-down thriller about Kim Basinger vs. a crew of low-rent, white-trash predators led by Lukas Haas. (Yes, the cute little Amish kid with the big black hat in Witness has grown into a grungy guy with the demeanor of a sociopath animal.) Is Montford the new Kathryn Bigelow?

Here's a riff on the film by AICN's Moriarty, and a take by Latino Review's George "El Guapo" Roush

"And finally, Barack Obama has to give comedians something to work with. Seriously, here's a guy who's not fat, not cheating on his wife, not stupid, not angry and not a phony. Who needs an asshole like that around for the next four years?" -- from Bill Maher's latest "New Rules," aired last Friday night.

Julian King, the missing 7 year-old in the Jennifer Hudson family murder case, has been found dead inside an SUV parked on a street. It's an ongoing tragedy that won't stop hammering this poor Chicago-based family. Devastating.

I posted my first story/item about Barack Obama during the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, or roughly 21 months ago. Today, in any event, marks the beginning of the final week of '08 Presidential campaign. Eight and a half days from now, all present-tense anxieties will be stilled and we'll all start to feel a huge depressing shift in the current.

It's probably unrealistic to hope for 60 Democratic U.S. Senators once the dust has settled, but it'll be beautiful if it happens. An FDR-like New Deal overhaul of priorities would be possible. The next step would be to go out and...Read More

I sat down early Sunday evening inside a spacious, softly lit Culver City cafe and spoke with Frozen River star Melissa Leo. She's blonde-ish these days (part of a look she's using for the currently filming Welcome to the Rileys, in which she plays the estranged wife of James Gandolfini) and very thin and...well, looking good, which is to say sexier, healthier-seeming and more spiritually centered than the frazzled trailer-dweller she plays in that three-month-old Sony Classics release.

Melissa Leo outside of Akasha in Culver City -- Sunday, 10.26.08, 6:35 pm

After...Read More

Update: It's 1:32 pm, and I've changed my mind about yanking Josh Brolin. I was weak. Brolin is back in. Original 1:21 pm post: Earlier this week I withdrew Josh Brolin's W. performance from the Oscar Balloon, and I feel badly about it. Every press person I've spoken to thinks his performance is spot-on and emotionally genuine -- they all get the sadness and the lost feeling at the end. But nobody would stand with me and call it Oscar worthy. Nobody did any cartwheels in the lobby about it, as I did.

Probably, I guess, because the film was not a...Read More

High School Musical 3, which I wouldn't see with a snub-nosed .38 jammed into my ribs, turned out to be a Friday-night sensation (it reportedly dropped 10% on Saturday) which means it will only have $42 million as of Sunday evening instead of Steve Mason's projected $55 million.

Mason initially predicted a weekend gross between $35 and $38 million on 10.22, and then reported a projected 3-day haul in the region of $55 million.

"For all its sophistication, Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche is oddly fond of poop jokes and, indeed, of poop shots. Is there really no better way to dramatize the frail health of your character" -- Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Caden Cotard -- "than by showing the discolored stream of his urine? The problem is not one of bad taste, to which the director is welcome, but the obviousness -- dare I say, the dullness -- with which he nags away at the sight of debilitation, in body and spirit alike.

Illustrationm by Robert Risko

"There has long been a strain of...Read More

Warner Home Video's double-disc release of a remastered Quo Vadis has two selling points, which are (a) Peter Ustinov's portrayal of Nero and (b) Miklos Rosza's score. Otherwise it feels like a wash. I've never had the slightest interest in seeing it. Partly because I've never read a truly rousing review, and partly due to Robert Taylor, an actor I've never liked and have always tried to avoid, being the lead.

Is there any big-time star of the old studio system of the '30s, '40s and '50s who matters less to anything or anyone right now...Read More

Somewhere within Prague's Stare Mesto, taken last week and sent along by Jett, who just returned to London after a visit to the Czech Republic capital as well as Budapest (seven hours from Prague by bus).

Five or six days ago in Prague

"There are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country," N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich writes in today's edition. "But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included.

"Nor is America's remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been...Read More

A 70mm presentation of West Side Story played last night at Santa Monica's Aero. It's a stodgy, dated, mediocre film in so many ways. But the Leonard Bernstein score (and the Stephen Sondheim lyrics) will always be beautiful, so I delayed a dinner date so I could drive over and buy a ticket in order to watch the first 20 or so minutes, which is the only part I can stand.

The rest of it is mixed to painful. The fresh red paint on the tenement walls is ludicrous. The...Read More

I've barely seen any Blu-rays of classic black-and-white films, but enough to know that the format is heaven for anyone with a serious monochrome jones. So my interest in the forthcoming Scott Derrickson-Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) is, I have to admit, at the very least matched by interest in the remastered Blu-ray of the1951 black-and-white original with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Billy Gray, Sam Jaffe and Hugh Marlowe, which is out on 12.2.

An MSNBC reporter in Scranton said this morning he'd recently spoken to a middle-aged woman who's still undecided about Obama-McCain, still wants to know more, etc. Meaning, of course, that she's (a) profoundly uncurious or otherwise lazy, (b) intellectually challenged, or (c) would rather not say what she's actually thinking to a TV reporter. (Or a combination of all three.) Most voters of her ilk are probably going to break for McCain, which might mean a final national lead for Obama in the range of six or seven points rather than nine or ten when all is said and done.

Then the reporter...Read More

"Of the three Blu-ray Connery Bond's that I've covered to date, Dr. No (10.21) looks the best yet -- which may sound surprising as it is the oldest film. Colors are vibrant and detail shows a good deal of gratifying sharpness. Black levels are pitch. The image overall is quite beautiful -- far in advance of anything put to SD-DVD. It resides on a dual-layered Blu-ray and the feature takes up 28.5 gigs. It felt like I was watching this initial Bond entry for the very first time -- what an addictive image!

Sean Connery...

Last night the Orlando Sentinel's Hal Boedeker reported that the Obama campaign has called WFTV news anchor Barbara West's 10.23 interview with Sen. Joe Biden "unprofessional and combative." Look at West's conservative blonde coif, her surgically sculpted, sanded-down features and particularly her cold timberwolf eyes as she asks her pathetic Steve Schmidt-playbook questions.

In a chat last night with Boedker, West said "I have a great deal of respect for [Biden]. I have a great deal of respect for Sen. Obama. We are given four minutes of...Read More

"There is one thing I can do as well as ever -- I can write," Roger Ebert said yesterday. "When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.

"After my first stretch in the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, I began to write again, a little. After my second, I returned to a nearly normal schedule. This spring during my third rehab, I was able to log onto a wi-fi network and begin writing much more. This year, which has included two major surgeries, I have...Read More

After predicting a weekend gross between $35 and $38 million on 10.22, Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is now reporting a projected 3-day haul in the region of $55 million for High School Musical 3. Saw V is looking at $29 million, give or take. Gavin O'Connor's Pride and Glory is looking at $6 million.