Updated: As predicted last night during the ceremony, The Hurt Locker won the best feature as well as best ensemble award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, held at Manhattan's Cipriani Wall Street. And director Kathryn Bigelow was given a career tribute. As if the Summit release needed a further boost for a Best Picture nomination. It's locked, certified...next?

(l. to r.) Hurt Locker producers producers Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro, director Kathryn Bigelow, costars Anthony Mackie, Brian Gerahty, producer-screenwriter Mark Boal, star Jeremy Renner.

If those ladies I spoke to at the Regency hotel last...Read More

On 11.25 James Cameron's Avatar had a first choice rating of 10 -- today (11.30) it's gone up to 15. If it keeps going up 5 points every five days it'll be at 30 by opening day on 12.18. Unaided awareness is now at 10, total awareness is at 82 and definite interest is currently at 40.

"We are in no position to battle Google on this. And without StudioBriefing.net being included in Google search results we cannot draw sufficient readers to remain viable. We are therefore left with no alternative but to shut down. We thank you for checking us out during the past months, and please check back here on occasion. We're still hoping that a White Knight might ride to our rescue." -- Lew Irwin explaining Google's destruction of "longest-running showbiz news site in internet history," as Roger Ebert has declared.

"Sources and friends close to the Bourne 4 project tell us that Paul Greengrass has quit Bourne 4 and walked away from the project," a Playlist story reported earlier today. "This actually happened more than a week ago, and we've been getting our ducks in a row before publishing this report (and again, we're shocked Nikki Finke or The Wrap didn't get wind of this yet and way before us)."

"I wept at the idea of a world that can hold so much beauty and so much horror at the same time. This is a significant, powerful film, one that I will revisit soon and often."

I don't trust Hitfix's Drew McWeeny take on The Lovely Bones because of the residual DNA of anyone who was heavily invested in Ain't It Cool culture (as he was for many years) and the almost contractual requirement that you had to be in the tank (along with Harry) for anything directed or even produced by Peter Jackson.

McWeeny is, of course, his own man...Read More

"It's okay...kind of a nice thing, nothing particularly special, a who cares? Not much for Morgan Freeman to work with. If it were not a Clint Eastwood movie, if it were not Oscar season, it would probably be direct to HBO, [and] showing during Black History Month

"I don't expect that a lot of people are going to want to go see it in a theatre, and I don't know that the Academy is going to see it as that important."

What would the last couple of weeks before a new super-costly James Cameron movie be without a Kim Masters article saying "uh-oh...big financial risk...look out!" But her 11.29 Daily Beast piece, titled "James Cameron's Titanic Gamble," does introduce an Avatar impression that I've never heard before. The Na'vi don't look like cats but goats, in the view of "a veteran producer of A-list films."

My initital Na'vi impression, which I posted on 8.14, was that they reminded me of the old Pinocchio donkeys in the 1940 Walt Disney film. Then I...Read More

"If one is talking Oscars with a film like Invictus then it's worth considering that even fans of the piece couldn't possibly, credibly consider it one of Eastwood's top tier works," writes In Contention's Kris Tapley. "An expanded Best Picture category and enough traditionalist voting methods will likely secure it a spot in the field, and Morgan Freeman has enough gravitas to coast to a most undeserved nomination, but beyond that, nothing rings true.

"Best Director? It would be surprising. Best Supporting Actor? The acting branch would be voting on autopilot. Below the line? Not enough frills.

"But away from the...Read More

I love the podcast moment when In Contention's Kris Tapley and Indiewire's Anne Thompson are discussing Invictus and Tapley presses her to say if she thought it was "flat" or not and she says yeah, she sorta did find it flat, and yet she found it moving all the same.

If there's one description that applies to Thompson as a film critic or commentator it's "diplomatic." She knows the film world over under sideways down, but butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. And yet I felt for her this time because I expressed a somewhat similar view in my own...Read More

So now it's even more certain that Inglourious Basterds will wedge its way onto the list of ten Best Picture nominees because all the December releases are falling short...is that it? That's more or less how In Contention's Kris Tapley expressed it over the Thanksgiving holiday in his podcast chat with Anne Thompson.

I'm sensing that Quentin Tarantino may have called his agent, Mike Simpson at William Morris, sometime last week to kibbutz.

Tarantino: "You're hearing what I'm hearing, right? Nobody's seen Avatar but all the other December releases are, like, good or pretty good or whatever but...Read More

With the groaning over Nowhere Boy having settled down for the time being, there's room to complain about the next John Lennon film -- a BBC Four production called Naked Lennon, in which Christopher Eccleston (Amelia) will play Lennon from 1967 to '71, or when the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein died, the group started to break up, Lennon left his wife Cynthia for Yoko Ono and so on.

John Lennon around '70; Christopher Eccleston. (Pic stolen from Slashfilm.)

The good thing about Eccleston is that unlike Nowhere Boy's Aaron Johnson he has a well-shaped...Read More

An industry friend who also attended yesterday afternoon's A Streetcar Named Desire performance at BAM wrote and asked what I thought. "A pretty good first act but a great second act," I replied. "Cate Blanchett is devastating, brilliant, heartbreaking."

"I was very closely attuned to the line readings in the first act. I know Elia Kazan's 1951 film extremely well, and I noticed how each and every line was delivered differently in this production. As if the actors had studied it also and resolved, 'I will say each and every line differently...no exceptions!'

"I didn't care...Read More

This 11.30 Claudia Eller/L.A. Times piece about the marketing of Up In The Air reminds us that selling motion pictures to the American public today is about the fine art of communicating with the dumbest, most under-educated and most culturally insulated people in the history of western civilization. Not to mention the most heavily narcotized (i.e., via food, alcohol, prescription drugs, constant TV watching, frequent visits to malls).

Listen to the marketing guys Eller runs quotes from. The way they talk about how audiences have to be approached just so, using just the right attitude and carefully chosen words. The...Read More

So Josh Leonard's The Lie, which would be called a mumblecore marital drama if the word "mumblecore" hadn't been expunged from the indie-realm vocabulary, won't be ready for Sundance '10. L.A. Times reporter Mark Olsen suggests South by Southwest or Cannes as possibilities. Mark Webber and Jess Weixler costar.

The Lie director Josh Leonard (the bearded goofball smoothie in Humpday) directing Mark Webber.

Here's the T. Coraghessan Boyle short story the film is based upon.

Saturday, 11.29, 7:48 pm.

If I hadn't wandered into an upscale framed-poster store in Chelsea, I probably never would have visited the IMDB page of this 1969 Vittorio Gassman-Sharon Tate film, which has an English-language title of 12 + 1. It was Tate's last film. She was three months pregnant and starting to show very slightly when production began in March 1969. Movies have been my faith and religion all my life and I've never heard of this thing. It'll almost certainly never see...

I realize I'm pretty much alone in believing that Oscar pundits should try and lead a little bit -- maybe even inspire on some level -- in their award-season scribblings. They could and should do this, I feel, by subtly or superstitiously or irrationally stepping outside the box and doing more than just predicting which films and performances the Hollywood voting community is going to favor. Now and then, at least.

Like me and Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil and one or two others, they should mysteriously and inconsistently blend their predictions with some personal conviction of their own -- a little feeling, a...Read More

Sincere thanks to Ben Stiller for mentioning my involvement in the Tokyo Film Festival screening of The Cove on last Thursday's Larry King Show. Stiller and Cove hero Ric O'Barry discussed The Cove and how, as the Huffington Post summarizes, "with Stiller's help [the film] was shown at the Tokyo Film Festival." Close enough.

I started to do a riff on The Hurt Locker as in order to explain why it's sitting at the top of the 2009 Pure Pleasure list, but it went off in another tangent after I began talking about having recently met a couple of women who hadn't heard of Kathryn Bigelow's film. Not 20-something waitresses this time but two well-to-do women in their 50s who've obviously been around and gotten a good grasp of things. Here's how I put it:

Bigelow's Iraq War thriller took me into a world of zero safety and security -- the anxiety-plagued, dry-sweat realm of...Read More

By my yardstick at least 13 extraordinary films -- each with some kind of striking, original-seeming quality and made from deep-seated, rock-solid material -- opened in 2009, and four others came close to breathing the same air. Anyone who whines that '09 was a weak year just hasn't been paying attention or has been living in a cocoon. It wasn't one of the all-time great years, okay, but it was certainly more than decent if you brought an intelligent, open-minded, ready-for-the-next thing attitude to the theatre.

On 11.18 I said I'd be assembling a list of '09 films and filmmakers that achieved...Read More

I've assembled sequential excerpts from my original reviews of the 17 Pure Pleasure films of 2009, starting with my 5.24.08 review of Il Divo and ending with my Toronto Film Festival 9.17.09 review of Collapse. I haven't seen Avatar yet (it's supposed to screen on 12.10), but the bottom line is that there are no October, November or December '09 releases on the list.

(1) From "Gospel of Il Divo," 5.24.08:

"Never overdramatize things. Everything can be fixed. Keep a certain detachment from everything. The important things in life are very few." -- former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, whose...Read More

One of my many derelictions right now is not having seen John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side, which I'm planning to catch tomorrow. It's a much bigger hit than box-office pundits were expecting, of course. "A 47% uptick from its opening day B.O. with $16.2 million on 3,140 runs...pic's domestic cume stands at $76.3 million," Variety reports.

The basic appeal, I'm guessing, is that it's a good Middle American movie that's not informed by the neurotic mentalities of the coasts. I heard this morning that a rival distributor (i.e., not a Warner Bros. guy)...Read More

"Bright vivid technicolor...like Spielberg directed it...a serial-killer movie meets The Color Purple...Silence of the Lambs meets What Dreams May Come." -- a friend who caught a screening last night in Los Angeles.

A couple of hours hence I'll be heading over to BAM's Harvey Theatre and a matinee performance of the Sydney Theatre Company's A Streetcar Named Desire, which began yesterday and runs only through 12.20. The lure, of course, is a reputedly devastating Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois. The classic Tennessee Williams play was directed by Liv Ullman, and costars Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kowalski and Robin McLeavy as Stanley's wife and Blanche's sister, Stella.

Cate Blanchett in BAM's A Streetcar Named Desire.

"If Blanchett's nerve-shattering turn doesn't knock the wind out of you, then there is nothing...Read More

I had a half-hour chat last Tuesday evening with Me and Orson Welles star Christian McKay, and despite enjoying our time and really liking the guy -- he's spirited and razor-sharp and full of buoyancy -- I waited five days to post. I don't know why and I'm sorry. It doesn't indicate anything. I just fell into a lazy pocket.

Me and Orson Wells star Christian McKay outside the Regency hotel just before we said out farewells -- Tuesday, 11.24, 5:20 pm.

Actually, that's not true. I was reluctant to get into a McKay thing because as...Read More

And the reaction to Yoostar, the cinema karaoke software with studios licensing clips for Average Joes & Janes to put themselves into movie scenes...? Actually, I'd rather be William Munny in the climax of Unforgiven.

"All the airports kind of feel and look the same now," Jason Reitman told the N.Y. Times' David Carr in an 11.25 interview piece. "Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you're going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You're going to get your coffee and the USA Today or New York Times in every airport. All the things that you want are there, so you can land anywhere, and you feel at home. You're given the sense that you're everywhere, but you're nowhere; that you are constantly with your community, yet you have no...Read More

"I'm really disappointed" in Barack Obama, writes playwright Christopher Durang. "I mean, I know he's way better than Bush. I guess I miss the oomph that LBJ had both in civil rights and in getting Medicare/Medicaid passed into law. Then he let his mistakes in fighting in Vietnam sink him.

"Obama is cool and charming. But oomph? Seemingly not. Hip and appealing. Yes, but can he do aggressive arm twisting to get something passed? Can he bring some power and aggressiveness to explaining things the country needs, to get people on board?" Not so much. So far.

"And if Obama isn't the...Read More

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell has bravely compared Gone With The Wind, a metaphor about the miseries and deprivations of the Great Depression of the 1930s (and a comment about how the nicest people aren't necessarily the ones who do well in tough times, and vice versa) with New Moon, a stunningly dull and tension-less Mormon metaphor about just saying no to pre-marital sex.

Howell is one of the nicest and smartest guys I know and one of the best film critics bar none, but this article is...uhm, unpersuasive. To me, anyway.

Howell actually calls New...Read More

The way I hear it Clint Eastwood arrived in South Africa to shoot Invictus on a Friday, never having visited the country before as an explorer looking to absorb and learn. He began shooting two days later (i.e., the following Monday) and, typically for Clint, shot it fairly quickly -- two days under schedule, I'm told. He would always finish at five and then, my source says, work out for a couple of hours each day.

My heart and admiration goes out to anyone with that level of vigor and discipline at an age when most people have downshifted...Read More

Pamela Ezell's 11.27 Huffington Post Invictus piece notes several parallels between former South African president Nelson Mandela and U.S. president Barack Obama. First black president, humble backgrounds, preachers of tolerance and forgiveness despite haters, etc. But the Mandela-Obama parallel falls apart in Clint Eastwood's film when Morgan Freeman's Mandela is told he's risking his political capital, and he replies "the day I am afraid to do that is the day I am no longer fit to lead."

Is there anything less Obama-like than a core belief that a leader must sometimes risk much if not all in...Read More

As everyone knows, the title of Clint Eastwood's Invictus is taken from William Ernest Henley's short poem of the same title, which was first published in 1875. "Master of my fate, captain of my soul, bloody but unbowed," etc. It's one of the best right-wing poems of all time and I respect it as such, but for most of us Henley's words fly better on the page than they do in real life.

The best stand-alone right-wing sentiment I've ever heard is "better a general in hell...Read More

The one sterling asset in Clint Eastwood's Invictus is...actually, make that two sterling assets. One is the fact that Eastwood is Eastwood and that there's something I love about sinking into his films, even when they're not double-grade-A. The other is Morgan Freeman's performance as Nelson Mandela -- a thing that will carry Invictus along with ticket buyers and probably reap Oscar glory.

Morgan Freeman in Clint Eastwood's Invictus

Freeman's performance is not a deep-mine thing or a dazzling revisiting of a still living-legend whose face and manner are well remembered by millions. But it's...Read More

So Newsweek's David Ansen, Variety's Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt get to ignore the 11.30 Invictus review embargo and everyone else has to wait...is that it? Because they're big shots with special privileges? Are we still living in 1997?

And now Huffington Post-er Pamela Ezell has chimed in with an opinion -- "On a scale of one to 10, Invictus is a six," she says. "Add it to your Netflix queue or watch it on pay-per-view. Those lucky enough to be on a trans-Atlantic flight next year will probably have a chance to see Invictus on...Read More

"Invictus is a very good story very well told," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. Wait a minute...a "good story"? The use of this term at the beginning of an important review of an end-of-the-year film by a major director calls for a full examination of its meaning.

Morgan Freeman (center) as Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood's Invictus.

I've seen Invictus myself and on a certain level McCarthy is right. The story of South African president Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) using the symbolism of sport -- i.e., urging unanimous and fervent support of the all-white Springboks rugby team in...Read More

Maggie Gyllenhaal's Crazy Heart performance works for everyone and then some, but is it leading or supporting? I saw it as supporting from the get-go, which didn't strike me as a problem in the least. The Fox Searchlight guys were feeling differently about this a week or two ago, but maybe they've come around.

I shot this with my Canon Elph. Bit of a strange angle but I had to keep it close to pick up her voice. There's a lot that goes into assembling a decent video...Read More

The big performance in Invictus is Morgan Freeman's Nelson Mandela, as you might expect. And Matt Damon's Francois Pienaar is...well, sturdy enough. But the one you remember after these two is South African actor Tony Kgoroge, who plays Mandela's chief security guy, Jason Tshabalala.

Invictus costar Tony Kgoroge in Manhattan last August

One obvious reason is that Kgoroge is handsome -- hunky even -- with a current of kindness and compassion about him. And because he's the most prominent character in the film with an arc, starting with a posture of borderline hostility towards white Afrikaaners to...Read More

The Weinstein Co. is pushing Marion Cotillard's Nine performance in the Best Actress category. She has the meatiest, hurting-est role among the Nine women -- i.e., the betrayed wife of Daniel Day Lewis's Guido. (She's also a lead because she sings two songs while all the other actresses sing one.) But nothing she does in Nine comes close to her acting in this scene from Public Enemies. I'm sorry but it's true.

Three and a half days before the 11.30 embargo date, Newsweek's David Ansen has posted a short review of Clint Eastwood's Invictus. Does this mean others will jump the gun and post today or tomorrow or this weekend? A respected icon like Eastwood has little to fear from traditional big-gun critics like Ansen. Their respect for him is such that they'll always go easy if they're not 100% delighted. That said...

"A number of sports movies have one-word titles (Rocky, Hoosiers), but they're not usually in Latin,"...Read More

An Invictus screening begins in 28 minutes (i.e., 6:30 pm) so I don't have time to write anything about my chat yesterday afternoon with Crazy Heart costar Maggie Gyllenhaal. Okay, I can repeat the general feeling out there that her performance as a 30ish single mom who falls in love with Jeff Bridges' roly-poly alcoholic country music star is a quiet, unforced, true-heart thing. More lived-in than "performed." A supporting standout, in the view of most I've spoken to.

Crazy Heart costar Maggie Gyllenhaal at the end of our sit-down yesterday at a low-key place on Tenth Avenue...

Mary Walsh is a Canadian comedian who's created a running bit out of ambushing Canadian politicians as her character, Marg Delahunte. She recently tried this with Sarah Palin during a book signing. I say again -- Palin is a flesh-and-blood incarnation of Martin Sheen's President Gregg Stillson in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone.

A fundamental reason why so many people of taste and refinement have been talking with great admiration about Peter Capaldi's In The Loop performance as the sewer-mouthed Malcolm Tucker is due to envy and dream-fulfillment. Capaldi's tirades have not only made him a dark-horse contender for a Best Supporting Actor nomination but instructed (or reminded) some of us that profanity can be artful -- it can be delivered with absolute precision and beauty. You just need a team of brilliant writers feeding you the lines.

In The Loop's Peter Capaldi

Swearing can be emotionally cathartic for the speaker,...Read More

What Tennessee Williams plays and film adaptations didn't feature a handsome (or pretty) young Southern-studcat figure in a prominent role? I'm thinking, I'm thinking. Night of the Iguana, of course. The 1961 film of Summer and Smoke only had Laurence Harvey so that too was an exception. Boom, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots...what others?

In Jodie Markell's Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (Paladin, 12.30), the object of desire is played by 28 year-old Chris Evans.

It's hard to define what makes an appealing movie poster, but the one for Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's How To Fold A Flag just "does it right" on some level. One look and I said to myself, "I want to see this." It makes what is clearly a left-humanist portrait of Iraq War veterans seem very plain and true and backyard American. Who's the artist or agency, I wonder?

"With How to Fold a Flag, a diffuse yet fascinating account of four U.S. Army vets readjusting to civilian life, documakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein continue...Read More

In the same way that one formerly Democratic U.S. Senator (Connecticut's Joseph Leiberman) and two conservative Democratic Senators (Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln) have stubbornly pledged to kill the public-option portion of the health care bill in defiance of common sense and against the wishes of almost everyone, I was the only Envelope Gold Derby Buzzmeter pundit to say "no" to Precious as a Best Picture finalist. In so doing I singlehandedly kept it out of the unanimous column.

I voted as I did not because Precious won't be Best Picture nominated --...Read More

"Peter Jackson's infatuation with fancy visual effects mortally wounds The Lovely Bones," writes Daily Variety senior critic Todd McCarthy in what may be the first cut in an onslaught of critical knives. Do howlings winds and heaving seas approach?

Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson

"Alice Sebold's cheerily melancholy bestseller, centered upon a 14-year-old girl who narrates the story from heaven after having been brutally murdered, provides almost ready-made bigscreen material. But Jackson undermines solid work from a good cast with show-offy celestial evocations that severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters.

"The book's rep, the...Read More

The Scott Foundas slot at the L.A. Weekly/Village Voice has to be filled, of course. Usually the person doing the hiring for such a position will put the word out through the right people and then sift through 15 or 20 resumes and suss things out privately -- but not this time. Or maybe there's an equal opportunity requirement that Village Voice Media needs to make a show (emphasis on that word) of opening the door to any and all applicants.

The following is listed in JournalismJobs.com: "The L.A. Weekly is looking for a film critic/editor. Candidate must have deep knowledge and...Read More

Just as it can be argued that I tend to approach any Peter Jackson film with a guarded attitude (which really isn't directed against Jackson as much as any director who incessantly underlines, over-emphasizes and over-cranks the visual razmatazz element as a way of beating his/her chest and saying "look at brilliant me!...look at what I can do!"), it can also be argued or at least suspected that AICN's Harry Knowles is in the tank for Jackson, and has been there for many, many years.

Knowles has called The Lovely Bones an "incredibly lovely film." He later says it "will be...Read More

In a review posted sometime earlier today called "Is It Possible To Hate A Film More Than Old Dogs?," HitFix's Drew McWeeny begins by saying "if Old Dogs were a person, I would stab it in the face." That's pretty good but it would have been better if he'd mentioned the weapon. As in "stab it in the face with a sharp No. 2 pencil" or "stab it in the face with an Exacto knife."

The worst comedies, I can tell you, always resort to...Read More

Avatar director James Cameron talking to CNN's Jason Carroll, in part about whether Avatar is going to get the same kind of repeat business that Titanic attracted. And whether the blog critics who've been slamming "the blue characters" have instilled any concern. "If everyone was praising the film too much, that would make me even more nervous," Cameron replies.

The Reel Geezers -- those reliable indicators of smart retirement-age Academy sentiments about current films -- are back in action on Indiewire. And as you might expect, they've totally rolled over for Precious. Like cocker spaniel puppies with their tongues and tails wagging. The screenplay is "superb," says Marcia Nasatir, and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. agrees. (God!) This is why Precious is going to be Best Picture nominated -- i.e., people and opinions like these.

"Not the usual 'hood movie, no men in it...no violence," says Semple. What? Precious is one of the most emotionally violent films I've ever seen -- that anyone's...Read More

If anyone has a copy of The Descendants, the Nat Faxon-Jim Rash screenplay that Alexander Payne will begin directing early next year with George Clooney in the lead role, please send along. This Hawaiian-based adaptation of the '07 Kaui Hart Hemmings novel will be released in 2011 by Fox Searchlight.

(l. to r.) Alexander Payne, cover of The Descendants, Kaui Hart Hemmings, George Clooney.

The plot summaries I've read on movie sites made no sense so I've pasted two -- one from Publisher's Weekly, another from The...Read More

I first saw Luke Wilson's "better 3G experience" AT&T ad yesterday. My first thought was "why is he doing this?" Then I figured okay, the last thing he did that really connected was his nice-guy-brother role in The Family Stone, and Luke's last semi-popular Eloi movie was My Super Ex-Girlfriend and...well, also that Henry Poole Is Here didn't fly and TV ads pay pretty well. Nothing wrong with a little financial fortification.

Then I thought "gee, maybe Luke should work out a bit more, drop a few pounds."...Read More

If -- I say "if" -- this trailer is a fair and accurate representation of Noah Baumbach's Greenberg (Focus Features, 3.12.10) then it's going to be one of 2010's smartest and most engaging films hands down, and why the hell didn't they open it this year? (Too costly?) I wasn't exactly pining for a dry, witty, low-key portrait of a 40ish L.A. loser, but this thing has me hooked. Focus should bring Greenberg to Sundance, where it'll most assuredly kick ass.

It looks like Ben Stiller might have...Read More

"C'mon and do the jailhouse twitter wit' me, lehhzz rock...everybahdy lehhzz rock ...everybahdy on ole ' cell block was checking out Avary's latest!" - "Jailhouse Twitter" lyrics by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

L.A. Times technology columnist Mark Milian has finally posted about Roger Avary's tweets from the Ventura County jail, which everyone who knows or is plugged into anything has been talking about for the last week or two.

"As is often the case with Twitter, screenwriter Roger Avary recently tweeted about what he had for lunch. It was soy, which, an acquaintance told him,...Read More

The idea behind Charity Buzz.com, as you might imagine, is to cough up a little something for your favorite cause. It's good for the soul if you can afford to give (and I realize this is a rough time for a lot of people). Plus "this is the time of year when want is felt most deeply," as Charles Dickens once wrote. In any event I'm passing along an opportunity to have dinner with the great Eva Marie Saint. If you win out the money will go to Children's Neurobiological Solutions Foundation.

Eva Marie...

To assess the Precious backlash among discerning African Americans, N.Y. Times writer Felicia R. Lee bends over backwards so far that she does the Linda Blair spider-walk from The Exorcist. "Dozens of black people were interviewed about their perspectives on Precious," she writes, but she only quotes eight, and there's only one Precious hater among them -- N.Y. Press critic and N.Y. Film Critics Circle chairman Armond White.

One other guy, novelist, former newspaper reporter and Emory University instructor Nathan McCall, takes a mild swipe at Precious director Lee Daniels for indulging in stereotypes by having made "light-complexioned actors the...Read More

How overwhelming can moviegoer cynicism get, or is it a bottomless pit? Nicholas Cage, Dominic Sena, scary wolves, 14th-century monks and knights, lots of fake fog, Ron Perlman and Ulrich Thomsen, a suspected witch, a monastery, the Black Plague, etc. Pure paycheck, pure bulimia.

Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (Freestyle, 11.25) is an appealing, decently assembled, light-hearted period...drama? There's something a little sluggish-sounding about that term that doesn't quite fit the film's spirit, and "dramedy" isn't right either. I guess "coming of age story" works. MAOW only goes so deep but that's okay for the most part. It's a pat and tidy effort (i.e., nothing terribly jazzy or unruly in its veins) but with a wound-up, young man's personality. Agreeably so. The actors and actresses hit their marks, say their lines and do their utmost to be vivid or colorful.

Read More

Last night's 60 Minutes piece on James Cameron and Avatar was a wafer-thin blow job. Not a sentence or phrase, even, in the entire thing about fan reactions to the trailer, to Avatar Day, etc. Not the slightest hint of Captain-Planet-with-Cats skepticism. Not the faintest suggestion that transcendent stories and themes are what connect with audiences, and not cutting-edge technology.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

If a movie has genuine soul and emotionalism it exudes a palpable moisture, and generally speaking audiences like to get soaked, or at least pretty damp.

The key Avatar...Read More

Manhattan-bound L train -- Sunday, 11.22, 6:45 pm.

Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. It's that simple and that clean. It's all here in this Bill Moyers review of how Lyndon Johnson destroyed his presidency and himself and ended the lives of tens of thousands of young men by being too afraid of the right-wing barking crowd to step up and do the wise and strong thing, which was to say screw it -- there's no way to win, we can't even define what a "win" is, South Vietnam is quicksand and we'll drown in it, and you can't hope to succeed by propping...Read More

Yesterday (11.21) Daily Beast political writer Peter Beinart noted that "in voting to allow debate, conservative Democrats Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas hammered some nails in the coffin of a robust "public option" that would allow the government to compete with private insurers. Both senators stressed that if the Senate bill includes a public option, they will ultimately oppose the whole thing.

"And since apostate Democrat-turned-independent Joseph Lieberman and moderate Republican Olympia Snowe have said something similar, and since health-care reform requires 60 votes, that means that liberals will likely face a choice between a robust public...Read More

I have no interest in watching, much less buying, the new Blu-ray of David Fincher's Fight Club because the film itself was always so dark and murky and dreary-looking, as if the final negative was soaked in a vat of cappuccino.

Brad Pitt in a third-act scene from David Fincher's Fight Club.

Unlike Anita Busch I've always loved what Fight Club was saying about how we all need to act in bolder and braver ways and embrace the real and the feisty and free our souls from the narcotizing effects of corporate branding, etc. And...Read More

"Due in large part to your raving about Collapse, I checked it out last night via On Demand. Incredible film. Just hypnotic and completely absorbing and more than a bit troubling. A thinking person's 2012 is right." -- HE reader Nick Clement, sent this afternoon.

The Criterion Bluray of Albert and David Maysles' Gimme Shelter, the legendary doc about the 1969 Rolling Stones tour that ended with violence and death at the 12.6.69 Altamont Speedway concert, struck me as an overpriced burn. It's a typical Criterion-level high-quality package as far as it goes, but it's not worth $40 because it doesn't look all that different from the last DVD, which was issued in 2000 and was clearly an upgrade at the time and looked pretty good on my Sony 36" analog flatscreen..

Gimme Shelter was originally shot on 16mm so...Read More

"I think certain criticisms that I've heard about myself repeatedly start to linger," Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson has told L.A.Weekly's Joe Donnelly. "The things that I think about are whether or not I'm telling the same kind of family stories and whether these movies are so meticulously art-directed or organized that people can't get into the story.

Fantastic Mr.Fox display in window of Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman.

"The hardest things are just the movies you spend years on. Not everybody's occupation in their life is [about] this moment where it's kind of yes or no, where...Read More

Variety's Pamela McLintock is reporting that Summit's New Moon will take in $140.7 million for the weekend, which is the third-biggest opening of all time, trailing only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. With Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest bumped out of the third-highest slot, it's also fair to say that New Moon now holds the distinction of being the most sluggishly-made, most agonizing-to-sit-through epic grosser of all time. I'm not looking for the "negative angle"...really. This honestly struck me as a fair observation. Has there ever been a worse film that has made box-office history? I'm asking.

I've been looking for the Hot Blog or "Blanky Weeks to Oscar" piece in which David Poland predicts that Pixar's Up will win the Best Picture Oscar. Because that's what he's been saying in conversation and presumably believes and intends to state in well-ordered prose sometime fairly soon. If he's saying that Up should win, fine...no problem, his opinion. But if he's serious about Up actually taking the Big Prize then I'm flabbergasted.

Up will be lucky to be Best Picture nominated. Enough people believe this may happen that I've allowed myself to be goaded into...Read More

"If this gets into the press, I will know it came from you...and I will rain down on you so hard, you'll have to be reassembled by fucking aircraft investigators. You breathe a word of this to anyone, you mincing fucking [expletive], and I will tear your fucking skin off, I will wear it to your mother's birthday party and I will rub your nuts up and down her leg...right?"

Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker says this in response to a not-entirely-trusted team member who has accused Tucker's assistant...Read More

There's a bit of an Invictus screening issue hanging in the air as we speak, having to do with fairness between the coasts. The Left Coast blogging crew saw Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort -- an inspirational Nelson Mandela rugby movie with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon -- on the Warner Bros. lot two or three days ago. They were told absolutely no reviews or Twitterings until Monday, 11.30. The film opens on Friday, 12.11.

The New Yorkers haven't seen it yet, and the only locked-down Manhattan screening I've been told about is happening on Tuesday, 12.1. There's also been...Read More

I saw Jim Sheridan's Brothers (Lionsgate, 12.4) a couple of nights ago, and then conducted a brief interview with Sheridan today at Manhattan's Four Seasons and then attended a group press conference (Sheridan, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Relativity's Ryan Kavanaugh). The hazy focus during the zoom-in on Maguire is due to low light -- apologies. Not a good column day. A bad one, in fact. One distraction after another.

Now that Summit Entertainment is looking at weekend New Moon earnings of $145 million or so (based on yesterday's record-breaking $72.7 million haul at 4,024 theaters), maybe they can afford now to make extra DVD screeners of The Hurt Locker and send them out to every Tom, Dick and Harry? You know...blanket the town like Lionsgate did with those Crash screeners in late '05 and early '06? No more excuses -- get 'em out there now.

"Finally, I'd like to step out of my pundit shoes for a moment, if I may, and make a bold suggestion: Academy, if you're reading, please consider nominating Fantastic Mr. Fox for best costumes. Where does it say costumes have to be human sized?"-- Vanity Fair.com's Julian Sancton in an 11.18 Oscar-nom handicap piece.

I know I probably won't end up looking like this when I'm 79, but I'd like to. Cool, studly, relaxed machismo is worth its weight in gold. The cover photo lies, of course, by favoring the subject, but what photo doesn't lie on some level? Most of them make you look worse.

Somebody said something the other day about Alec Baldwin being exceptional in Nancy Meyers' It's Complicated (Universal, 12.25). The vested parties are saying this, of course, with the post-marital comedy expected to start screening for critics sometime after Thanksgiving. A non-vested writer-director guy told me this afternoon that he can "absolutely confirm" that Baldwin is the shit in Meyers' film and a prime candidate for Best Supporting Actor. A vested party who nonetheless tends to be blunt said Baldwin is "a lay-down hand for a nom, Jeff. And he could win. Total breakout performance. Bet on it."

...

Part of the tragedy of New Moon is that it temporarily wraps Kristen Stewart -- the GenY Marlon Brando/James Dean/Montgomery Clift -- in a shroud of mediocrity. I'm not saying that Stewart has mastered her talent completely, but it's inside her, for sure. It's almost nauseating to see her grimming up and getting through the vampire/ werewolf paces as best she can. She seems tough and resilient enough (and seems to have a good sense of humor about it) but what a waste.

Kristen Stewart

Imagine if a 19 year-old Brando had been caught up in a...Read More

New Moon has earned a fair and appropriate 37% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I'm amazed and almost stunned that EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum, the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips, the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Colin Calvert , the Washington Post's Michael O'Sulivan and the Philadelphpa Inquirer's Carrie Rickey could either (a) give a pass or (b) at the very least go easy on a film that is so draggy and dreary and lifeless.

Hands down the most idiotic-looking CG wolf in motion picture history. Who decided on the size of this thing? I'll tell you who decided on the size of...

I like Peter Bart's brief 11.19 profile of 34 year-old movie financier and Relativity Media honcho Ryan Kavanaugh more than the also-recent one by Chris Jones in Esquire. I prefer Bart's because he mentions that Kavanaugh is "a moderate drinker [whose] driving is sufficiently erratic to provoke occasional run-ins with the cops" and who "can joke about melodramatic relationships with the opposite sex."

Relativity Media's Ryan Kavanaugh

This humanizes the guy, you see. Makes him sound flawed and vulnerable and maybe a wee bit ...not reckless, exactly, but...what's the term, nocturnally spirited? It tells you Kavanaugh...Read More

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Will Ferrell's track record over the last five years (and particularly the titanic failure of Land of the Lost) has earned him the title of Hollywood's most overpaid actor, according to an intensive survey announced a day or two ago by Forbes.com.

The survey is not, in other words, a portrait of who's hot and who's not right now, but a specially focused statistical assessment of the last five years. So Ferrell doesn't have to put on shades and a fishing hat and drive out to Indio and rent an apartment there under an...Read More

This is a peripheral Matt Drudge-like posting and I'm sorry, but as soon as I heard the term "dino-chickens" I was hooked. In my entire life I've never heard this term, and I'm speaking as a guy who once wrote a Roger Corman- or George Pal-type script called Killer Chickens. The size of ostriches, out for blood, looking to settle a score with humans...screaming overall-clad victims being chased around the barnyard and pecked to death. I would honestly pay to see this movie if somebody made it.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

IFP Gotham Independent Award "Breakthrough Director" nominee Derick Martini (Lymelife) and Michelle Byrd, IFP Executive Director, at last night's IFP celeberation for the nominees of the "Best Film Not Playing at a Theatre Near You" award.

This is a private invitation to a private event (and the crop of this photo respects this), but the juxtaposition of the name of Jacob Dayan, senior representative of the State of Israel in the Southwestern United States, and the "o" Nazi swastika in the Inglourious Basterds title does seem a little jarring.

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A fellow Oscar handicapper recently conveyed this observation on the fly. He was talking about some late-breaking Oscar contending films that have begun to be seen and/or whispered about over the last week or so. (And no, Brothers was not part of the discussion since it only begins showing tonight.) I'm not saying or implying this myself -- I was just struck by this guy's powers of summation. I chuckled, I mean.

In lieu of recent reports that seasoned editors Walter Murch and Mark Goldblatt have been hired to try and punch up improve Joe Johnston's The Wolfman (Universal, 2.10), I heard from a guy a day or two ago who recently saw a research screening of the 19th Century-era horror film in Los Angeles, and who said three interesting things.

One, Benicio del Toro's role is that of a touring American Shakesperean actor along the lines of Edwin Booth. Two, his performance, which the guy didn't think was all that terrific, is somewhat reminiscent of his landmark...Read More

The one thing that's always bothered me about The Hurt Locker. One scene, I mean. Actually a single line of dialogue. A jocular U.S. Colonel (David Morse) asks Jeremy Renner's Sgt. James, a bomb-defusal Jedi, "What's the best way to defuse one of these things?" And Renner answers, "Duhwayuhdohndyesuh." I've seen this over and over, and each time I've asked myself "what?...what is Renner saying, for God's sake? Has he ever tried speaking with marbles in his mouth, or taken elocution lessons? Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet."

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There were two screenings yesterday of Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones (Paramount, 12.11 limited) -- an exhibitor screening on the Paramount lot and (according to a friend) a SAG screening at the Landmark Westside Pavillion. I heard some stuff from one guy, and of course (a) it's just one guy and (b) one always needs to take any earlybird opinion with a grain, etc.

Saoirse Ronan in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones.

But as I considered this guy's views I was reminded of something I read in a Terrence Rafferty piece on the film...Read More

Lionsgate has provided Hit Fix/Awards Campaign columnist Greg Ellwood with an exclusive clip from Jim Sheridan's Brothers (which I'm seeing this evening) in which costars Carey Mulligan -- the Best Actress front-runner for her work in An Education -- and Natalie Portman share a low-key scene. I say again -- half of the British-born Mulligan's natural charm goes out the window when she's obliged to speak with an American accent. (I've posted the embed code twice and it doesn't work -- screw it.)

Without copping to having seen New Moon (which he clearly has), The Wrap's Dominic Patten has listed six reasons why the Twilight franchise is doomed. Eventually, he means. Sapping of the spirit, downward marketing spiral, tank running dry, etc.

One, "nothing happens" in the books, the characters are "caricatures" and there's only "pointless plodding for plot." Two, the absence of Robert Pattinson in much of New Moon will provoke disappointment and turn his star current into a lower-wattage thing Three, the afore-mentioned Chris Weitz-is-not-Catherine Hardwicke factor. Four, the laws of diminishing returns on sequels....Read More

Much of what's wrong with New Moon seems tracable to director Chris Weitz. In the view of L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, Weitz is a "polished" and "smooth professional who makes the vampire trains of Melissa Rosenberg's capable script run on time, but he almost seems too rational a director for this kind of project. This lack of animating madness combined with the novel's demands give much of New Moon a marking-time quality."

It was precisely this animating madness, a kind of "crazy-in-love energy" that made Twilight work as well as it did, Turan believes. (As do I.) All of this seemed...Read More

In terms of using the right kind of connective tissue that works for the story and for the audience simultaneously, New Moon (Summit, 11.20) isn't half the film that Twilight was. It's slow and infected with the sequel virus. It's gaseous and flatulent and meandering. This won't matter box-office wise, but it pretty much sucks. That swoony romantic current that Twilight had has taken a powder this time out.

Firing Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke was a lousy idea, and so was getting Chris Weitz to take her place. I don't know what tricks Hardwicke used to make Twilight play as well as it...Read More

Sacha Gervasi's Anvil!: The Story of Anvil has been left off the just-announced short list of the Academy's Best Feature Documentary contenders. One of '09's most offbeat and emotionally engaging (one could even apply the term "heart-warming") docs, Anvil! was expected to at least make the short list, but no. I wrote a few months back that it's so earnest and touching in a shlumpy, blue-collar, middle-American hangdog way that it might win.

Jeez, I haven't seen the original Bottle Rocket short in 15 or 16 years. L.M.Kit Carson, who helped Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson with the funding to complete it (and who got it into Sundance and showed the short to Polly Platt, etc.) showed me a tape of it, as I recall. And this isn't even the whole thing.

I've been working on a list of '09 films and filmmakers that achieved one of two things. One, they simply gave me enormous viewing pleasure. (Or even if an aspect of them did.) Or two, they introduced me to some new aesthetic or style or attitude that I hadn't really absorbed before but which I felt comfortable with -- i.e., in a calm and accepting frame of mind -- as I left the theatre. In short, a list of my favorite films that I liked for my own damn reasons, and the hell with taking the pulse of the town.

I'm talking about...Read More

"While this second chapter of Summit Entertainment's four-part franchise is as good as Twilight and arguably a shade better, New Moon is indisputably darker in its depiction of the throes and woes of adolescent love, especially when one gets dumped," writes Variety's Jordan Mintzer, reviewing out of Paris.

"That's how things kick off for Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), whose 18th birthday begins with a nightmare and ends with vampire heartthrob Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) telling her he's moving away, with no plans of maintaining a long-distance relationship. Bella quickly slips into a massive depression that resembles a full-scale heroin withdrawal, while her...Read More

Envelope/Gold Derby guy Tom O'Neil is predicting that Inglourious Basterds will win the Best Picture Oscar.

Trust me -- this won't happen. We're living in anxious, racially attuned, recession-afflicted times, and that means Up In The Air -- the only film by my measure that has that dignified, settled, summing-up-everyone-and-everything vibe -- or Invictus will take it. Enjoyable as it is and admired in some quarters, there is no discernible echo and spiritual after-effect in Inglorious Basterds.

I'm not alone in this thinking. In Contention's Kris Tapley has Basterds and director-writer Quentin Tarantino ranked pretty far down.

I'm gathering/presuming that Hurt Locker screeners for Academy members will be mailed out before December 1st. If this doesn't happen PDQ and if (God forbid) somehow The Hurt Locker somehow doesn't get Best Picture nominated (which is unthinkable), the fault will be entirely Summit's. This great war film has to be seen to kick in. A Crash-like screener mailing to everyone on the planet is the only way to go.

"At the start of the awards season, I had The Hurt Locker at the top of my top ten picks list," writes columnist Anne Thompson. "But right now quite a few other...Read More

It's not perfect, but this two-faced Avatar poster is much grabbier than the last one I've seen (or at least remember seeing) for the U.S. market. I've been experiencing a huge blockage with the Na'vi cat noses all along. There's something in me that just doesn't care for them. They just don't strike me as particularly cool.

I'm not looking to dig my claws in and say "this is my last and only reaction to this film" -- I'm just saying the noses haven't stopped bothering me, and I sort of wish that they would. I'm...Read More

A third prominent African-American commentator (and the fourth overall as far as this column is concerned) has joined the Precious takedown campaign. The writer is Washington Post Metro columnist Courtland Milloy, who has trashed Lee Daniels' film with almost an Armond White-like vitriol.

"In Precious, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have helped serve up a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick," he wrote today. "In it, we glimpse a sweaty, faceless brute of a black man raping the girl while her mother watches from...Read More

The 2007 blowoff of Benicio del Toro's landmark performance in Things We Lost in The Fire by critics groups, Oscar pundits and Academy members is one of the most shameful (certainly incomprehensible) wrongos in the history of award-season politicking and handicapping. The people who ignored Del Toro's work as Jerry the junkie will one day have to stand before the Movie Godz with bowed heads and explain themselves, which will surely be a painful thing all around.

Benicio del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire; Michael Stuhlbarg as he doesn't...

For whatever reason a beautiful Blu-ray of David Lynch's The Elephant Man, long admired for Freddie Francis's ravishing monochome scope photography, is available in Europe but not here. Another standout is Stuart Craig's fascinating production design, which almost makes a character out of the aesthetic ravages of industrialism in late 1800s London.

Anthony Hopkins in David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980).

John Hurt

"One thing that's really changed [in the last few years] is the independent landscape," Hurt Locker screenwriter-producer Mark Boal said in a recent (11.15) Hollywood Reporter 'Award Watch' roundtable. "I didn't know much about it, but I learned in the process of writing The Hurt Locker and producing it. That was a four-year thing, all in, and by the end of that period I felt like, 'Wow, I've learned a little bit about how independent films work.'"

"And in the last year," Boal concludes, "I've watched that entire business model crash and burn. I don't know that the film I set out...Read More

A high-def version of the recently-posted "Cinema Italiano"/Nine music video appeared today. Nobody will be free to say anything about the film until mid-December, but I can at least mention that Nine offers a three-second shot of Positano (also in the trailer from the 10 to 12 second mark), and that this gave me a pleasant jolt, sending me back to my brief visit there in late May 2007.

I completely understand and agree with the view of Italian sophistos that Positano has been degraded by the...Read More

The all-media screening of Chris Weitz's New Moon happens tonight on 42nd street. No plus-ones, I've been told. I wouldn't normally run an excerpt of anything from the UK News of the World but this 11.17 review by Robbie Collin has an interesting passage in which he calls it "unnecessarily good."

Weitz "kicks off with an eerie dream sequence that says more about the main characters in two minutes than the last Harry Potter film managed in two and a half hours," he writes.

"In fact, special effects aside -- which, by and large,...Read More

This is over a week old, but on 11.10 Digital Bits columnist "Two Cents Worth" wrote the following about a Martin Scorsese remark heard via satellite at the recent Blu-Con 2.0 conference, to wit: Scorsese "spoke very positively about the Blu-ray format:, saying it has 'the potential to replicate the original theatrical experience" and "is the best I've seen in forty years of [movie] collecting. Blu-ray offers the ability to see the film as it was intended.'

And then comes a passage straight out of the grainstorm monk's handbook. "The most interesting quote [Scorsese] offered, however, was something I hope was not...Read More

You may not find this fact in film-history books, but 1987 was a seminal year for the tarnished moral and ethical authority of the proverbial investigator and law enforcer (i.e., the loosely-allied private dick and big-city cop) in Hollywood films. For this was the year in which they both succumbed to the forces of darkness and crazy-hood.

It was 22 years ago when Shane Black's (and Richard Donner and Joel Silver's) Lethal Weapon introduced the then-radical idea of a cop who was screwier and possibly more dangerous than the criminals he was chasing. '87 was also the year when Alan...Read More

"[Simply] making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy" is my all-time favorite Michael O'Donoghue quote. He was saying, I suspect, that Eloi laughter is a form of depression and that LQTM humor -- i.e., laughing quietly to myself, Wes Anderson-type humor -- is a far richer vein. I've said a few times before that I prefer LQTM unless the humor being delivered is sharp and flinty and knowing (as in The Wedding Crashers or Network), and even then I only laugh somewhat.

But of course, the reason anything is funny in any way is because it's providing a kind of...Read More

After that pretty good teaser trailer this Salt one-sheet has to be called a disappointment. It's been obvious from the get-go who Salt is. The fact that Angelina Jolie plays her has been well established by the trailer, as well as the fact that she's Russian and smoky-eyed and given to various feats of acrobatic derring-do. The other problem is that the face could almost belong to someone else. Is it Angie or a cyborg or Megan Fox's malevolent sister?

Through the kindness of a friend, I too have now read Wes Anderson's The Rosenthaler Suite, a Universal/Imagine-funded adaptation of Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), theatrically released in '06 and issued on DVD on 10.16.07. Or most of it, I mean.

Wes has thoroughly Wessified the Leconte piece and made it his own. And it's a very enjoyable read. I could see this movie in my head right away, and I quite liked it. More than The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic or The Darjeeling Limited, and more than Fantastic Mr....Read More

The wifi in the apartment went down early last week and has stayed down. I've been using the iMac by piggybacking on a neighbor's wifi but it's a very weak and skittish signal and mostly a waste of time to mess with. Using the flaky AT&T air card with the laptop has been close to pointless and mostly futile due to the apartment being located in a weak-air pocket. On top of which the laptop touch pad has Parkinson's disease. The Time Warner guy is finally coming today between 2 and 6 pm. It's been hell.

When a new trailer comes out I like to play it almost simultaneously (i.e., slightly staggered) on two or three screens and then not watch either (or any) of them but listen to the dialogue out of the corner of my ear. "I'm 57 years old and I'm broke...why don't you write the damn song?...what's your real name?," etc.

And it starts to really sink in that way if I repeat the loops two or three times, more so than from the watching of the film...Read More

Movie City News had this first and then The Playlist, etc. On top of which the video was posted two days ago. But I'm copy-pasting this 11.15 video of Tree of Life composer Alexandre Desplat talking about Terrence Malick's film at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival for a reason.

I'm running it in order to address a quote from Desplat about the film, which deals with families and anguish and infinite time streams and dinosaurs, and which will presumably come out sometime in 2010...unless, you...Read More

Their most striking similarity between Werner Herzog's about-to-open Bad Lieutenant and Abel Ferrara's 1992 original "is that each stars an actor whose performance is so intensely played and thoroughly inhabited, it can feel like psychosis, possession, a bit of both," N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote yesterday.

Lucius Baston, Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

"They're performances that make you wonder where the character leaves off and the man playing him has taken hold, a slippage that can lead to greatness, but also to moments of such excess and even grotesque comedy...Read More

Today's tracking has Summit's New Moon (opening 11.20) with a 24 unaided awareness, an 84 total awareness, 46% of the totals definitely interested and a 26 first choice open & release. Somewhere between the high 50s and low 60s? [Note: I was way too low earlier -- wasn't thinking it through.] The numbers will bump up as the week progresses and Friday gets closer.

Warner Bros. The Blind Side (11.20), the John Lee Hancock-Sandra Bullock true-life drama, has a 68 total awareness, 48% of the totals definitely interested and a 13 first choice open & release -- exactly half that of...Read More

Jokes are such delicate things. Frail, even, in the sense that they have to be written just so and delivered in exactly the right way or they'll collapse into embarassment. One thing they have to do at the start is convey a sense of basic cultural normality -- they can't start out sounding too clever or dumb. I'm saying this to explain how the joke on page 53 in the current Esquire (whether or not it came from the mind or mouth of Gillian Jacobs) dies immediately, during the first sentence.

How dumb to you have to...Read More

You really do have to be living in a monastic Criterion world to be damp with excitement over the chance to re-savor Steve McQueen's Hunger. This is a frank and unsparing chronicle of political torture of IRA combatants by the British, and particularly the plight of Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), who died from a hunger strike in 1981 at age 27, by a first-rate visual artist, but...well, I put it like this on 9.8.08.

"You're very unhappy for a long period of time. And you don't experience joy. At the end you experience relief, if you're lucky." -- producer and former Warner Bros. honcho John Calley speaking two nights ago about the life of a typical Hollywood studio executive.

I'm constantly amazed at the frequency with which I hear people lament the fact that their lives aren't (or haven't been) happy enough. As if that "happiness" was some kind of central tenet of the quality of a life. There is certainly contentment and satisfaction, but "happiness," as most people define it, is a periodic mood thing...Read More

On the 40th anniversary of Easy Rider (which I personally commemorated with a purchase of the recently released Bluray, which makes the film seem vibrant and highly attuned and freshly found), Slate's Keith Phipps went on a journey that followed Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's original path, and has written an essay about the movie, its legacy, and how the places it visited have changed.

LACMA's Michael Govan

There are two kinds of Edward Woodward fans -- the kind that automatically say "Equalizer!" when they hear his name and the kind that speak in respectful hushed tones of his performances in Breaker Morant (my personal favorite) and the original The Wicker Man. Woodward died today in London at age 79. Smart salute.

Here's another expression -- written by the THR/Reuters' Alex Dobuzinskis -- of the current Hollywood thinking that stars matter less and less these days.

Due, just to repeat, to the successes of the star-less Twilight/New Moon, Paranormal Activity, The Hangover and District 9. And, of course, to underwhelming returns from big-star vehicles like A Christmas Carol (the sunset-ing of Jim Carrey?), Duplicity (a too-smart chess-game movie or the near-fatal wounding of the Julia Roberts legend due to passage of time?), Surrogates (Bruce who?), Funny People (serious Adam Sandler doesn't sell like the Eloi-friendly version), Land of the Lost (the spearing of...Read More

GenX, it seems, is easily the most frustrated, pissed-off generation of all, hands down. But the math in this article threw me. For a couple of decades I've had it fixed in my head that boomers were born from 1946 to 1964, GenXers were born from '64 to somewhere in the late '70 to early '80s, and that GenYers (i.e., digitally conversant, less-pissed-off children of boomers) began popping out in the mid '80s. (Kids born in the early '80s have no tag -- they're wanderers.) And that GenD -- kids born into wifi, Playstation3, iPhones, big-screen plasmas and...Read More

Yesterday Envelope /Gold Derby guy Tom O'Neil posted his choice for Best Actor front-runners at this stage of the game. I feel torn, as always, between pushing those performances in this category which I know are the "best" (i.e., the most striking, affecting, powerhouse-y, likely to be fondly remembered 20 years hence) and those that the Zelig crowd either thinks will win or needs to see win due to genetic tribal-current issues.

Right now HE's most worthy contenders -- comfort-seekers be damned -- are, in this order, Colin Firth in A Single Man, Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker, Michael Stuhlbarg in...Read More

Now I have to see Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans again just to re-absorb this little snippet straight. It passed right over (or through) me during my first viewing in Toronto. I watched about 40 minutes of The Rock last night. It was vaguely startling to see Cage (a) looking so young and (b) playing a more or less normal person.

Cage was 32 at the time. The Rock was his first move -- a cash-in -- after the acclaim of that Mike Figgis' Leaving...Read More

Okay, yes -- it's slightly more dismissive for Couples Retreat costars Faizon Love and Kali Hawk to be completely zotzed out of the British one-sheet as opposed to being reduced to the really small guys in the rear (i.e., whom no one outside of friends, family and management could possibly notice or care about) in the U.S. version. From an art direction standpoint, the British poster is obviously less crowded and more pleasing to the eye.

Couples Retreat poster (l.) vs.U.S. version (r.)

Universal has reportedly apologized to any and all offended parties and has...Read More

Here's a video clip of Gordon Willis accepting his Life Achievement Award at last night's 2009 Governor's Awards in Hollywood. And here's a Scene Unseen podcast interview with Willis from June 2007. And here's a chat I had with Willis about a year ago regarding Robert Harris's Godfather restoration.

Here also are Caleb Deschanel's remarks about Willis during the afore-mentioned ceremony. (I'm not likely to ever forget the term "dumptruck directors.") The full Scene/Unseen interview is accessible here.

I was in a mood for Italian cinema after last night's showing of Rob Marshall's Nine (which of course is primarily based on Federico Fellini's 8 1/2) so I went up to the Lincoln Plaza cinemas to catch Vittorio DeSica's The Bicycle Thief (1948). I assumed I'd be seeing it in pristine form, based on a claim by the distributor, Corinth Films, that a new print was being shown. I should have also figured on the projection and sound standards at the theatre, of course.

The fact is that the Lincoln Plaza's presentation of this...Read More

All kidding aside, the slogan -- "the harder the life, the sweeter the song" -- isn't half bad. There's a vein of truth in that. Unless, of course, your definition of a hard life is one poisoned by constant slurps of bourbon and 40 to 50 cigarettes daily, which isn't so much a "hard" life as much as a slow, drawn-out attempt to extinguish life altogether while making difficult if not miserable the lives of family and friends.

As the son of an emotionally curt, often grumpy alcoholic for my first 28 or 29 years of...

Legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis (a.k.a., "the Prince of Darkness") is being handed a Lifetime Achievement Award sometime this evening by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- after decades of not honoring the guy. As Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale wrote yesterday, "Very few would argue against Willis being the best American cinematographer to never win an Oscar." Stu's piece includes six famous Willis clips, including my favorite -- the killing of Fanucci in The Godfather, Part II.

Collapse star/doomsayer Michael C. Ruppert discussed Chris Smith's film last night (Friday, 11.13) at the Laemmle Sunset 5. He should continue to speak out and play in the band -- it's called multi-tasking.

In his 11.12 "Notes on a Season" column, Pete Hammond reports that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is premiering a digital restoration of From Here to Eternity (1953) on 11.18 at 7:30 pm in the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre. Which means not just a new DVD but a Bluray will be issued before long. I'm profoundly and eternally queer for any and all Blurays of monochrome classics. (Unless it's Criterion's The Third Man, a grainstorm horror.)

Taken in May 2001 at Halona Cove/Blowhole beach on the southeast coast of Oahu, where Eternity director...

The big Nine buzz starts this weekend with the junket screenings, MCN's David Poland wrote yesterday. (There are two this evening in midtown Manhattan.) He presumably means private buzz. Journos are being asked to pledge (or sign statements) that they won't write about it until the embargo-release date in early December. Fair enough.

Nine costar Kate Hudson (seated), star Daniel Day Lewis (lighting up)

This is a great time for local fans of Italian neo-realism with the ongoing Film Society of Lincoln Center program (now through 11.25) at the Walter Reade, where one of the upcoming films is Vittorio DeSica's The Bicycle Thieves. As well as the recent (still current?) booking of DeSica's The Bicycle Thief at the Lincoln Plaza.

I realize that Gina Lollobrigida first caught on in the early '50s with two films (also included in the LCFS series) -- Attention! Bandits! ('51) and Bread, Love and Dreams ('53). And I enjoyed her in Beat The Devil....Read More

"I saw Precious last night," a regionally-based critic friend wrote this morning, "and Mo'Nique is a surefire Oscar nominee." Probably, I said, but the fact that Mo'Nique plays the devil in that film gives me pause. She's playing a monster like the Wolfman or Gorgo or Hannibal Lecter, only without Lecter's charm. Great demonic figure, embrace the great lady, shower her with awards, pop the champagne...yaaay! No offense but I'll have mineral water.

Steve Mason is reporting that Roland Emmerich's 2012 made $25 million yesterday and is looking at a $60 million weekend total. Variety said it might go well over $40 million, and I predicted the high 40s and maybe a nudge over $50 million -- and we were both too cautious. Everyone was.

Robert Zemeckis and Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol took in $5.5 million yesterday -- a "decent" hold -- with an expected $20.4 million weekend tally and a 10-day cume of just under $50 million. The big indie story is Lee Daniels' Precious (Lionsgate) taking in $1.75 million yesterday...Read More

"I went to sleep dreaming life was beauty -- I woke up knowing life was duty." -- written by David Mamet for a 1987 Hill Street Blues episode called "Wasted Weekend."

I heard the line once during the original broadcast. I watched it from a cool little pre-war studio I was renting at the time, located on Camrose Drive in the old-time Hollywood hills, close to the Hollywood Bowl and just down the street from Elliott Gould's deco-moderne Long Goodbye apartment. Reanimator's Jeffrey Coombs lived in the...

Late this morning I saw Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart (Fox Searchlight, early December) and yeah, Kris Tapley was right -- Jeff Bridges is definitely in the Best Actor derby for his performance as a grizzled, pot-bellied, booze-swilling, cigarette-sucking ex-country music legend on the downswirl who just manages to save himself from self-destruction. It's an honestly scuzzy performance -- Bridges' best since The Big Lebowski but tonally opposite and much harder hitting, of course.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Bridges, Robert Duvall

It's the same kind of "look how gross and dessicated I can be" performance that Orson Welles...Read More

Mike Russell's latest "Culture Pulp" riff on disaster movies is obviously more informed by Irwin Allen-styled '70s schlockos than Roland Emmerich's 2012, but the rules explained in the last four panels [see below] are followed fairly closely by Emmerich.

And speaking of Irwin Allen...that helicopter! 24 inches long, at most.

If there's a line of at least five or six people waiting to use the one available bathroom, and if the person currently in the bathroom is either dying or giving birth or typing out the last chapter of a novel on his/her iPhone, then you know you're at a Starbucks.

Say what you want about Michael Mann's Public Enemies, but the finale -- the one-on-one between Marion Cotillard's Billie Frechette and Stephen Lang's Charles Winstead, a brief jailhouse conversation that ended with the words "Bye-bye, Blackbird" -- was the most penetrating of 2009. The best, the most memorable, the most oddly affecting.

Stephen Lang as Charles Winstead in Michael Mann's Public Enemies.

Marion Cotillard's final moment as Billie Frechette

It was a kind of neat bulls-eye Hollywood moment, and I can't think of any other '09 finish that felt quite so "right"...Read More

I don't see why there's friction between documentarian Alex Gibney and director George Hickenlooper over the use of the term "Casino Jack" in the titles of their respective Jack Abramoff films. HIckenlooper's film, a feature starring Kevin Spacey as Abramoff, is called Casino Jack, and Gibney's is called Casino Jack: The United States of Money. I can tell the two apart easily. Both could play Sundance 2010...maybe.

A Hurt Locker q & a was moderated last night by director-screenwriter Tony Gilroy following a 6 pm screening at Manhattan's DGA theatre. (l. to r.) Gilroy, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, screenwriter Mark Boal, costar Anthony Mackie, and...I'm sorry but I didn't write down the name of the bearded guy on the right. It could have been producer Nicolas Chartier or associate producer Jack Schuster or producer Greg Shapiro. No disrespect intended.

It's been 14 months since I first saw The Hurt Locker at...Read More

"Defense Lawyer: Fort Hood Shooter Could Be Paralyzed" (11.13 AP story). HE reaction: That's a start. This is straight out of the Glenn Beck playbook and I'm sorry, but Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan must swing for this. If he doesn't, the crowd in the Place de Concorde will make their feelings known.

Dead Time Warner wifi in the apartment with the repair guy not able to visit until next Tuesday. ATT air-card wifi on the laptop spotty at best and randomly disconnnecting whenever it feels like it. An urgent visit to the local post office required due to curious refusal of postman to leave letters addressed to me here, and a screening of Crazy Heart at 11 am in Manhattan. I have all this good stuff to post but I know when I'm temporarily beaten. All she wrote until mid-afternoon.

Detective #1: "I think God hates me." Detective #2: "Hate him right back. Works for...Read More

It's not that I've discounted Nicolas Cage's loop-dee-loop jazzman performance in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. For an actor whose stock in trade is to convey varying degrees of derangement whatever the role, Cage hits a 21st Century high as Lt. Terence McDonagh -- a wackazoid refrain of Cage's legendary Peter Loew in Vampire's Kiss.

To truly commune with an inspired Cage performance is to drop a tab of mescaline, jump off a 700-foot cliff in Yosemite National Park and howl like...Read More

I had a nice, friendly, off-the-record lunch today with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow at Extra Virgin on West 4th. She's in Manhattan for a day or two, and is sitting for a q & a with director-writer Tony Gilroy this evening at the DGA theatre on West 57th. On 11.30 Bigelow will be handed a tribute award at the 19th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards. The org has also nominated Hurt Locker for Best Feature, Best Ensemble Performance and Best Breakthrough Actor (i.e., Jeremy Renner).

The DVD/Bluray comes out January 12th....Read More

Gamechangers.com's Mike Bonifer has written a nicely thought-through HE tribute, calling yours truly the October 2009 game-changer of the month. Except his piece was just posted today, 11.12. Why wait 12 days after the end of October to announce this honor? I should either be the November game-changer guy or Bonifer should have run this 30 days ago. Or...whatever, he should have waited until next April.

The site is a promotion for Bonifer's book, "Gamechangers: Improvisation for Business in the Networked World."

If you've ever played in any kind of half-assed blues band, which I did for a year or so (as a barely competent drummer), you know that the band has to have a half-assed blues band name. The one I played in was called the Sludge Brothers. The thinking was that "sludge" sounded authentic on some level; it also sounded like Flatt and Scruggs. A variation of this same band adopted a different name -- Dog Breath -- for a special one-night gig. It was stolen from Frank Zappa, of course.

But the band never adopted the greatest blues-band name I...Read More

Today's (11.12) tracking has Roland Emmerich's 2012 with an 87 total awareness, a 49 definite interest and 30 first choice-and-release. That means pretty damn big. Maybe tsunami level. Variety says that box-office observers are forecasting over $40 million and perhaps higher. I say high 40s at least and perhaps a nudge over $50 million.

Vanity Fair.com's Jason Zinoman recently went the distance with Robert McKee's screenwriting course. He was"genuinely hoping to learn about screenwriting," he writes, "but also, as a critic -- and a specialist of horror movies -- with a professional interest in McKee's theories about genre and narrative."

Legendary screenwriting guru Robert McKee

"By the end of the day, I had learned some valuable lessons about show business, the art of persuasion, and the tricky relationship between truth and fiction. I'd also learned that Robert McKee often has no idea what he's talking about.

"Some...Read More

You can respond to Fantastic Mr. Fox as an auteurist thing -- a dazzling and charming representation of the mind and spirit and stylistic exactitude of director Wes Anderson -- and as a movie you pay to see with an $8 tub of popcorn in your lap. I responded to it both ways -- in effect with two heads. Which left me feeling great and not-so-great.

I loved and worshipped the auteurist aspect -- the luscious autumnal colors, the every-other-frame movement that Anderson and his team used to create Fox's particular stop-motion look, the "moving" fox...Read More

A small but bothersome issue in Fantastic Mr. Fox is the refusal of Wes Anderson to give his foxes bent hind legs, like all canines have, even cartoon versions. Anderson's foxes walk around with straight legs and essentially stand -- or more accurately balance themselves -- on the pads of their tiny fox feet. Which aren't large or broad enough to maintain an easy, natural balance, so all the foxes appear to be ballet dancers, in effect -- stepping around on their tippy toes. All Wes had to do was give them bent hind legs and I would've bought it. I would've understood...Read More

The about-to-open Fantastic Mr. Fox shows that director Wes Anderson (a) remains one of the 21st Century's most assertive auteurist filmmakers, which is a glorious thing from a certain perspective, and yet (b) at the same time is trapped in this auteurist-mindset mode. A little more than two years ago I wrote a column, inspired by a dream, that suggested how Wes could free himself from the Andersonville gulag. I'm re-running it today as a follow-up to my Fantastic Mr. Fox review:

DVD frame-capture from Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend

Dreams never seem as profound the next morning...Read More

"That sounds a little David Koreshy...we've now reached a completely surreal [juncture]."

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland looks like the one I had in my head when it was first read to me when I was, like, five or six. I suspect that Burton was drawing from the same kind of well when he began to create the film. There's a Tim Burton drawn-art exhibit kicking off at MOMA on Tuesday, 11.17,

IFC Films has acquired North American rights to Jordan Scott's Cracks, a somewhat bent and frenzied thriller staring Eva Green, Juno Temple, Imogen Poots and Maria Valverde. I talked with a couple of acqusitions guys about Cracks during the Toronto Film festival. They were chortling and snorting and going "whooo!" Lots of merriment and not much belief that it was any kind of "audience" film. Which is okay with me.

Variety's Todd McCarthy called Cracks "a drear account of adolescent reveries gone south [that] plays like a cross between Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, shot...Read More

What exactly will Scott Foundas's appointment as associate program director of the NY Film Festival mean? He'll be handling series and event programs, and good for that -- Foundas is a very bright and knowledgable and plugged-in guy. I've seen him interview several distinguished filmmakers in various venues, and few are better at it than he.

On the other hand Foundas did trash A Serious Man in Film Comment and was one of those NYFF programmers who stood in the way of screening it at last month's festival. So as Anthony Quinn's Auda Abu Tayi said of Peter O'Toole's T.E. Lawrence,...Read More

I've just watched the first half of the new Gone With The Wind Bluray, and I'm truly dazzled. No, levitated. This is by far the most beautifully rendered old-time Technicolor film I've ever seen on a high-def system -- razor-sharp, pulsing with color, pretty close to grain-free and significantly upgraded over the 2004 DVD version, which was excellent for what it was.

I haven't talked to Robert Harris or George Feltenstein or anyone else in the know, but I do know what my eyes tell me....Read More

I ran into Men Who Stare at Goats director-writer Grant Heslov on 10.13 at the opening-night party for the London Film Festival. He had flown up from Italy with George Clooney, the star of Anton Corbijn's then-shooting The American, of which Heslov is one of the producers. It's about an asssassin (Clooney) hanging back and chilling down in a Southern Italian village as he prepares for the proverbial final assignment while coping with a romantic entanglement and local friendships, etc.

Photo copied from an 11.11 Playlist posting.

You know what this sounds like? Local Hero...Read More

It had somehow slipped my mind that Sam Worthington is the star of Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans (Warner Bros., 3.26). This on top of Avatar and the last Terminator film plus Last Night, The Debt and the possible/discussed The Candidate and The Tourist...it's a kind of deluge. Worthington is into and all over everything in the same way that Christian Bale was the absolute go-to guy two or three years ago.

Part Arnold, part Clint, past Chuck Norris...I get it, fine. I'm just feeling...Read More

This Up In The Air trailer was posted yesterday, and it seems to be precisely the same one I was watching a month or so ago. The release-date shifts have thrown me off, so this is an opportunity to reiterate that the presumed Best Picture front-runner opens on 12.4.

Scott Foundas has written an eloquent opening for his Up In The Air review in the November/December issue of Film Comment:

"Contemporary Hollywood has steadfastly avoided the workplace -- unless the jobs are particularly...Read More

Collider's Steve Weintraub caught up with a red-band trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine during his American Film Market wanderings. A red-band version has sitting on YouTube for several weeks -- presumably Weintraub saw a new one. In any event he posted the following last night:

"If you haven't heard of Hot Tub Time Machine, it stars John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke. It centers on a group of high school pals who reunite at an old ski lodge party spot they went...Read More

It's time to ease up on Precious after yesterday's double-header. But as a friend has passed along Raina Kelley's well-written "The Problem With Precious" essay (11.5) in Newsweek, I may as well keep the ball in the air a bit longer.

"Depending on who you are, where you grew up, and, frankly, the color of your skin, you'll most likely react in one of two ways to Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," Kelley begins. "The film tells the story of Claireece (Precious) Jones and her struggle to survive a life overfull with misery. Pregnant for the second time with...Read More

I've spoken to In Contention's Kris Tapley about Lee Daniels' Precious, and he's not a flag-waving, come-this-way devotee. But he did officially predict yesterday that it would win the Best Picture Oscar, and he did call it the Best Picture front-runner on 10.21. And I think this view needs to be reconsidered.

Precious is probably a guaranteed Best Picture nominee, and it will translate all the awards heat into box-office revenue between now and early March, and good for that. And hey-ho to the people running the Precious campaign so far -- excellent work. But it won't take the Oscar....Read More

I took the time to speak today to an obviously bright and articulate 29 year-old African American guy named Anthony Smith, who tells me he's had two acquisition jobs so far (with Sony and First Look under Ruth Vitale) and has an MBA from Dartmouth, and who knows how to write fairly well. He recently sent an "open letter" to certain industry folk about Lee Daniels' Precious, claiming that it pushes dangerous stereotypes about values and conditions among African-American families. He's the only African-American guy I know of besides Armond White who's strongly criticized this highly praised Lionsgate release, and I wanted to...Read More

Last night Envelope/Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond wrote with some enthusiasm about a Sunday DGA screening of Jim Sheridan's Brothers (Lionsgate, 12.4), the remake of Susanne Bier's 2004 film with Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman costarring.

Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal in Jim Sheridan's Brothers.

Hammond asked "why no bloggers are buzzing about Brothers even with its Dec. 4 opening less than a month away"? Well, I've been writing about this film for over two years now, beginning with a start-of-filming announcement and...Read More

I'm very interested in snagging a PDF of Peter Morgan's Hereafter, if anyone has access. This is the now-shooting Clint Eastwood film, of course -- a reportedly supernatural piece about three characters "touched by death in different ways," etc.

Hereafter costars Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Marthe Keller (Marathon Man, Bobby Deerfield, Black Sunday -- U.S. theatrical career seemingly killed by Fedora and The Formula), Mylene Jampanoi and Thierry Neuvic.

I'm forming an idea that whatever Invictus may or may not be, Hereafter may settle in and really touch home. It would be seen, of course, as a contemplation of...Read More

I've forgotten if there's a review embargo in effect for Roland Emmerich's 2012, but let's assume there is and state unequivocally that this is not a review. But I do need to say that this mother-of-all-disaster-movies -- this stunner, this train wreck, this howler that is Deep Impact, The Poseidon Adventure (Hackman/Winters/Lynley/Buttons version), Titanic, Airport and Hot Shots times infinity multiplied by five hits of blotter acid with CG that will make you plotz in your gourd -- is absolutely, categorically and certifiably insane and must be seen because of this fearless wackazoid quality.

That's all I'm going to say except hats...Read More

I just filled out my projected Top Ten Best Picture list for the Envelope Buzzmeter chart Most seem to be following an equation that includes six or seven Best Picture contenders with serious chops (Up In The Air, Invictus, An Education, A Serious Man, etc.) along with three or four slummers, which is to say films that exude a certain crowd-pleasing popcorn aroma (Avatar, District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Up).

I'm going right now with Up In The Air, The Hurt Locker, Invictus, An Education, Nine, A Serious Man, Precious, A Single Man, Avatar and Inglourious Basterds -- eight real contenders and two slummers....Read More

Michael Cieply's financial assessment piece in today's N.Y. Times about potential revenues from James Cameron's Avatar states the following:

(a) "Published reports have put the production budget at more than $230 million";

(b) "[But] when global marketing expenses are added, Avatar may cost its various backers $500 million";

(c) "Fox's biggest investment in Avatar may be on the marketing side, where the company is planning to spend about $150 million around the world";

(d) Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation "is carrying a much smaller share of...Read More

It's almost fascinating that Universal marketing has decided to try a suggestive/arty mode for its recently revealed one-sheet campaign for Joe Johnston's The Wolfman (2.12.10). If Val Lewton were making werewolf movies today and designing his own posters, these are the kind of material he'd probably turn out.

There's a paywall up on the Newsday site, but Lewis Beale has written a piece about apocalyptic movies called "2012 and The Road lead doom boom on screen." And the only thing wrong with it is that -- huh? -- Beale and his editors chose to ignore the real-life gloom-and-doom doc that film cognoscenti are all over right now -- i.e., Chris Smith's Collapse.

Beale says he hasn't seen Collapse and that it was never mentioned in conversations with his editors, but if it had been the dialogue would have probably sounded something like this:

Beale: "Uhh, there's this other...Read More

I'm proud and pleased to announce that I've been officially welcomed into the fold of the Broadcast Film Critics Association. This'll be great as far as time screening invites and receiving screeners are concerned, and of course it's a nice thrill to be honored with a membership in the first place.

Longtime Newsweek film critic David Ansen has joined Film Independent as artistic director of the organization's 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival, it was announced an hour or so ago. Senior programmer Doug Jones has also been promoted to associate director of programming. The festival will run from 6.17 through 6.27. I did a quick phoner with Ansen around 2:45 pm today; will post something later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Newsweek critic and just-announced LAFF artistic director David Ansen.

Last weekend Time's Erin Davies delivered a fairly thorough (read: depressing) summary of the hard economic times plaguing the independent film industry, including a blind quote from an "industry executive" that "very few people think Focus Features is going to survive." All the bummer statistics are presented, and all of it explaining why ads are a little harder to come by, and/or require a lot more in the way of begging and cajoling.

"There are moments" when Warner Home Video's new Gone With The Wind Bluray "simply looks 'better' than the previous DVDs," says DVD Beaver's Gary Tooze, "and then there are times when it makes you gasp. Most notable may be the colors -- flesh tones are warm at times but lose that yellow-orangey look of the SD transfers. Detail advances to as high a degree as we are likely to see for this 70-year old classic."

The GWTW Bluray streets on 11.17. I haven't received a copy myself but then again I'm at a new...Read More

An English-language Salt trailer went online last Thursday, or roughly two or three days after the Russian-language version turned up. The Phillip Noyce thriller won't open until 7.23.10, so there's plenty of time to tone down that CG-tweaked feeling in a couple of the action scenes. The Tangier chase sequence in the last Bourne film is the gold standard in this regard.

I saw Oren Moverman's The Messenger last July. I went with the menu, respected the chops and intent, found Samantha Morton's performance as a bereaved Iraq War widow especially moving. (So far the film has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating.) Last night I attended the after-party at 1Oak following the Manhattan premiere. The Oscilloscope release opens this Friday.

The Messenger costars Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson at 1Oak -- Sunday, 11.8, 10:10 pm.

I spoke to Woody Harrelson briefly about that Sunset Strip oxygen bar he...Read More

In an acknowledgement of the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which heralded the end of the extended and aggravated U.S.-Soviet Union tensions generally referred to as the Cold War, L.A. Times critic Betsy Sharkey has listed her favorite films which reflected that era and mindset. But she misdescribes one seminal 1950s-era monster movie, and overlooks the bulls-eye capturing of American fears of Communist invasion and subversion in the finale of another '50s monster flick.

In other words, Sharkey calls Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) a fear-of-aliens movie when the common interpretation is that the...Read More

To me it's just more of the same improbable, nobody-could-ever-survive-this-in-real-life action-movie horseshit. I stopped even half-believing what I was seeing before the guy was up the tree. Jean-Luc Godard would spit on it.

I was puzzled after reading Mark Olsen's 11.8 "Indie Focus" column this morning. The focus was Sebastian Guitterrez's Women in Trouble, an apparently sexy, allegedly Pedro Almodovar-esque indie anthology that will open in New York and Los Angeles on 11.13. It costars Carla Gugino, Adrianne Palicki, Marley Shelton, Simon Baker, Elizabeth Berkley and Josh Brolin.

My confusion wasn't just about my never having received a screening invite. It was also due to three top-ranked journalists I called this morning (including L.A. Times columnist and screening series host Pete Hammond, who knows everyone and...Read More

A long while ago I accepted the notion of Samantha Morton, 33, being the Daniel Day Lewis of younger actresses. She's a very high-calibre, high-throttle type who can't help but drill deeply and maybe go a little mad (or madder) with each new performance. Which is what makes her good. But I did mutter "uh-oh" when she first came on-screen in The Messenger. In fact, anyone who's seen it and claims he/she didn't say "uh-oh" is probably lying.

Samantha Morton in The Messenger

The truth is that Morton has been...well, physically changing as the years go by,...Read More

This weekend Lionsgate's Precious averaged $100,000 per location in 18 locations -- an indie-level record. An Oprah Winfrey-propelled mix of upscale black-and-white audiences (plus middle-scale and downscale black crowds) resulted in a $1.8 million Friday-to-Sunday gross.

The Robert Zemeckis/Jim Carrey/3D A Christmas Carol only managed $31 million from 3,683 locations for a $8,417 average. Not bad but a bit of a shortfall, given the broad family-market potential. I suspect it was because parents decided that the mo-cap Scrooge character looked too scary for toddlers.

Sony's This Is It was down 40% from last weekend -- a relatively decent hold -- for a...Read More

Vanityfair.com's Julian Sancton noted yesterday that a brief scene of violence in The Men Who Stare at Goats recalls the recent Fort Hood tragedy. The scene (actually a self-contained clip in a montage) shows a disturbed soldier running amok in Fort Bragg, firing at troops during their morning exercises. Sancton is wondering if Overture Films should omit the scene from future prints.

HE verdict: It happened, move on, let it ride. No one is going to blame Goats for goading the grief. All chickenshit Monday-morning-quarterback censorship calls need to be ignored. It was lame for filmmakers to talk about...Read More

The Overture marketing guys who designed (or at least approved) the Men Who Stare At Goats lobby poster were paying oblique tribute to the 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg poster. Have there been others? Probably, but they're not coming to mind.

The very first version of the Nuremberg poster, by the way, used side-to-side profiles. The below image is from the soundtrack album.

The German city is called Nurnberg, of course. Why have Americans always insisted on calling it Nuremberg? Where is the upside in changing the...Read More

The House's passage of the House Healthcare Reform Bill just barely squeaked through -- 220 to 215. A nice event and a victory for Barack Obama, but the bill will be watered down (and possibly even gutted) by its opponents in the Senate.

What happened last night is certainly better than nothing, but all we're likely to get at the end of the road is a de-balled version of the Swiss health care system. A "vigorous" public option will never get approval from the Senate. The...

Ever so often a few bars from a song that was briefly hot in your early youth but which no one plays or even thinks about just pops into your head. I haven't heard Keith's 98.6 in eons, but it came back to me today. Strange.

I've tried for nearly an hour to find an online PDF of Wendell Mayes' script for Go Tell The Spartans, or a transcript of the film's dialogue -- same difference. I'm in love with a soliloquy spoken by Burt Lancaster, playing Major Asa Barber, as he tells a young soldier (played, I think, by Craig Wasson) why he'd been demoted from the rank of Colonel a few years back.

Lancaster/Barber was stationed near Washington, D.C, he recalls, and having an affair with his commander's wife. Some months passed and then a party was given by this commander...Read More

Nancy Meyers' idea behind the title doesn't do it for me. But this does: "She looks so simple in her way / Does the same thing everyday / But she's dedicated / To having her own way," etc. Women always call the shots, lay down the rules, say what goes.

The rule as I see it is (a) celebrities are entitled to slap, shove or punch anyone violating their privacy with a camera because for dignity's sake alone they have to strike back at the tabloid paparazzi malevolence, and yet (b) regular people aren't allowed to get aggressive or hit anyone because they almost never have to deal with a stranger taking their picture and if they don't like it, tough.

Yesterday Sunset Gun's Kim Morgan posted a very nice q & a interview with Eva Marie Saint. A little too nice, if you ask me.

Older showbiz folk tend to either recall their lives in a naked-blunt Klaus Kinski style (i.e., "I'm too old to muddy my memories with even a smidgen of bullshit") or with excessive fondness. Saint lives in the latter camp. Every big name she's worked with (Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Shepard) was fascinating or colorful or generous...Read More

"The first test screening for Titanic was at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. [Director-writer James] Cameron flew there ahead, ostensibly to test the audio systems, while producers Jon Landau and Rae Sanchini and 8 or 9 20th Century Fox executives rode in on the corporate plans.

"Cameron had roped off seats for himself in the theatre. He likes to sit in the middle of the audience, but not next to an audience member who might reognize him and definitely not next to an executive, so Sanchini was his buffer. He had also rigged the audio...Read More

Last night I attended the first prime-time public screening for Chris Smith's Collapse at the Angelika. It played just as powerfully for me as it did in Toronto. The show was a little more than four-fifths sold out. Producer-director Smith spoke before and after the film. There were many questions. More than a few people in the audience seemed pumped. I was too.

Collapse editor Barry Poltermann, producer/director Chris Smith at Tom & Jerry's on Elizabeth, about 90 minutes after the finish of Smith's q & a at the Angelika, following the 7:30 pm...

MCN's Gurus of Gold, finally up and running, have Up In The Air in the top Best Picture prediction slot, fine, followed by Precious and The Hurt Locker. Wait...they have A Serious Man in tenth place following the unseen Invictus, Nine and The Lovely Bones, and one slot behind Inglourious Basterds? Am I reading this correctly? Jokey-dokey, baseball-bat-and-gloppy-brain-matter Basterds -- a movie costarring the perpetually smug-faced Eli Roth -- is a hotter Best Picture contender than A Serious Friggin' Man?

Calling on the ghosts of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Andrei Tarkovsky and Fritz Lang to walk the earth, visit...Read More

I was amused at how chief N.Y. Times critics Tony Scott and Manohla Dargis gave the task of reviewing Chris Smith's Collapse (which opens today in Manhattan) not to second-stringer Stephen Holden but third-stringer Jeanette Catsoulis. It's only the scariest and most riveting doc of the year -- a theoretical portrait of the world's end that will suck the air out of whatever room you happen to be sitting in. (Last week I called it "the thinking man's 2012").

Catsoulis is, of course, an...Read More

Sidney Lumet's The Verdict turns on a bullshit premise-- an attorney can't refuse a reasonable cash settlement if that's what his/her client is looking to get -- but I love it anyway for the following reasons:

In no particular order: (a) the Boston-Irish flavorings, (b) Jack Warden, (c) that straight-whiskey, pinball-machine opening, (d) Edward Binns, (e) James Mason's face when he realizes his case has just collapsed in the face of Caitlin Costello Price's testimony, (f) Charlotte Rampling, and (g) those portions of Paul Newman's performance that...Read More

Richard Kelly's The Box, which opens today, was shooting in the Boston area two years ago; that in itself should tell you it has problems. The failing-grade RT reviews (44% hoi-polloi, 25% creme de la creme) are another. It's Friday morning and the film is all but dead in the water -- let's face it. WB marketers knew it was a ruptured duck ages ago; that's one reason why they took so long to open it.

So why did Media Rights Capital agree to fund...Read More

What is the point of buying and caring for the original crop-duster plane from North by Northwest if someone in the food chain (yourself or the guy you bought it from) decided to change the engine nose to a robin's egg blue color and paint the wings a fresh shade of light amber? The original plane was a plain old brown crop-duster out of central casting so why prettify it?

Bill Knauz and his slightly prettified NxNW biplane.

The Real McCoy

I'll tell you why. Because people like Bill Knauz, a...Read More

Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol "turns a 19th-century morality tale into a 21st-century funhouse ride, replete with digital greasepaint and 3-D gaping," says the Toronto Star's Peter Howell. "Look past all the techno tinsel, and the uplift is the same as always. You might even enjoy the 3-D faux snow landing in your lap.

"The bad news is that all this glitter is not gold. This is the third film by Zemeckis using motion-capture technology, the others being The Polar Express and Beowulf, and he has yet...Read More

More than seven months after its debut last March at South by Southwest, I've finally seen Scott Teems' That Evening Sun, an exceptionally well-honed, low-budget regional drama with a lead performance by Hal Holbrook that feels lean, crafty and country-plain -- clearly in the same cut-the-b.s., less-is-more realm as Robert Duvall's performance in Tender Mercies or Billy Bob Thornton's in Sling Blade. By my sights Holbrook's work certainly deserves a Best Actor nomination.

I mean, if you can't stand up and salute an actor like Holbrook,...Read More

While I have concerns about aspects of Michael Hoffman's The Last Station (Sony Classics, 12.4), I certainly understand and agree with the Helen Mirren-for-Best Actress thing. Her performance as Sofya Tolstoy is a little florid, but I think that's appropriate given who and what she is and what she's up against. Her spirit is infectious, intxoicating.

The long-awaited Bluray of Michael Mann's Heat (Warner Home Video, 11.10) lacks that Bluray schwing. Here I am sounding like a plebian again, but dammit, you buy a Bluray version of a film you already own on DVD because you want enhancement -- something with finer detail, more color gradation, sharper focus -- a more robust pop-through quality. That's what you pay for, right?

Diane Venora, Al Pacino in Michael Mann's Heat.

The Heat Bluray offers a slight sense of enhancement, okay, but there's nothing all that "extra" about it. The instant I popped it in...Read More

I read Armond White's absolute corker of a Precious review yesterday afternoon as I was rushing to the L train and a 5 pm appointment in town, etc. I knew it would be all the online rage and of course it is that now, but everyone knew that White-the-contrarian would go for the kill on this one, especially with the Oprah Winfrey connection. Is White regarded as such a kneejerk trasher of popular liberal-minded entertainments that the spectre of a brilliant African-American critic obliterating Precious won't count? I wonder.

"Shame on Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive...Read More

One awfully nice thing about pets is that you don't have to look your best for them. They'll take you with your hair combed or scattered, pants on or pants off, showered or not, with or without a manicure. They'll put out the same you-and-me-forever vibe as long as you're mellow and affectionate and put food on the plate. And they won't walk into the room and say, "I'm really sorry but I just met this cat lover in the other building who makes me feel more secure."

Aura -- Thursday, 11.5, 11:05 am.

In a brief 11.5 riff about the Weinstein Co.'s poster for Tom Ford's A Single Man, In Contention's Guy Lodge wrote, "Call me cynical, but are they trying to hide the fact that it's about a gay man?" Gee, I don't know...maybe? Movie Marketing 101 says that you always conceal or downplay the gay element contained in any film, whether it be in the story or lead character or whatever. The Weinsteiners did the usual thing.

But it's surprising that they didn't try and convey the film's selling point, which for me is its sense...Read More

On 10.29 I expressed regret at not being in Los Angeles this month in order to catch American Film Market screenings of Noah Baumbach's Greenberg and Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, which New Yorker columnist Richard Brody had claimed would be showing there based on a Variety ad. It turns out this was a wrongo -- neither film will be showing at the AFM. Now I feel less deprived.

Now that the World Series is over and the N.Y. Yankees are world champions (first time since 2000, 27 wins overall), I feel free to ask a question I've had on my mind since the series began: why do so many baseball players these days have the bodies of linebackers? What happened to the concept of pitchers and catchers and shortstoppers being relatively trim and, well, athletic-looking?

N.Y. Yankees pitcher Carsten Charles Sabathia

I've been looking at pitchers the last few days who almost look like sumo wrestlers trying to lose weight. Seriously, half of today's...Read More

Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson red-carpeting at a 10.30 AFIFest screening in Los Angeles. Of course. But what gets my attention (since I know the Wes/Fox rap) is the fascinating activity (i.e., a rapid progression of thoughts and moods) on the face of Fox Searchlight publicist Melissa Holloway.

Deeply sorry about the whacking of Entertainment Weekly's Christine Spines, as reported this evening by Indiewire's Anne Thompson. Spines is an A-level feature writer who used to bang out profiles and investigative pieces for the old Premiere. Further regrets for the 10 other EW staffers who got cut also.

John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side "is the kind of inspiring and solid upbeat studio release that could, and should, put Sandra Bullock firmly in the race for Best actress," Envelope/Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond posted this afternoon.

"This could be her Erin Brockovich. Just like the film that earned Julia Roberts her Oscar, this is a true-life story about Leigh Anne Tuohy, an unstoppable force of nature who persuades her very white Southern family to take in a virtually homeless African American teen named Michael Oher (played by newcomer Quinton Aaron). This...Read More

In Contention's Kris Tapley saw Crazy Heart earlier today, and is now proclaiming that Jeff Bridges has bounded or barrel-assed into the Best Actor field, or words to that effect. I'm about to watch The Last Station and I can't embed links with an iPhone, but now I'm ever more envious of the L.A. crowd.

"It's not just Jeff Bridges who leaps onto the Oscar landscape with Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart," Tapley writes. "It's [also] possible in a few months that we'll be talking pretty seriously about Maggie Gyllenhaal in the supporting actress race and, most certainly, T-Bone Burnett's contributions...Read More

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein echoed my own dismay when he criticized Envelope/Gold Derby columnist Tom O'Neil on 11.2 for posting an anonymous Oscar voter's opinion that This Is It, the Michael Jackson documentary, will grab an Oscar Best Picture nomination.

Engaging as the film is, the voter's claim is absurd given the obvious fact that This Is It (a) is first and foremost a cash-grab enterprise that (b) obviously has no theme or under-current due to its total lack of interest in portraying the Jackson back-story or any of the circumstances behind the "This Is It" rehearsal footage --...Read More

It struck me when I first saw the trailer for John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side (Warner Bros., 11.20), an adaptation of Michael Lewis's 2006 book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game," that it seemed like a more affluent, white-middle-classy, economically upbeat version of Lee Daniels' Precious.

The rough shorthand is that both are about compassion and nurturing offered to a young African American -- an obese female teen in Precious, a mountain-sized homeless teenaged male in the Hancock film -- grappling...Read More

Fox Searchlight is suddenly screening Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges character drama that Hollywood Reporter columnist Steven Zeitchik has described as a country-music version of The Wrestler, and frequently -- two showings today and a couple more tomorrow and/or Friday, a friend reports. But so far no screenings are slated for the New York crowd. Or so I'm concluding due to a lack of response after writing Fox Searchlight's Manhattan p.r. crew this morning.

Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Jeff Cooper's Crazy Heart.

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein reported yesterday that the film,...Read More

Envelope/Dish Rag columnist Elizabeth Snead suggested yesterday that Alec Baldwin's m.c. performance at the 10.21 Elle Awards may have cinched his just-announced Oscar gig (i.e., co-hosting with Steve Martin). Especially with Oscar co-producer Adam Shankman in the audience that day.

Exit polls are reporting that a majority of voters in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won tonight, say that President Obama wasn't a factor in their voting. Obama is personally popular but people are feeling ornery. I get that. Tonight wasn't that big a deal -- certainly no national referendum.

I was seriously impressed with Tom Ford's A Single Man in Toronto. It played even better early this evening. Gently moving, immaculate photography, elegant, understated. Ford's script is concise and true. 11.3, 7:35 pm.

Screencrave's Krystal Clark somehow snagged a high-quality, Russian-language trailer for Phillip Noyce's Salt, the Angelina Jolie actioner due next summer, and posted it earlier today. You never know how long this stuff will last before the lawyers jump in so click on it ASAP.

Angelina Jolie in Phillip Noyce's Salt.

It looks to me like very high-throttle stuff in the action-plus tradition of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger -- nicely choreographed and cut, very handsomely lit and framed. In a role originally meant for Tom Cruise, Jolie is fine with the accent, leapings, kickings...

I'm more than down with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin co-hosting the 82nd Academy Awards, which producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman announced a little while ago. In fact I'm almost excited. They're both wordsmiths -- the pithy, erudite, dry-witted Martin vs. the pugnacious, slightly testy, vaguely-angry-all-the-time Baldwin. So it'll be a competition all the way. They'll be on each other's back and will call each other's bluff. If Martin takes the humor or commentary in a certain direction that doesn't quite pan out, Baldwin will immediately zap him and course-correct. And vice versa.

The...

A longtime HE reader who works in the broker/trading sector dropped a couple of riffs into the box this afternoon. One argues that Kristen Stewart's Twilight/New Moon character Bella Swan is a pathetic female role model (matched only by Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City); the other wonders why Hollywood still isn't offering new movies on a day-and-date, pay-per-view basis.

1. "Here we are on the verge of another Twilight film, and the scary thing is that it's entirely based on low self-esteem among young females. It's essentially the story of the ordinary girl drifting through her boring life...Read More

I'm repeating myself, yes, but I can't help gnashing my teeth over how mushy and...well, Barack Obama-minded the thinking is right now among Best Picture prognosticators in the case of the Coen Bros.' A Serious Man -- easily one of their wittiest and most sharply cut films, and hands down one of the year's best.

To my knowledge Serious still has only a handful of ardent supporters -- myself, The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, In Contention's Kris Tapley, The Wrap's Steve Pond, Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, legendary Oscar-watcher Robert Osborne, etc. Am I...Read More

Every so often I need to shake my head and remind myself how completely off-the-reservation the tabloids have become in their reportings about alleged movie-star couplings. In the '80s and '90s they used to piece together tidbits from their sources and create speculative articles that may, from time to time, have contained shards of truth. But over the last decade they seem to have gotten into a habit of inventing stuff out of whole cloth. Which their equally divorced-from-reality readers apparently have no problem with.

I'm reacting to, on one hand, a just-published Vanity Fair profile of New Moon costar Robert Pattinson...Read More

In Rouge/Universal's MacGruber, a comedy about a screw-up secret agent (SNL's Will Forte), Val Kilmer plays a character (presumably an edgy bad-guy type) named...Cunth. Ryan Phillippe, Kristen Wiig and Powers Boothe costar.

I don't know why I was reluctant to play the trailer for Mike Newell and Jerry Bruckheimer's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (5.28). I guess it was because I knew it would deliver the same old deluge of grandiose CG that looks like nothing except grandiose CG, and the same sublime feeling of being soaked in Eloi-pandering oatmeal. And you know it'll play like gangbusters when it opens a little more than six months hence.

I love the colloquial dialogue ("Don't press your luck"),...Read More

In a piece about David Plouffe's The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory (Viking Adult), Arianna Huffington contemplates the gap between the '08 Obama campaign themes and the way things have devolved since he took office. Caution bordering on timidity, status quo half-measures, playing softball with the right, etc.

"How did the candidate who got into the race because he'd decided that 'the core leadership had turned rotten' and that 'the people were getting hosed' become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as...Read More

No trailer yet for Extraordinary Measures (CBS Films, 1.22.10), the Brendan Fraser-Harrison Ford true-life drama (based on Geeta Anand's The Cure) about a father teaming with a scientist to create a medical-establishment-defying cure for his ailing kids. But here's a video piece about the actual history that inspired the book and the film.

Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser in Extraordinary Measures.

The appearance is obviously that of a medical procedural along the lines of George Miller's Lorenzo's Oil (1992), as both deal with finding medical cures for sick kids without the aid of FDA-approved...Read More

Among the four breakout performances mentioned on 10.30 by the N.Y. Times Karen Durbin, there's no question who makes the most robust impression and who seems (to me anyway) the most talented, personable and charming -- A Single Man's Nicholas Hoult, who's not yet 20.

Nicholas Hoult in Tom Ford's A Single Man

Guys this young rarely have this kind of quietly charismatic confidence. Either way he exudes something that feels steady beyond his years. Focus, discipline, some kind of tick-tocky metronomic thing going on inside. Hoult doesn't seem to be playing an alert and confident...Read More

Sony Classics' deal to acquire Rodrigo Garcia's Mother and Child "came together shortly after Toronto but took some time to close," reports Indiewire's Peter Knegt. The plan is to open it sometime next year so Annette Bening's Best Actress nomination is of course out the window. I remain persuaded that Bening gives the best performance of her career in this film.

My initial TIFF gush review was a mistake as it was based on having seen most but not all of Mother and Child. I'm still a bit stunned, looking back, that a film that delivered as well as it...Read More

I won't purchase the new VCI Bluray of Bryan Desmond Hurst's A Christmas Carol (1951) until sometime this evening, but the frame scans posted by DVD Beaver's Gary Tooze look stunning. I've written repeatedly that Hurst's is the most emotionally affecting, the best acted, the spookiest and the most atmospherically correct of all the versions. So it's great to finally have an immaculate Bluray rendering to have and hold.

The great Alistair Sim captured on VCI's Bluray

Scanned off VCI's 1998 DVD

Tooze chose to compare the Bluray to scans of...Read More

A little movie about a middle-aged guy getting to know his neighbors by sleeping over at their homes sounds very appealing. Julia Roberts' Red Om intends to make such a film, using Peter Lovenheim's In the Neighborhood, a forthcoming non-fiction book based on the author's June '09 N.Y. Times Op-Ed piece (called "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"). It sounds like a perfect role for some agreeably seasoned older type -- Richard Gere, Jerry Seinfeld, Richard Jenkins, Daniel Day Lewis, etc. (But not George Clooney!)

The "but" factor is in the routine presumption that Roberts sees a role for herself...Read More

Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory investigates the life of former Arizona Cardinals linebacker and U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, and particularly his April 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's roundabout admission earlier this year that he fraudulently approved awarding Tillman a posthumous Silver Star as a result of enemy fire has been heavily focused upon by Krakauer's book and in a 10.14 Daily Beast article.

"After Tillman died, instantly -- within 24 hours certainly -- everybody on the ground...everyone knew...Read More

"The floor of a cave called. It wants its bat shit back." -- Bill Maher on Rep. Michelle Bachman, from the 10.16 show.

I was up in Connecticut this weekend for a memorial gathering for my recently deceased brother. And being subliminally distraught or whatever (i.e., I tend to push things down) I left my apartment keys somewhere up there -- either in the Wilton/Georgetown cottage I stayed in last night or the rental car. So I got back to the Brooklyn pad this evening and no keys. But I got into the building anyway and went up on the roof and climbed down the fire escapes and tried the windows -- no dice. So I went over to the only hotel in the neighborhood and...Read More

The Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Zeitchik reported this morning that Robert Zemeckis and Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol, the 3D motion-capture pic opening Friday (11.6), "is a faithful retelling (in tone and dialogue) of the Dickens classic" and "a technical marvel, uncannily beautiful and attentive to detail. But narratively, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge's visit to his past, present and future feels less compelling.

"Some of the biz and media people we talked to at Wednesday's screening weren't showing overwhelming support," Zeitchik writes. "The buzz was of a masterful filmmaking feat that's nonetheless lacking in...Read More

Here's another prime example of a clever European TV commercial, the slightly risque kind you'll absolutely never see in this country. Ancient (i.e., 17 years old) but brilliant. Okay, one of the nuns is a bit too broad, but Mother Superior nails it.

Willem Dafoe, Michael Sheen, John Lasseter, Jane Campion and others have shared their feelings with USA Today's Suzie Woz about this year's ten Best Picture nominations (as opposed to the usual five).

In a 9.12 piece called "Sumptuous Devastation," I described John Hillcoat's The Road (which I had just seen) as "two hours of rotted, ash-covered, end-of-the-world remnants captured in ravishing, desaturated, ugly-beautiful photography with highly admirable production design. Viggo Mortensen and the kid are very good...yes, fine. But what they bring isn't nearly enough.

"I read Cormac McCarthy's novel for the exquisitely plain prose, but the movie is quite unnecessary. It really and truly goes nowhere, enhances nothing, offers no poetry of any transformative value and adds nothing...Read More

After being shown "a few minutes of footage" from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones (as well as "an exceptionally handsome trailer"), N.Y. Times writer Terrence Rafferty writes that Jackson "appears to have made the attempt to be faithful to Alice Sebold's wistful, lyrical tone, but there are indications, too, that he hasn't entirely abandoned his hyperbolic horror style: the looming close-ups, the ominous shadows, the fast, vertiginous tracking shots.

The Lovely Bones star Saoirse Ronan.

"It's always tricky for filmmakers who have earned their reputations in fantasy and horror to go respectable without losing the disreputable vigor...Read More