Paris is the only place in the world to welcome in the new year. The kids and I stood in front of the Eiffel Tower exactly ten years ago tonight, and I would do it again. This isn't the greatest New Year's video I've ever seen, but it ends with the best upward-pan spectacle shot I've ever seen on YouTube. Taken only seven or eight hours ago.

The Obama family saw Avatar in Hawaii this morning -- alone. The story doesn't say if they saw it in 2D, RealD, Fake IMAX digital 3D or real IMAX celluloid 3D. Why didn't they watch it with a paying crowd? You're missing something if you see a film like Avatar in a vacuum. Or are you?

The Bowling Green Daily News' Michael Compton has chosen United 93 as his best film of the decade. Which isn't too far from where my Prius is parked -- I had Paul Greengrass's 9/11 drama fifth among my best aughts.

When someone writes the obit for Variety critic Derek Elley (not for many decades!), it's likely he/she will feel obliged to mention the biggest wrongo of Elley's career -- his September 2008 pan of The Hurt Locker at the Venice Film Festival. There's no right or wrong view of any film, of course, but Elley's view is so drastically divorced from the opinion of 98% of the critics who've written about it since that you have to wonder, as I did in my 2008 Toronto review, what Elley saw over there.

You can slam any film you want for any reason,...Read More

At the end of his best-of-aughts piece (in which he names Charlie Kaufman 's Synecdoche as the best of the bunch!), Roger Ebert finishes with a thought that I've conveyed several times myself. Actually thousands of times, in a sense.

"All of these films are on this list for the same reason -- the direct emotional impact they made on me," he explains. "They have many other qualities, of course. But these evoked the emotion of Elevation, which I wrote about a year or so ago. Elevation is, scientists say, is an actual emotion, not a woo-woo theory. I believe...Read More

There seems to be a growing consensus that you can't say "two thousand-something" any more -- you have to say "twenty-ten" or whatever. This has been the only century since the acceptance of the Gregorian or Roman calendars in which English-speaking people have referred to a year by saying the word "thousand." This has mainly been due, I suspect, to the grammatical influence of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've been a twenty-something advocate since '01, to no avail.

I've been feeling more and more persuaded over the last couple of weeks that Zoe Saldana deserves a Best Actress nomination for her motion-capture performance as Neytiri in Avatar. In the manner of a silent-film actress Saldana's emoting is necessarily broad, and I understand the uninformed suspicion that it's not she who deserves the credit as much as the motion-capture tweaks that fine-tuned her performance, but my heart knows what it feels. Saldana got me.

Don't even mention Meryl Streep's Dan Aykroyd-y performance in Julie & Julia alongside Saldana's. When I think of Avatar I...Read More

I'd like to add 50% agreement to a recent AOL Moviefone poll verdict, which is that Megan Fox was the worst and the sexiest actress of 2009. I concur with the "worst" part because no other actor in an '09 film seemed quite as falsely mannered to me -- as devoid of anything recognizably human. There's nothing behind her eyes. She really does seem to exude the personality, attitude and talent level of a porn star.

I'm talking mainly about her acting in Jennifer's Body, of course. You can't judge anyone by their performance in either of the Transformers films.

The...Read More

A Manhattan street artist sold this to a friend, who turned around and gave it to me for a Christmas present. I don't like to wear anything brown (not even underwear or socks) but this is exceptional. Research hasn't revealed what "Il Maco" means.

Jett, who tunes out on certain subjects every so often, just asked who the likely Best Supporting Actor winner will be, and when I said "Christoph Waltz, the milk-sipping Nazi Colonel from Inglourious Basterds," he said "what?" He's seen Quentin Tarantino's film and was okay with it, but the Waltz certainty shocked him. Write a fast piece about why you just said that, I suggested. He's not responding so I guess not.

This was a banner year of Stephen Lang in Public Enemies and Avatar -- why isn't he in the loop? Peter Capaldi's potty mouthed rage-hound performance in In The Loop made...Read More

"While there is violence galore in Ian Fitzgibbon's A Film With Me in It, the lion's share is accidental," writes critic Marshall Fine. "That's the joke in this blackly humorous Irish film. People drop dead at an alarming rate in this movie, and the deaths are unbelievably accidental -- and are certain to seem so to the authorities.

Doherty or Moran? You decide.

"Unemployed actor Mark (Mark Doherty) and his would-be writer-filmmaker friend Pierce (stand-up comic Dylan Moran) are ne'er-do-wells, renting flats in the same building from the same gruff landlord (Keith Allen), who is...Read More

Orangutans have very expressive faces. Nothing startling in this. I first realized it when I was in third or fourth grade. I thought that Clyde, the orangutan who co-stared with Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can , performed well, but I'd like to see someone try to direct an orangutan into a straight drama. "Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own..."

With Nine not doing as well as it could and Harvey Weinstein feeling the financial pressure even more, I've no desire to add to anyone's grief. But from a sporting perspective I'm wondering if anyone besides myself is perturbed in the slightest that Mo'Nique and Christoph Waltz, portrayers of a gruesome twosome in Precious and Inglourious Basterds respectively, have been so relentlessly predicted to win Best Suppporting Oscars?

Because so many pundits and critics groups have predicted both to win, I would love to see one or both apple carts overturned. Just for the pleasure of seeing certain people shout "no!...no!".

The Gold Derby Buzzmeter has been updated and Avatar got a big bump. It's still trailing Up in the Air, but only by a couple votes. Invictus is seen as a Best Picture hopeful?

The trailer for James Mangold's Knight and Day (20th Century Fox, 7.2.10) suggests it may be the only formulaic throw-away movie of Tom Cruise's career.

Which isn't to suggest that it is that. Trailer always accentuate the most stupidly appealing aspects of any film, etc. It's just that Cruise -- think about it -- has one of the best track records of all time in terms of almost making quality-level, or at least quality-aspriring, films. (What's his all-time worst? Far and Away? Days of Thunder? Cocktail?) And he's been maintaining this brand for 30 years now. He's never really made...Read More

In all modesty, I would like to believe that my 2009 war against the Blu-ray grain monks may have been...well, at least a significant anecdotal factor in the evolution of industry thinking about how to wisely master Blu-rays of classic films. I ranted about this over and over, but the best-written column article on the subject, called "Damn Sand," ran on 2.28.09. I am genuinely proud of how I put the case.

And here it is again, the second 2009 looking-back post for the purpose of filling column inches as everyone kicks back and...Read More

Since I have little else to write about in these late December doldrums, I'm going to re-run some of HE's 2009 highlights over the next couple of days. And one piece I'm especially proud of is the slapdown I gave to director William Friedkin and his "high-contrasty, snow-grained, color-bleeding, verging-on-monochrome" Blu-ray of The French Connection that came out last February.

This Blu-ray disc was, no exaggeration, the most offensive act of corporately-sanctioned vandalism to happen to a classic film in motion-picture history, and I'm thinking it can't hurt to give Friedkin another couple of...Read More

MCN's Michael Wilmington has assembled a somewhat lengthy but well-chosen list of 2009 DVDs that he considers the year's 21 best -- most of which I agree with. Wings of Desire, Z, Do The Right Thing, North by Northwest, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Wizard of Oz...the usual-usuals.

But surely a key value in determining "best" in this context alludes to high-end appearance. Wilmington should be talking about best looking, best mastered, best restored, etc. But he barely mentions this, focusing instead on the lasting long-view film-bum value of the movies themselves. Which you can get from any greatest-flicks-of-all-time...Read More

"If we can't catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn't check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, and whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list -- who can we catch?" -- from a 12.29 Maureen Dowd column in the N.Y. Times.

Indeed -- you'd think that someone in airline security.that day would...Read More

An HE correspondent says he's been "getting reports from theatre managers that many people are choosing to see Sherlock Holmes only after finding Avatar to be sold out." How would Holmes be doing on its own, without the Avatar feed-through? I wonder. Avatar pays off -- Holmes is a burn.

Avatar grossed $19.4 million yesterday (Monday, 12.28) for a cume of $232 million. It made $16 million last Monday. Exceptional, phenomenal, historic.

We all know about the supposed relationship between box-office earnings and being nominated for Best Picture (i.e., not enough dough = forget it), but Pete Hammond has amended this thinking in a passage from his 12.28 Envelope/Notes on a Season column.

Director-screenwriter Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Gods and Monsters), who co-produced last year's Academy Awards show, tells Hammond that "voters are more understanding" when it comes to low-earners like The Hurt Locker.

Kathryn Bigelow's film cost $11 million to make and has taken in a bit more than $12 million, but "I think the Academy is a lot more likely to...Read More

In a 12.28 piece that attempts to explain the low-tech tabulating process that determines Oscar nominations, The Wrap's Steve Pond says the following about the Best Picture nomination process: "You're listing 10 films on your ballot, but you're only actually voting for one. Your ballot gives you a single vote, which goes to a single film. And if a movie's not ranked number one on somebody's ballot, it's out."

Pond also points out that "the magic number for a Best Picture nomination is 501," based on (a) the goal of 10 nominations, (b) having started with 5,500 Best Picture ballots and (c)...Read More

On page 84 of Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 1.12.10), author Peter Biskind summarizes Beatty's thinking about the character who eventually became George Roundy, the scampy hairdresser in Shampoo.

Freudian analyses had a certain currency in the '60s and '70s, and, as Beatty puts it, "I wanted to challenge the fashionable assumption that the proverbial Don Juan figure is expressing self-hatred, self-love, hatred of women, homosexuality, sadism, masochism, a wish for eternal life and so on."

"Beatty never thought about himself as someone who was inordinately interested in sex, obsessed or addicted to it in any way,"...Read More

The holiday doldrums -- 12.25 through 1.2.10 -- are upon us now. This may seem like a good thing from an impulsive-adventure perspective (read two books, drive to Vermont, fly to London, walk into the city), but I was outside this morning and it's 22 degrees (and feels like 4, according to weather.com). So I suppose I'll go with the reading. If only Criterion's Che Bluray was obtainable...

Marshall Fine's Best of the Decade list reminded me of two I should included in my own -- Pedro Almodovar's Volver and Errol Morris' The Fog of War. Wait a minute...Kill Bill? And The Hours?

I made a mistake running my Best of the Decade piece back in early October. It got 109 comments, but I still don't think many people were thinking sum-ups at the time. Since then every critic and blogger on the planet has posted a best-of-decader, of course. So I may as well post mine again only with four extra titles [UPDATED] -- James Cameron's Avatar, Michael Mann's Collateral, Pedro Almodovar's Volver and Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man -- for a total of 42. The top ten are obviously indicated so if that's what you're looking for...

In order of preference:...Read More

Besides being a great headline in the tradition of 'Headless Body in Topless bar,' it also turns down the terror factor by making the underwear bomber a figure of foolery.

Who in their right minds would want to watch, let alone Netflix or buy, the forthcoming Bluray of John Wayne's The Green Berets when it streets on 1.10.10? The only star-fortified Hollywood film that was wholly supportive of the U.S.war effort in Vietnam, The Green Berets (directed by Wayne and released in July 1968) became legendary for its ludicrousness -- a turgid propaganda film that screamed "reality detachment!" at every turn.

It's set in Vietnam, of course, and is basically about a special Green Beret mission to capture a North Vietnamese general. (Or so I...Read More

Stuart Heisler's I Died A Thousand Times, a 1955 remake of Raoul Walsh's High Sierra, doesn't have much of a rep, but it has a great florid title. The forthcoming release of the DVD, in any event, triggered an idea for two lists -- movies with great-sounding titles that made for difficult viewing, and excellent or very good films that were stuck with lousy titles.

Most good films are released with decent appealing titles. But every so often a title will come along that's exceptionally stirring, flat, dull, catchy or off-putting, and which also argues with...Read More

After complaining about the murky image projected during last evening's Sherlock Homes showing at the Regal Union Square Stadium 14, HE reader Gordon 27 replied that the RUSS "is the worst chain theater in NYC...everything they do nickel-and-dimes their customers, right down to the weak lamps in the projectors." He acknowledged that "every chain does this to some extent" but claimed that the RUSS is far guiltier than most.

Does this plex deserve the ugly crown? Opinions, refutations, further indictments, etc.

The RUSS is probably the worst I've ever been to in my life...Read More

I still haven't seen Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, even though it opened on 12.25 in NY and LA. I was invited to some LA press screenings in November but none at all in NYC. I guess I'll just pay to see it sometime this week unless, of course, someone would like to send me a screener.

Johnny Depp and Jude Law, in any event, have released the following statements regarding their involvement the film (i.e., having been hired to complete Heath Ledger's role in the wake of his death in early '08).

Deep: "Maestro Gilliam has made a sublime film....Read More

I've finally received a copy of Peter Biskind's Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 1.12.10), and have spent a total of 20 minutes of dancing through it and dwelling here and there. It's a pleasure to read just for the quality of the writing and editing. Well-shaped sentences that are no longer than they need to be, and paragraphs that hatch and develop a thought or a mood or a theme, sometimes all three at the same time.

And I can tell right away that it's been written as a kind of tragedy,...Read More

There's one aspect of Sherlock Holmes that deserves favor. Robert Downey, Jr. has assembled a Holmes personality apparently based on his own personal situation as he made the film -- a bright and gifted fellow who's "not there" in a kind of Dylanesque sense, and therefore has a certain something or other that holds the tiller steady. A certain fuck-all integrity? Determination? A willingness to succumb to corporate corruption?

The brightness levels in this shot of Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes weren't evident at tonight's 7 pm screening at the Regal Union Square...

What kind of animals throw loose trash on the street? People don't do this in Santa Monica or Brentwood or Silver Lake. Or in North Bergen, for that matter. Or in Astoria or Spaha (i.e., Spanish Harlem). And East Williamsburg is thought to be a neighborhood on the upswing.

Near corner of Montrose and Bushwick -- Sunday, 12.27, 4:05 pm.

Poor Nine came in eighth place this weekend, beaten by The Princess and the Frog but ahead of Did You Hear About The Morgans? It made $5,544,000, or an average of $3926 at 1412 situations. And this just doesn't seem right. It feels like an overly harsh verdict.

a Criterion Bluray frame-grab of Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Felllini's 8 1/2

Nine is a reasonably decent, sometimes better-than-decent musical with its own scheme and attitude and (for me) a pair of ace performances from Daniel Day Lewis and Marion Cotillard. It's not Cabaret, Sweet Charity...Read More

I missed Steven Mikulan's 12.23 Wrap story that claimed the evil Polish dwarf is almost out of the woods regarding that 31 year-old unlawful sexual conduct beef. So much anti-Polanski hate and vitriol was expended on this site last September by the pitchforkers that it seems appropriate to address it again before the year concludes. Nothing is over until it's over, of course, but if I were a pitchforker...

"The most important news about Roman Polanski has been nearly lost in the swirl of stories this week about the state appellate court's rejection of his motion to dismiss the 32-year-old...Read More

"Hugely expensive, extravagant, lavish and a clear statement of what's possible when great vision is united with the means to deliver the unprecedented, Avatar would never exist without capitalism. James Cameron has not merely innovated or improved -- he invents to create something wonderful and new. In other words, he has done exactly what the high priests of capitalism -- from Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton to Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan -- have always preached: allow daring, vision and capital to find one other and the extraordinary can emerge" -- AbilTo CEO (and non-film critic) Michael B. Laskoff writing for...

Soft non-conclusive reading -- that's what you'd have to call Peter Wilson's profile of artist and Nowhere Boy director Sam Wood in The Australian. All of the basic story points, and no hint about how Nowhere Boy has actually settled in thus far. I have no idea what Wilson means when he calls it "a well told, conventional treatment of a story that has an important part to play in Western popular culture," but I can put it more bluntly, if you care to read.

Sam Taylor Wood

Nowhere Boy, I wrote on 10.29.29, is...Read More

In a piece that summarizes James Cameron's Project 880, the 113-page scriptment that eventually became Avatar, CHUD's Devin Faraci points out a difference in a certain scene that really got me. I'd skimmed through an ADD version of the scriptment two or three years ago, but I'd forgotten this.

In Avatar, the paraplegic Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) isn't just excited by having the use of his legs again when he first awakens inside his new ten-foot-tall blue Avatar body -- he's exalted and blissed out, and impulsively bolts the laboratory so he can run...Read More

Because a team of airport screeners failed to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from carrying an explosive substance called PETN (i.e., pentaerythritol) aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, the Transportation Security Administration is determined to make worldwide travellers suffer delays worse than ever before. TSA officials are reactive bureaucratic ninnies whose jobs are not precisely dependent on keeping terrorists off airplanes as much as putting on a show of attempting to do same. It's all theatre and all tedium. I can honestly say this evening that I fear the TSA more than I do Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Abby Cornish delivers a vibrant, full-hearted performance in Jane Campion's Bright Star, but Greig Fraser's cinematography is arguably the film's most transporting aspect. Which makes it seem odd if not strange that Sony has chosen to bypass releasing a Bluray version on 1.26.10, when the DVD is due for release.

Abby Cornish in Jane Campion's Bright Star.

What could the thinking possibly be in deciding against a Bluray release? It costs $100 grand, I'm told, to properly master a film in the high-def format but if any film warrants this treatment in terms of visual rewards...Read More

"Due to the surprising performance of Avatar and Sherlock Holmes, the total domestic haul for the 12.25 to 12.27 weekend could surpass the record-breaking weekend of July 18-20, 2008, which saw the release of The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia!," reports boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino.

Weekend grosses could exceed $270 million by Sunday night, which would easily top the $260 million earned over the Knight/Momma weekend.

By Sunday night Avatar will have made $72 million for the weekend and $209,268,053 since it opened on 12.18. The mostly loathsome and despicable Sherlock Holmes will have pulled in $70,000,000 (two million less than...Read More

Alleged conman Simon Monjack, who's come to be widely despised in the wake of the recent death of his late wife, Brittany Murphy, has spoken to the Daily Mail's Paul Bracchi in a 12.26 article, which has been echoed/reflected in a 12.26 Daily News piece by Soraya Roberts.

Simon Monjack

Both articles use George Hickenlooper's HE-posted opinion about Monjack (which appeared on 12.20) as a prosecutorial centerpiece.

People everywhere have been guessing/presuming that Murphy's death was somehow Monjack's fault. The thinking as I understand it is that no good can come of a marriage...Read More

Listen to this "Old Jews Telling Jokes" guy, Larry Greenfield, take a whack at the old lumberjack joke, and then watch Warren Beatty tell it in Reds. A joke is the most delicate thing in the world. If you don't tell it exactly right (and I mean with exactly the right attitude and timing and pace), it dies.

It's nice to hear admiring words about Up In The Air from Indiewire's Reel Geezers. Because supportive words about Jason Reitman's film have been scarce in my circle over the last ten or twelve days. It's locked, of course, for a Best Picture nomination and there's also the 90%/91% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but in conversation after conversation I've been hearing "overhyped," "good but not great," "won't win Best Picture Oscar" and so on.

I've already mentioned the Avatar-rising-as-UITA-falls equation, but Read More

Can you imagine being on your death bed, as legendary critic and essayist Robin Wood was recently, and being suddenly seized by an urge to name your top all-time films, and as a friend sits down by the bed with a pad and pen, you sit up slightly and say, for openers, "Top of the list...my all-time favorite...Rio Bravo."

What is that? You're about to leave the earth and meet the monolith and the greatest film you can think of is Rio Bravo? A zero-story-tension hangin' movie that constantly subjects viewers to screechy-voiced Walter Brennan,...Read More

A very comforting Christmas Eve service at All Souls church on Lexington and 79th -- 12.24.09, 7:25 pm. The choir, I'm told, is composed of professionals, and their singing was awesome. It was like watching a Christmas pagent produced by Broadway's finest. Only in New York.

The Sherlock Homes of literary legend "has never been much for physical violence," says NY Times critic A.O. Scott. And Guy Ritchie, director of the corporation-serving, would-be tentpole movie Sherlock Homes, has never been much for "intelligence [in terms of his] interests or attributes as a filmmaker." But here the twain meets...synergy!

"The chief innovation of this new, franchise-ready incarnation is that Robert Downey, Jr.'s Holmes is, in addition to everything else, a brawling, head-butting, fist-in-the-gut, knee-in-the-groin action hero. In this vein Sherlock Holmes is kind of cool" and "intermittently diverting...but that's not really a compliment.

"The visual style -- a smoky,...Read More

HE is wishing everyone a serene and soothing time on this, the ninth Christmas Day of the 21st Century. Not that I really buy into the holiday. Okay, I do buy into it in a sort of in-and-out, half-assed way. I just don't like all the stores being closed and that On The Beach absence-of-humanity feeling on the streets. And all that sitting around and binge-eating and sipping of fatty holiday drinks.

Dylan and Jett Wells -- 12.24.09, 9:55 pm.

The boys and I are attending a gathering today at a good friend's home. Sit back,...Read More

There's no title at the beginning of Avatar, and no opening credits either. It's just the Fox logo and fanfare and it starts, wham -- an overheard moving shot of the Pandoran forest as Jake's murmured narration kicks in, and we're off to the races.

Films occasionally begin without a title sequence but not many. No titles is a way of saying to the audience. "You're in for something ambitious, no fooling around...get ready." Somehow it wouldn't play if Paul Blart Mall Cop or Fifty First Dates didn't have them. It has be a major-type film from a name director or the...Read More

This was one of the best-tasting glasses of beer I've had in my life. Ice cold with a kind of cidery texture, topped with a perfect lemon wedge. One cool sip and I was saying "happy holidays!" I had it yesterday at Fanelli's on Prince, across from the Mercer Hotel.

Sincere congrats to Karina Longworth for landing the film editor gig (i.e., Scott Foundas's recently vacated post) at the LA Weekly. She's sharp and tough and exceptionally bright, and highly respected all around. A bit of a dweeby monk-type, perhaps, but that's what many film critics are like. She'll never gush over a film for grossly emotional reasons (i.e., not the kind that popcorn-munchers might recognize), and she'll always have that slightly detached, hip-scrutiny thing going on with the thick horn-rimmed glasses and all. Longworth is a very cool brand.

Karina Longworth

What's with the morning-after revenue reporting at boxofficemojo.com? It's nearly 1 pm in Manhattan and Avatar's Wednesday numbers still aren't up? It made another $16 million on Tuesday, hitting $109 million total. Jett and I attended last night's 6 pm show at the AMC Lincoln Square -- we wanted to catch the monster-screen "real" IMAX 3D version -- and it was packed solid. The lines inside the plex were ridiculous. So where are the Wednesday numbers? I'm guessing...what, another $15 or $16 million?

We sat in the third row, and the film looked much better than the "fake" IMAX version at the...Read More

What delight and joy in reading the Auburn Plainsman's Ben Bartley, some red-white-and-blue type guy from Texas who's fuming that such an anti-corporate, anti-arrogant, anti-Bush legacy, pro-eco, pro-nativist pantheist tract is raking it in big-time and spreading the myth everywhere, and there's nothing this guy can do about it. Hah! Eat shit, Christian asshole!

In its own primitive popcorn way Avatar is the craftiest and most persuasive left-wing, fuck-Fox-news political film to come along in ages. Happy holidays indeed.

In a wartime letter to his parents in 1943 excerpted in the current Esquire, Lt. John F. Kennedy referred to an NCO "who always seemed to have the feeling that something was going to happen to him...and when fellows get this feeling, strangely enough, they always seem to be the ones who do get it."

As soon as I read this I thought of film distributors possessed by this very same attitude when it comes to opening certain films. They know the flick in question is doomed, and everything in their marketing effort seems to acknowledge this. I sensed this attitude from...Read More

"When you buy a car, you ask your gearhead friends what they think -- and the same should hold for movies," says alibi.com's Devin O'Leary. Then he makes the leap that the best movie-gearhead friends you can find these days are professional film critics. I know some folks who would dispute that.

"Film critics aren't just opinionated gas bags (not all of us, anyway)," he continues. "A good film critic is one who knows film history, understands how films are made, has memorized the resumes of everyone involved and can play a wicked game of 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.' A...Read More

The 12.18 Gurus chart had Notes on a Season's Pete Hammond and Awards Daily's Sasha Stone joining MCN's David Poland in predicting Avatar to win Best Picture with Indiewire's Anne Thompson, USA Today's Anthony Breznican and Hitfix's Gregory Ellwood putting it in their #2 slots. But in today's chart (12.23) Thompson and Ellwood have bumped Avatar up to #1, and In Contention's Kris Tapley and USA Today's Suzie Woz are voting the same way -- a total of seven Gurus on the Avatar-to-win team. The latest Gold Derby Buzzmeter Best Picture poll still isn't up, but the last I heard it...Read More

In Paul Byrne's 12.24 review of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes,which he calls "a travesty," he says the following: (a) "Robert Downey, Jr.'s accent is 'flawless,' according to Ritchie, which either means he's deaf or I'm the Prince of Wales," and (b) "This is Holmes the romp -- overplayed, overwritten and overwrought, a Sherlock for the age of the easily distracted."

Jude Law, Robert Downey, Jr.

Hollywood & Fine's Marshall Fine says, "There are plenty of reasons to dislike Guy Ritchie's post-modern take on Sherlock Holmes, but here's the main one:

"Unlike most heroes of American detective...Read More

Obviously high-quality clips....cool. Nicely paced and cut, but you'd think 2009 was mostly about wow intensity rather than stories, themes, emotions and mood poems of one kind or another. It makes you simultaneously think "yeah, 2009 did have several good films" and "wait a minute, this isn't telling the real truth about what happened." Did they have to use that same old Hurt Locker clip with the bomb exploding and the gravel rising up? What's the thing with the alligator in the mud pit?

The Wrap's Sharon Waxman reported yesterday that in the wake of Avatar's huge success, which is partly attributable to audiences being delighted with the 3D aspect, Robin Hood director Ridley Scott "is breathing down the neck of executives at Universal to get them to approve making a 3D version of his new $200 million epic," at the cost of an extra $7 or $8 million.

She also writes that "a deal is in the works with Studio Canal to fast-track construct a 3D version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and that George Lucas is exploring a 3D version of Star...Read More

Up In The Air opens wide today. Today's tracking says definite interest is strongest among over-25 males (35) and over-25 females (32). Unaided awareness is also highest among these two groups. The across-the-board first choice number is only 4, however. That doesn't calculate...or does it? It's been playing limited and has gotten great reviews that have mentioned its Best Picture potential. And everyone is cool with George Clooney, and is open to a good adult-level movie with heart and smarts.

What's behind the limited enthusiasm then? All I can figure is that the word is out on that final ten minutes, which...Read More

The fact that Precious is currently topping the Village Voice reader poll as the worst film of 2009 is clearly a major cultural bellwether with a thundering total of...6 votes. And yet hundreds have voted for the Best Picture winner so far (i.e., The Hurt Locker) and 69 have voted for Mo'Nique as Best Supporting Actress. This tells us that (a) most people feel it's impolite to think or talk "negatively" so they refrain from doing so, and (b) once a presumed winner has been planted in people's minds, they tend to sheep-vote their agreement.

The latest Envelope Buzzmeter predictions (voted on but not yet posted) have three Oscar-race bigmouths -- myself, Notes on a Season's Pete Hammond and Awards Daily's Sasha Stone -- asserting that James Cameron's Avatar will most likely win the Best Picture Oscar. Consult the latest (12.18) Gurus of Gold chart and you've got Hammond and Stone saying this again along with MCN's David Poland.

So that's four friends-of-Avatar along with three others -- Indiewire's Anne Thompson, USA Today's Anthony Breznican and Hitfix's Gregory Ellwood -- putting it in their #2 slots. That means they suspect it may be the front-runner but...Read More

When I called the first Sex in the City movie "a Taliban recruitment film," I was referring to a notion that young Arab men might be so repelled by its celebration of putrid 21st Century chick culture that joining the Taliban might seem freshly appealing. How curious, then, that a portion of the upcoming Sex and City 2 (opening 5.28.10) has triggered Taliban-ish associations by having the girls visit Morocco, an Arab-Muslim nation teeming with keffiyahs and camels and sand dunes.

It's almost as...Read More

On 12.21 I ran some comments from reputably knowledgable tech guy Al Magliochetti (a friend vouches for him) about IMAX 3D showings of Avatar at Universal Citywalk being slightly out-of-synch. He wrote me again this evening with an update. With a shocker, actually.

"IMAX called me today and said that apparently all of the IMAX digital projectors routinely show 3D films approximately 1/3rd frame out of sync," Magliochetti claims, "because the projectors are obsolete and can't keep up with film technology, and James Cameron didn't know this when Avatar was planned.

And yet the sync/collapse problem Magliochetti was seeing before...Read More

A Movie City News chart says The Hurt Locker has now been named Best Picture by ten film critic groups (Austin, Association of Women Film Journalists, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, LAFCA, NYFCC, Oklahoma and San Francisco Film Critics) and Kathryn Bigelow has been handed the Best Director award 13 times -- from the same orgs plus the Oklahoma, Toronto and Washington, DC crix.

The making and promotion of Che, says director Steven Soderbergh, "made me consider the issue of whether movies matter or not anymore...at all. I think there was a period when they did matter, culturally. I don't think they do anymore. So that added to this sense of 'what was the point' of eight years of work when movies have become so...disposable, and don't seem to be...there aren't many opportunities for them to be taken seriously the way they were in the late 60's and 70's here in the United States."

"I guess the point of some art...Read More

Gerritt Graham's cameo performance as Beef, a coke-snorting rock singer, in Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974) was perhaps the first out-there parody of a rock-industry cliche -- i.e.,, the over-indulged infantile celebrity. Graham was hilarious, and was just as remarkable five years later in Robert Zemeckis's Used Cars. It would be nice if the Paradise Bluray, currently available in France, would be released domestically.

Film critic Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films was the second in-depth analysis of the films of Alfred Hitchcock that I read as a young lad. (The first was the legendary Hitchcock/Truffaut.) This brave, passionate essay went out on a limb by taking seriously the films of a director who'd been regarded his whole career as a kind of droll comedian. Wood instead saw a series of films rich with perception, shadows, moral ambiguity and profound echoes.

Wood was a huge influence; he'll always be in my pantheon of critics. He died last Friday,...

So where are Tuesday's Avatar box-office figures? It's 7:40 pm eastern...hubba-hubba. Yesterday's surprising $16,385,820 -- unusually strong for a Monday -- indicated something extraordinary going on. It was at $93,411,301 last night after four days. It's almost certainly topped $100 million by this evening.

I've been dwelling more and more on Barack Obama's failure to stand up and be the new FDR or Lyndon Johnson, and yet I felt a surge of hopeful-positive when I saw him on the tube yesterday. Illogical, but my heart wanted what it wanted. Our natural inclination is to give people who've let us down another chance. It's built into our genes to reconsider, and we're taught to do this by the metaphor of waking up every day and taking a shower, washing off the crud. Don't be foolish and watch out for the b.s., but always refresh the page.

Which is...Read More

I haven't seen a film with a mostly African-American audience in my entire life -- not once. That's partly because I prefer seeing films in the company of elite film-Catholics like myself in my neck of the woods (and preferably in private screening rooms), partly because I don't like seeing mass-market movies with regular ticket-buyers because they make too much noise with candy wrappers and go to the bathroom too much and bring their noisy-ass kids, and partly because of the legend of urban audiences always talking back to the screen is still with us, whatever the truth of it, and I won't...Read More

A guy who apparently doesn't know his way around asked this morning if I've ever seen a DVD of Mark Rydell's The Fox (1967). I told him it's available through Warner Achives. The fact that it's a mediocre film, I explained, is why it hasn't been available for so many years. He wanted to see it anyway, primarily, I suspect, because of the film's carnality, which is spare but intense by way of Anne Heywood. One look at this clip and you'll be dissuaded for life.

In two posts over the last six days the Digital Bits guys have listed several titles (some new, some classic) being prepared for 2010 Bluray release: Fox's Alien Anthology, Collateral, the Indiana Jones trilogy (please...not Crystal Skull!), The Maltese Falcon, a Dr. Zhivago 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition, Spielberg's War of the Worlds and Saving Private Ryan, a bunch of Clint Eastwood movies (Where Eagles Dare, etc.) and three titles that aren't necessarily 2010-ers but may be released the following year or in 2012: Ben-Hur, The African Queen, Lawrence of Arabia.

My personal requests focus on...Read More

In the view of ThePunch.com's Sam Cleveland, 2009 was "the year the 'chick flick' smartened up...rounded female characters showed up in everything from straight-out Oscar bait to rock 'em-sock 'em horror flicks, while some of the best films of the year centered around women and their distinct set of needs and challenges." The September Issue, 500 Days of Summer, Drag Me to Hell, Whip it, Coco Before Chanel, Julia and Julie, An Education, etc.

IFC.com's Stephen Saito has reviewed his favorite critical dust-ups of 2009. Some...er, most of these were about a critic or a columnist getting personal in some quirky-ass way. Anne Thompson vs. Kent Jones. Glenn Kenny vs. Joe Swanberg. John Anderson vs. Jeff Dowd. My own Oxford Film Festival episode plus the pear-cake-wrapped-in-tin-foil clash in the West Village. Roger Ebert vs. Armond White. NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis' f-bomb-filled interview with Jezebel on the state of women in Hollywood. And last but not least, MSN's James Rocchi on his conflicted Couples Retreat junket experience.

"The geniuses at the Universal Citywalk IMAX theater appear to be screwing up the projection for Avatar in a major way," tech guy Al Magliochetti has allegedly twittered. (Likely but unverified -- I've been trying to find his Twitter handle.) "I'm trying to get them to fix it but until I post otherwise I would suggest seeing Avatar elsewhere."

"A 3D frame is made up of two images, a left and a right," he explains. "Polarizing filters are used on the projector along with convergence lenses to merge both images into one and then filter it so that each of the two images...Read More

L.A. Times/Envelope/Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond is flatly declaring that Avatar is now the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar. Because it's "big" and grand and dazzling and selling tickets big-time, and because there was a effusive response from the mostly older membership when Avatar screened at the Academy theatre last Sunday night.

50-plus and retirement-age types were thought to be a hindrance to Avatar's chances of nabbing the big prize with their reputed tendency to under-value CG-driven spectacles, but Hammond is apparently persuaded that the gray geezer contingent is ready and willing to support James Cameron's fantasy epic.

There's a primitive, slap-dash, graphic-novel feeling to the title art in this Runaways teaser. Along with the theme about overcoming sexism in the '70s rock-music world, of course. Passable but you want more.

The New Daughter, a horror film toplining Kevin Costner, has quietly snuck into L.A. and possibly other markets this past weekend, with no advertising or reviews to speak of.

Kevin Costner in The New Daughter

The film is directed by Luis Berdejo, who wrote the acclaimed Spanish horror film [REC] that was remade for America as Quarantine, and it costars Ivana Baquero (Pan's Labyrinth).

HE reader Marc Edward Heuck, who alerted me, doesn't claim to "know too much about the plot" but says it's "something about a widower moving his two kids to a...Read More

Having performed much better yesterday than expected, Avatar raised its final weekend tally to $77.3 million rather than the previously estimated $73 million. James Cameron's film has therefore squeaked by the $77.2 million earned by Will Smith's I Am Legend and taken the all-time record for a December opening. Variety's Pamela McClintock reports that Avatar "dropped a mere 3% from Saturday to Sunday, a rare feat, and a sign that the 3D sci-fi fantasy is already benefiting from powerful word-of-mouth."

I said to a friend an hour ago that I've never enjoyed the Christmas holidays because everything slows or shuts down, and because there doesn't seem to be anything to do except catch up on reading or roam around in the slush or hang out in coffee shops or go to book stores or drink Irish coffees and rum egg nog, etc. I write all the time but still, the holidays are dreary and boring for the most part.

To which he said that Xmas holiday cheer has always seemed forced to him, and that he finds it analogous to posing for a...Read More

"I just got back from an aborted IMAX 3D showing of Avatar at the Showcase Cinemas in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Apparently the prime-time showing last night also conked out -- an issue in which the sound drops out and then the whole movie shuts down. Showcase guys are claiming that some showings have gone fine, but their prime evening showings on Saturday and Sunday both bit the dust. I'm PISSED because I had reserved prime seats, and hell if I can swing getting back to the theater over the next couple of weeks." -- e-mail from HE reader Doug H., sent five...

Three weeks ago James Toback told me that Peter Biskind's long-gestating Warren Beatty biography, called Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 1.12.10), had been sent to this and that party. I felt hurt, left out. I've known Biskind for years and he knows of my interest in the book (being something of a Beatty-ologist myself), so I figured I'd be sent a copy also. Has anyone read it, written about it...anything?

Biskind's Beatty bio (due 1.12.10); Peter Biskind.

"You know, everybody's shaking their heads [about Brittany Murphy] and going 'drugs,' of course. I don't know what was happening on the last movie. I know that, you know, she seemed to go through a change, you know, on Clueless. Maybe she felt like she was not the skinny pretty girl...you know?

"And then the next few movies she was...you know, thinner, blonde, you know, at MTV Awards and all sorts of things like that, and going out with Eminem and Ashton Kutcher, and, you know, suddenly got more into that whole glamorous scene. I think she felt the pressure to become...Read More

On 12.14 I ran a short story on the Weinstein Co.'s Nine luncheon at Per Se, along with some photos. I called it "Nine Is A Ten" but I didn't explain that the line was a mock-quote fed to me by Forbes.com's Bill McCuddy, who was joking that CNN's Larry King (who was also at the luncheon) would eventually pass this quote along to Weinstein Co. publicists about Rob Marshall's film. Sure enough, the quote appeared in Friday's N.Y. Times. McCuddy nailed it before King said it -- brilliant.

Right away this photo of the late Brittany Murphy and screenwriter husband Simon Monjack (Factory Girl), taken a few weeks ago, tells you something's wrong. He looks relatively young (in his mid 30s?) but is obviously a food monster. (He looks like Oliver Platt on a binge.) Why, you ask, would Murphy have gotten a lip job at the tender age of 32? Why would they pose for PDA photos at LAX? You can feel the ick.

Simon Monjack, Brittany Murphy -- photo allegedly taken in November 2009.

Here's the AP...Read More

Box Office magazine's Phil Contrino has reported some specifics about how much the blizzard may have dented Avatar's box-office in New York, Washington, DC and Philadelphia, where the show was especially heavy. "Grosses in New York dropped 18 percent from Friday to Saturday, Philadelphia was down 57 percent, Washington, DC fell 75 percent and Baltimore dipped 86 percent," Contrino reports.

Contrino also quotes Fox senior vp Chris Aronson saying that Avatar's blizzard hit was "probably somewhere between $1 and $2 million." Naaah -- more like $3 or $4 million.

"Brittany Murphy, 32, died early this morning after she went into full cardiac arrest and could not be revived, multiple sources tell TMZ," the story says. A terrible thing. Ghastly, sad...like a plot turn in a Brett Easton Ellis novel.

Brittany Murphy (1977 -- 2009)

Good God...I met Brittany four or five years ago at Chris McGurk's house, at one of his year-end outdoor parties. "Hello...how are you?" she said as we stood by a tiki torch near the backyard pool.

"A 911 call was reportedly made at 8:00 am from a home in Los...Read More

One of my favorite "no laugh funny" SNL skits in a long time. Because the attitude is so '50s cultish, I suppose, and indifferent to the fact that 98% of SNL viewers don't know and couldn't care less who Vincent Price, Ed Wood, Katherine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe or James Dean were, and therefore couldn't possibly get the no-laugh jokes. I didn't even chuckle at the humor -- I just sat there stone-faced -- but I thought it was funny.

And I don't...Read More

If it wasn't for the big east-coast blizzard Avatar's weekend tally would have nudged $80 million, I believe. Or at least made it to $77 or $78 million. Instead the projected domestic figure is $73 million, which is fine. Variety's Pamela McLintock is reporting that James Cameron's film has grossed $220 million to $230 million worldwide. The domestic tally was the second-best December opening. McLintock notes that "a film normally can expect to gross three times its opening weekend, but year-end films can see multiples of four and five." Which suggests Avatar could end up in the mid $200 million range or...Read More

Over the last twelve months 20 winning films opened in theatres, and I'm not sure if people understand this as fully as they could or should. It wasn't a top-ten year but double that. But yet only three on this list -- Avatar, Up In The Air and Public Enemies -- have done well at the box-office while the others have had to scramble.

On 11.29 I posted a 2009 sum-up that focused on 13 or 14 peak pleasure films -- each with some kind of striking, original-seeming quality and made from deep-seated, rock-solid material -- plus four others came close...Read More

I don't believe in whining but yesterday's Mo'Nique thread ("Keep It Up") was one of the ugliest of the year for all the name-calling and rhetorical mud-slinging, much of it directed as yours truly. All day I was ducking spears thrown by a pack of hysterical p.c. queens for two perceived sins. One, my decision to use the term "lard ass." And two, observing that if Precious was about some scurvy white crackers in Alabama or Mississippi it wouldn't have gotten the traction that the actual Precious has because it wouldn't have the liberal-white-guilt element propelling it along.

I realize that...Read More

As I pointed out in my 12.11 piece called "Not Right-Wing Friendly," And The Winner Is blogger Scott Feinberg has stated in a 12.20 posting that "there is a strong political undertone to Avatar, both in words and images." Feinberg doesn't give it a name (Avatar is ardently left-leaning) but he does a fine job of describing the currents.

"I have little doubt that the film's central conflict is actually a metaphor for America's two ongoing wars in the Middle East," he writes. "The humans plan to invade Pandora in order to gain access its large reserves of a...Read More

"Something's not right here," Bill Moyers began at the top of a 12.18 broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal. "One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you're about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that's just dandy with the White House.

"Truth is, our capitol's being looted, Republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism...Read More

I missed the 12.17 news of Jennifer Jones' passing at age 90. The only film in which her aura came through for me was in Portrait of Jennie ('48) and, to a slightly lesser extent, Since You Went Away ('44) and A Farewell To Arms ('57). Everyone thought she was excessive in Duel in the Sun ('46) but then that whole film was excessive.

Precious costar Mo'Nique, whose performance has been way over-praised but has nonetheless locked an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, is continuing to give Academy members reasons not to vote for her. The latest boner, as reported by Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil, is her decision not to accept her Best Supporting Actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle on 1.11.

A rep explains that "Mo'Nique and her family will just be returning from vacation that very night" [presumably she means Monday, 1.11] and that "she begins taping her TV show in the a.m....Read More

Take this, Mr. Beaks and Devin Faraci and all the rest of the anti-Avatar fanboys who've dropped to their knees in praise of all kinds of fanboy-cathedral movies in the past, including the tedious, exhausting, mostly unwatchable Lord of the Rings trilogy:

"Like people who can't dig the Arcade Fire's album Funeral, I'd find it hard to respect anyone who can't enjoy this bloody masterpiece. I think it's so universal, so human, and so ridiculously beautiful that it reveals a pretty serious character deficiency to not be able to go with it. Saying the story is predictable is like saying...Read More

The curious carpings of Mr. Beaks, Devin Faraci and others aside, Avatar is here and surging upward with fairly big numbers for the weekend (over $70 million) and everyone now realizing that the Best Picture race is down to Avatar vs. Up In The Air vs. The Hurt Locker. Cameron's story is familiar, but it works. It lays out the elements, marshalls its forces, turns up the heat and pays off big-time in the fourth act.

I was among paying customers yesterday at the AMC 34th and I could feel the film kicking in and holding on, and now the word is flash-flooding...Read More

HE's Moises Chiullan (a.k.a. Arthouse Cowboy) has posted a favorable review of Martin Scorsese's Shuttter Island. "The average viewer has become accustomed to focusing more on 'figuring out the twist' than actually watching the movie," he begins. "This is thanks to so many films of the last few decades hedging all their bets on one gimmicky little MacGuffin.

"Thankfully, Scorsese's new film keeps you too busy to get very distracted. It does involve a plot twist, but Shutter Island is much more invested in the series of bends in the road that get you there, and the picture is better for...Read More

I saw a fake IMAX presentation of Avatar late this afternoon at the AMC Leows 34th Street, and it played a nudge better than last week's initial exposure. In part because I was able to better assess and appreciate how the four-act structure works and how it all brilliantly pays off during the final half-hour.

The four acts can be summarized (spoiler whiners are advised to READ NO FURTHER) as (a) Jake Sully's introduction to the deal and the Na'vi reality -- i.e., the opportunity to serve as a military spy through his transformation into a Na'vi body and immersion into the Na'vi...Read More

The Punch.com's Sam Cleveland has delivered five reasons why James Cameron's Avatar might very well make its money back.

In a nutshell, it's because the mega-budget 3D sci-fi spectacle "has been designed with a sort of calculated universality" that "will play across almost all racial and cultural boundaries...there's no country on the globe that Avatar won't work in."

The bullet points:

(1) The US has a global image problem, and Avatar's "black and white depiction of primitively-equipped Na'vi good guys struggling against heavily armed US space soldiers -- all clenched teeth and good ol' boy attitude -- will play...Read More

I'm a week late to this, but Red Letter Media's multi-chaptered explanation about why The Phantom Menace sucks eternal dog balls is quite lucid and specific and well-ordered. Call it the final nail in the coffin of The Phantom Menace and particularly the reputation of George Lucas, as if this was necessary.

Quentin Tarantino was interviewed by Elvis Mitchell last night at the Museum of Modern Art's downstairs theatre following a screening of Inglourious Basterds. You could feel the worship in the room as Tarantino made his way down the aisle. He's as much of a celebrity as any big-name actor. Nobody is better at giving an audience a good time.

I was standing next to QT during the final few minutes of the film, and he was laughing and enjoying it like someone seeing it for the first...Read More

I don't agree with this Avatar pan by Nerve's Scott Von Doviak, but I laughed at the following line: "After spending a while in the aquarium-like world of Pandora, I started to feel like I was staring at the world's most expensive screensaver." Okay, perhaps the fact that I laughed means on some level that I did agree with Von Doviak. All right, maybe...in a kind of peripheral. don't-bug-me, having-too-good-a-time sense.

HE reader DeafBrownTrashPunk was initially surprised to find The Real Cancun included among Salon's Films of the Decade series, but it made sense to her after considering Michael Tully's explanation, to wit: Cancun isn't a great film but a "disturbingly relevant historical document" about the eventual fall of Western Civilization due...well, due to many things but at least partly to the pathetic nowhereness of 2003's wanker-class college youth. The film shows us scores of George Bushes-to-be having the time of their lives, and we all know where that leads.

"I remember how, as a young Muslim college student struggling to fit in...Read More

The enclosed comments are two or three days old, but it's somehow satisfying to hear Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt call LAFCA (i.e., the Los Angeles Film Critics Assocation) dweeby, off on their own beam, and "out of touch" because they ignored Avatar.

I was also amused to hear Honeycutt describe Seraphine's Yolande Moreau as "an actress nobody ever...

Firedog Lake's Jane Hamsher to drug-company lobbyist Lanny Davis on today's (12.17) Ed Show: "Which drug companies and health corporations are you speaking for when you tout this [de-balled health care] bill? Who's paying you to be here?" I couldn't put this up until I got home late tonight, but it's quite beautiful.

And good on Howard Dean for calling a spade a spade -- i.e., the de-balled health care bill will "put this country on a trajectory which is a disaster. This is an insurance company's...Read More

"One of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz. [And yet] few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children.

"Movies rarely carry us away; few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What's often missing is awe, something James Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood,...Read More

I still haven't seen the IMAX 3-D Avatar (20th Century Fox's press screenings only showed the regular-sized 3-D version) so last night I bought two tickets on Fandango to a 3:15 pm Friday show at Leows 34th Street. And they hit me for $16 or $17 bucks a pop. I was slightly trembling after the purchase. $32 or $34 dollars for a pair of tickets to a damn film?

I don't know if Hitfix's Drew McWeeny has reviewed Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes or not, but I do know I can't find his review so let's assume he hasn't posted and that he's either currently writing or has recently written one up, etc.

I'm not trying to be an asshole but I'm wondering what this must feel like, Drew being so invested in Holmes lore and having called himself "Moriarty" while writing for AICN and having taken shots at me for hating the movie unseen and asserting that it's valid for Holmes to be a muscular kick-boxing martial arts stud...Read More

It's 5:15 pm and dark out as I sit at my usual Lincoln Center-area Starbucks. I'm about to head downtown for Indiewire's Xmas party on Spring Street and therefore don't feel like calling around about anything, but a friend tells me there's a small story to be had about whether or not Up In The Air's real-life unemployed will make an appearance at the Oscars in early March.

One of the angles is "did Up In The Air's real-life 'terminated employees' get Taft-Hartleyed into SAG so they can get a little residual kick-back from the movie?" Will they at least be invited to...Read More

Slate V has posted a spirited chat with Rebecca Winters Keegan about her just-out book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron (Crown).

I've read about 85% of Keegan's book over the last two or three weeks. I was mainly looking for stories of Cameron's fights and goadings and tongue-lashings, which I love. (I heard some real wowsers about the making of Titanic.) But Keegan so admires Cameron that she either didn't try to dig up stories of sturm und drang or she heard them but...Read More

"Guy Ritchie's hyperbolic Sherlock Holmes isn't a movie -- it's a franchise," writes New Yorker critic David Denby. "Or, at least, a would-be franchise. Arthur Conan Doyle's material has been grabbed by its velvet collar and thrown into twenty-first-century media culture. Such a turn was inevitable. The subdued charm of Conan Doyle's hansom cabs, enveloping fogs and courteous manners, in which the facade of gentility is broken up so delightfully by devilish conspiracies, is not of our age."

Thursday, 12.17, 2:55 pm.

In other words, ladies and gentleman: Sherlock Holmes: The Coarsening and Degradation of Civilization...Read More

Avatar's tracking numbers have strongly surged. Total awareness is at 93, definite interest is at 52, first choice is at 28 and first-choice-and-release is at 39. Under-25 females who were counted on 12.10 as definitely not interested at 18 have sunk down to 8, which obviously means that negatives have dropped across the board.

After lamenting earlier this month that Avatar's most recent first-choice tracking seemed to have stalled out at 16, I suggested that a 30 first choice just prior to opening day seemed necessary to match box-office expectations. On December 10th I noted...Read More

Eagle-eyed Avatar fans might want to take note of possible differences between the IMAX 3-D version and the regular 3-D versions. Netherlands-based HE reader Jonathan Spuij claims he's seen "both the IMAX 3D cut and the regular digital 3D version of Avatar and I noticed two small changes in scenes." Or at least he thinks he did.

"First, when the super-tree gets destroyed, the IMAX cut shows the clansmen trying to fly off their banshees from the top of the falling tree," he writes. "I didn't notice this shot in the regular version.

"And second, there's a shot in the trailer of Sam...Read More

I have to return a rental car in New Jersey and then bus back into Manhattan for a Serious Man luncheon at the Monkey Bar starting at 12:30 pm, so I haven't time to get into the just-announced SAG Award nominations.

It's the same old gruel anyway with Up In The Air, Precious and Inglourious Basterds taking three nominations each. Mark my words -- five years from now the people standing by Precious will be like Peter denying three times that he knew Yeshua of Nazareth. Who, me...Precious...what?

L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan's comparison of James Cameron's Avatar to The Jazz Singer will have a profound impact on the Best Picture race, I suspect. Among those over-50 Academy members who listen to and occasionally follow his lead, I mean.

The instant I read his review I began to think that if the ABTHL crowd (i.e., anything but The Hurt Locker) decides that they can't fully embrace Up In The Air because of its admirable refusal to go all warm and huggy during the final ten minutes, they might just throw their...Read More

This Melena Ryzik Carpetbagger piece about the security guys who handled the Manhattan premiere and after-party for It's Complicated is sharp and briskly paced. But a major point is side-stepped. Security goons are solid and disciplined and nicely dressed, but they don't know who anyone is and they don't want to know. They refuse to be street smart. This is why they're called goons or apes -- because they insist on fulfilling the definition of these terms.

If you've been invited by a publicist handling an event...Read More

James Cameron's Avatar "is the most beautiful film I've seen in years," says New Yorker critic David Denby in the 1.4.10 issue. "Amid the hoopla over the new power of 3-D as a narrative form, and the excitement about the complicated mix of digital animation and live action that made the movie possible, no one should ignore how lovely Avatar looks, how luscious yet freewheeling, bounteous yet strange.

"As Cameron surges through the picture plane, brushing past tree branches, coursing alongside foaming-mouthed creatures, we may be overcome by an uncanny sense of emerging, becoming, transcending -- a sustained mood of elation...Read More

"Group votes of any kind tend to cancel out radical options on either side in favor of the middle," says Spoutblog's Karina Longworth in a 12.16 Vanity Fair.com piece.

"If you are not surprised that neither Ron Paul nor Ralph Nader has ever been elected president, you should be equally unimpressed by the fact that The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air have taken the bulk of this year's pre-Oscar honors. Though the two films have their own unique virtues (and failings), neither is daring enough to truly piss anybody off. More often than not, consensus victories go not...Read More

"I'm so jaded I even initially regarded James Cameron's mindblower as a perfect Forgotten Decade capstone -- nothing more than one rich man's $300 million intellectual exercise with some silly blue aliens. But then Avatar actually blew my mind. It's in fact a turning point: Cameron took the decade off, let the technology catch up with him, and then usurped its power by making something hot and light and utterly permanent. The self-proclaimed King of the World reclaimed art from the kingmakers." -- from a 12.16 Esquire.com article by Movieline's Stu VanAirsdale, called "Why Avatar Really Can Change Movies Forver."

I briefly spoke with Up In The Air director-writer Jason Reitman today at 21, where a Peggy Siegal luncheon was held to celebrate the film. I told him I've watched the Up In The Air four or five times, and that my favorite part is the last ten minutes. And yet some folks have told me the finale didn't warm them up the way they wanted. Reitman smiled, shrugged and said, "That's not my job!" Good for him. My sentiments exactly.

It took Jett and I four...Read More

"The cancer that has often afflicted Academy Award thinking is the equation that a film deserving of being chosen Best Picture can't, in fact, be chosen if it hasn't made a pretty good amount of dough." This is the portion of my quote for a story about The Hurt Locker's Best Picture chances that Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino didn't use in his 12.15 story.

No criticism intended for Phil -- I just like like the use of the words "cancer," "dough" and "Academy Award" in the same sentence.

"The Hurt Locker has received an overwhelming amount of critical support over the last couple...Read More

There were two standouts among theAustin Film Critics choices -- Inglorious Basterds' Melanie Laurent for Best Actress and Up In The Air's Anna Kendrick for Best Supporting Actress. Otherwise they voted for the usual usual -- Hurt Locker, Bigelow, Firth, Waltz, etc. Waltz! Waltz!

The Avatar cost factor has essentially become a selling point, in the view of director James Cameron. "I don' think it means jack shit," he told the Hollywood Reporter's Carl DiOrio.

"To be perfectly honest, I think the studio has generated the myth about its costs to help in the selling of the movie. I have seen this happen with Terminator and True Lies and Titanic, and it helps [Avatar] become a must-see film. By the way, doesn't that mean it's a bargain to see such an expensive film for the same amount it costs to see any other film? It's...Read More

With the public option and the Medicare buy-in both out the window, the Senate health care bill is so weakened and watered-down that it would be better to try to kill it than fight for its passage. Go instead to reconciliation and start the process all over again two years hence. And do whatever's necessary to prevent the obstinate and obstructionist Sen. Joe Lieberman from being re-elected.

"This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate," former presidential...Read More

40 days hence VCI is releasing a DVD of a film I've never heard of -- Stuart Heisler's Island of Desire (1952), a Tab Hunter movie with a somewhat older Linda Darnell (29 to his 21) as the love interest. Who in the world would buy or rent this? It's obviously negligible. Older gay guys?

The IMDB notes that "the July 22, 1952 edition of The New York Times noted that this film would make its local debut at Lowe's Metropolitan Theatre in Brooklyn on Wednesday, July 30. However, the newspaper did not send...Read More

An end-of-the-year recall of a moderately amusing music video with Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and JJ Abrams. Made for the 2009 MTV Movie Awards, originally aired 5.31.09...when I was still in Europe and not paying attention.

Somebody forgot to explain the drill to the San Francisco Film Critics Circle. It's Inglourious Basterds' milk-drinking Nazi Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor, dummies, and not Christian McKay for his bellowing genius performance in Me and Orson Welles. Scores of obsequious critics in cities across the country have voted for Waltz over the last three or four days, so how could there have been a misunderstanding?

And what's with the SFFCC giving Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach their Best Adapted Screemplay award for Fantastic Mr. Fox?

Otherwise the SFFCC fell into the ranks. Hurt Locker for Best Picture, Kathryn Bigelow for...Read More

My first reaction to the news about Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe's Robin Hood movie was "again?" This new trailer doesn't change anything. I feel as if I've seen it already. What could it bring to the table that's significantly different from the Kevin Costner version? Apart from the grittier cinematography and production design and Crowe's machismo, I mean? It's the same old recipe.

Here's a neat little video taken last summer on the outdoor Robin Hood set, which uses the same clearing (located in Bourne Wood, Tilford -- south of Farnham, Surrey)...

I have to get a rental car and drive all the way the hell up to frigid Syracuse this afternoon to pick up Jett and take him back down for the holidays. I'll be staying there this evening and thereby missing the Nine premiere and after-party in Manhattan.

The Golden Globe nominations were announced this morning. (Here's the Indiewire link.) Up In The Air accumlated six nominations, and Nine did fairly well with a Best Picture Comedy/Music nomination plus ones for Daniel Day Lewis and the very deserving Marion Cotillard.

The only surprise I'm seeing thus far is their decision to place Meryl Streep's Julie & Julia performance into the Best Actress Comedy or Musical category, thus leaving the Best Actress competish open to Carey Mulligan (who's been strangely losing to Streep in the critics awards so far). Categorizing Streep's performance as Julia Child under comedy is, of course,...Read More

I was told yesterday by producer Ed Pressman that the Hollywood Foreign Press recently rejected the submission of Nicolas Cage's performance in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical -- a not very perceptive call, not to mention unfair and unhip. They also blew off This Is It! as a submission in the Best Musical/Comedy genre.

Esteemed critic Jack Mathews, a guy who's been around the block and acquired a little perspective, said the following about Precious in a 12.10 discussion with Indiewire's Anne Thompson:

"If the Academy hadn't just doubled the number of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10 this year, we wouldn't be talking about Precious as an Oscar contender now. In fact, if director Lee Daniels had cleaned up the language a bit and eliminated an unnecessary rape clip, Precious might have found its natural home [on the tube] and we'd be talking about its rightful fate of an Emmy winner.

"I am not...Read More

I flinched when I read Michael Fleming's 12.13 story about Mel Gibson's forthcoming Viking movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and a script by William Monahan. We know what this will be. What big-league director is more drawn to gougings, disembowelments and beheadings than Gibson? The man is insane.

Fleming says the story "will be as unsparing as Gibson's Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto." And we're all going to pay $12 each to sit through more throat-slicings, testicle-crushings, skull-splittings and so on. Terrific.

This makes me...Read More

The Weinstein Co. threw an elegant lunch today for Rob Marshall's Nine at Per Se, the renowned gourmet restaurant on the Time Warner Center's fourth floor. Nine stars Daniel Day Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Kate Hudson attended; ditto an assortment of Manhattan industry/media types (Harvey Weinstein, Ron Howard, producer Ed Pressman, screenwriter Stephen Schiff, Martha Stewart, Campbell Brown, Larry King) and hot-shot journalists.

Nine star Daniel Day Lewis, director Rob Marshall at today's Weinstein Co. Nine luncheon at Thomas Keller's Per Se -- Monday, 12.14, 2:35 pm.

If I was flipping through Variety and came upon this ad, which doesn't even mention Glenn Kenny or The Girlfriend Experience, I would keep flipping. You can barely make him out. I know Kenny wasn't in any close-ups, but wasn't he at least in a shot that was sharply focused and well-lighted? This stinks.

Apparition has picked up Floria Sigismondi's The Runaways for distribution, says L.A. Times/Company Town contributor Steven Zeitchik. Apparition is planning "a roll-out that lies somewhere between a platform and wide release" beginning in March 2010. In other words, it may not be as much of a problem movie as I was detecting on 12.12. The big premiere will be next month at Sundance, of course, with "a possible Joan Jett performance in Park City, Utah."

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick assessed the New York Film Critics Circle winners today as follows: "The NYFCC and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association rarely agree on their top choices. [So it's] really fascinating is that with two major exceptions -- LA went for Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart and Yolande Moreau in Seraphine -- the New Yorkers almost exactly duplicated the L.A. list."

It also "carries real weight that both groups gave their best picture award to The Hurt Locker and Best Director to Kathryn Bigelow," he said. I agree and so does everyone else.

NYFCC winners plus HE...Read More

In a 12.14 interview with Jezebel's "Irin," N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis riffs on Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and what she calls the hateful "bullshit" pedigree of the Oscars. I love this interview! Magnificent salty slams from a senior representative of the Gray Lady!

"Something like a woman winning best director for directing an action movie and not a romantic comedy is symbolically important," she says. "Whether it then leads to a lot of women doing things outside of the pathetic comfort zone of romantic comedy -- and I say that as someone who loves romantic comedy -- we'll...Read More

In the same 12.14 Jezebel interview, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has explained why romantic comedies are always fairly terrible, discussed the output of Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers, and explained why women pay to see crappy chick flicks regardless.

"One, the people making [romantic comedies] have no fucking taste," Dargis says. "Two, they're morons. Three, they're insulting panderers who think they're making movies for the great unwashed and that's what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don't know what's happening.

" I personally don't think [Ephron or Meyers] is a good filmmaker -- they...Read More

In the same outspoken 12.14 interview, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has responded harshly and (I think) hilariously to a quote from Hollywood.com's box-office analyst Paul Degarabedian in a 10.25 Washington Post article by Ann Hornaday.

"What women like, at least for now, are traditional narratives," Degarabedian said. (Note: PD always says stuff like this, repeating status-quo views on tastes and trends.) "There's no Bourne Identity with a woman starring in it right now. It's almost as if in real life, women want to be empowered and in control, but on-screen they seem to like the old-fashioned damsel-in-distress, love-struck...Read More

The Zelig virus is alive and well among the Indiana Film Journalists Association as far as its choices for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor. The winners are/were (and I really do think we're getting damn tired of this) Mo'Nique in Precious and Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. respectively. They dared to be obsequious!

I'll give this Hoosiers this much -- they chose Up in the Air for Best Picture but they also chose Fantastic Mr. Fox for runner-up. Wes Anderson's film also won for Best Animated Film, beating out Up. The IFJA also chose Sin Nombre as Best Foreign Language...Read More

If I could pick the winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar with a wave of my hand, I would give it to either Up In The Air's Vera Farmiga or Nine's Marion Cotillard. Primarily because they're not Mo'Nique, but also because they play far more interesting women with greater portions of shading, strength and simple charm.

It's easy to play two colors, as Mo'Nique does in Precious -- i.e., repulsively malicious and boo-hoo-poor-me. It's much harder to make a performance work without all the eyeball-glaring and emotional grandstanding, which is what Farmiga and Cotillard manage to do.

I admired the steady...Read More

The New York Film Critics Circle's website has announced that the results of today's voting will not be announced in real time, which has been the standard deal for years. (WTF? Why do a rollback on a perfectly cool policy?) The winners will instead be posted online when voting is complete, or sometime after 1 pm. I'll be at a Nine luncheon from that hour until 2:30 pm or so, so I guess I'll just file from there.

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick is "fairly sure" the NYFCC won't choose The Hurt Locker for Best Picture because "they almost never go...Read More

Here are some counter-riffs to Katey Rich's assessment on Cinema Blend of what's happened so far with the critics' group choices:

1. Rich: "The Hurt Locker is a formidable contender, but critic's support might not translate at the Academy." HE: In other words, the Academy will nominate a film for Best Picture, but it may not confirm the Big Win unless it's made some serious dough (i.e., more than $12 million).

2. Rich: "Don't mess with Mo'nique and Christoph Waltz, because they are apparently unbeatable." HE: The critics who are voting for Mo'Nique and Waltz are spineless and easily-led sheep,...Read More

The Hurt Locker was obviously the weekend's big critics-group winner with three Best Picture wins from the Los Angeles Film Critics Associaton, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the Alliance of Women Journalists. But the relationship between The Hurt Locker and female moviegoers is the source of three regrettable ironies.

The AWJ win is ironic given that the main reason for Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War film having only made $12 million is the fact that most women have refused to see it (or, as I've detected in recent Manhattan conversations, have claimed not to have even heard of it)....Read More

Force-of-nature big shot Harvey Weinstein was the big winner this morning with the announcement that Nine and Inglourious Basterds had won 10 nominations each (including one each for Best Picture) from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, which does out the Critics Choice Movie Awards. The Weinstein Co. is the principal producer/distributor of both films.

But while Basterds helmer Quentin Tarantino received a Best Director nomination, Nine's director, Rob Marshall, was left out in the cold.

The numerous nominations accumulated by Nine/Basterds is partly due to the addition of several below-the-line craft categories.

The other BFCA Best Picture nommies are Avatar, An Education,...Read More

"The next time you want to talk some trash about what a provincial city Houston is, or how we all deserve to get blown away by a hurricane, consider this. And then consider this: In 2000, Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush in Houston. And in 2004, John Kerry got more votes than George W. Bush here. So there." -- Variety critic and author Joe Leydon, sent to yours truly this morning.

Wells to Leydon: I never called Houstonians provincial. I certainly wouldn't in the wake of their having elected the openly gay Annise Parker their new mayor....Read More

In a gathering today at Manhattan's Walter Reade theatre, the NYFCO (New York Film Critics Online) voted on the following awards: Best Picture -- Avatar (20th Century Fox....LITTLE BIT OF A GEEKY CHOICE BUT WE'RE TALKING ONLINE HERE...FINE); Best Actor -- Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart); Best Actress -- Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia...WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU GUYS?); Best Director -- Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker...GOOD MOVE).

Plus Best Supporting Actor -- Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds...ZELIGS!); Best Supporting Actress-- Mo'Nique (Precious...GOATS PRODDED BY SHEPHERD'S STAFF...baaaah); Best Screenplay -- Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino; Best Documentary -- The Cove (Roadside Attractions); Best Foreign Language --The...Read More

I chatted last night with legendary director Whit Stillman, who's been living in Manhattan and writing screenplays for the last several months after an extended expat period in Barcelona and Paris. The occasion was a screening at the 92YTribeca of Metropolitan (1990), which will have a 20th anniversary showing at next month's Sundance Film Festival. Sometime during the first weekend, I was told, with a social gathering to follow. Calling all Stillman heads!

Stillman and Metropolitan star Chris Eigeman did a q&a after the screening,...Read More

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has given its Best Picture award to The Hurt Locker with Up In The Air coming in second. Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow won for Best Director with The White Ribbon's Michael Haneke right behind.

Jeff Bridges won LAFCA's Best Actor award for Crazy Heart, edging out A Single Man's Colin Firth. And Yolande Moreau won Best Actress for her performance in Seraphine, nudging out An Education's Carey Mulligan.

The first phase included The White Ribbon dp Christian Berger winning for Best Cinematography. LAFCA rolled over for Mo'Nique's Precious performance in the Best Supporting Actress...Read More

The Boston Film Critics dropped the ball with their Best Actress award by handing it to Meryl Streep instead of Carey Mulligan, but otherwise today's Beantown voting was a four-star triumph for The Hurt Locker. Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's Iraq-war thriller was named Best Picture, Bigelow won for Best Director, Jeremy Renner was named Best Actor for his Sgt. James portrayal, and Barry Ackroyd won for Best Cinematography.

What's it going to take to get critics to stop reflexively handing Mo'Nique their Best Supporting Actress awards for her Precious performance? Will some of them please get a grip and show a...Read More

An Up In The Air spoiler was posted by an HE talk-backer a while ago. I got rid of it, but not before considering what the guy was saying, which is that an audience he saw it with was a bit deflated by the downish finale and not applauding at the end, etc. Well, I don't think audiences applauded at the end of The Godfather, Part II either.

George Clooney's last shot in Up In The Air; Perkins' in Psycho.

Up In The Air is a close-to-the-bone thing to anyone who's struggling in the...Read More

N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich has written a rousing paean to Jason Reitman's Up In The Air in the Sunday edition. For those who haven't decided to vote for the George Clooney topliner as a Best Picture nominee or winner, Rich's piece will close the deal. Certainly among Academy members who read the Times over Sunday brunch.

Up in the Air "is not a political movie," he writes. "It won't be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Ayn Rand polemic on capitalism. What makes it tick is the struggle of Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, to...Read More

"There are parallels between Precious and Samson and Delilah as they both tackle taboo issues in their respective societies -- race issues in their different forms in two quite different countries," says HE reader Joel Meares.

"I personally feel Samson avoids some of the pitfalls of Precious, which I greatly respect and admire, as well. But where Monique's performance and the teacher character in Precious hit extremely false notes for me (and seem to tie the film to a very Hollywood construct it other times deftly avoids), Samson stays on course the whole way through.

"Whether that delivers emotionally in the...Read More

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon won Best European Film with European Director and European Screenwriter awards going to Haneke at the 22nd European Film Awards in Bochum, Germany. (Bochum?) Kate Winslet's Reader performance took the Best European Actress while A Prophet's Tahar Rahim won for Best European Actor. The People's Choice award for Best European Film was Slumdog Millionaire.

The only flagrantly bad thing about Avatar is James Cameron's decision to play a Leona Lewis song called "I See You," written by overall score composer James Horner, over the closing credits. Cameron apparently still doesn't understand that Titanic's closing vibe was ruined by the end-credit playing of "My Heart Will Go On," that repulsive Celine Dion song. Including both tunes were total whore moves, looking to appeal to younger women, get a song played on the Oscar show, etc.

You can sometimes detect little hints in the online summaries of Sundance Film Festival selections (which are usually written by festival programmers) about how good or not-so-good the films are. And they're evident, I think, in the summary for Floria Sigismondi's The Runaways, the '70s rock-band biopic with Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie. And I'm a little bit worried.

The film is "an ode to an era and a groundbreaking band," the summary says. (In other words, it's all over the place?) "Acclaimed video artist Floria Sigismondi directs from her own script" -- danger! danger Will...Read More

I've rented HE's Sundance pad -- a large one bedroom that sleeps three or four with a bedroom queen, a foldout couch and bunk beds -- but now a filmmaker who was going to stay has bailed so I'm looking for someone to step in. It's right near the Marriott and runs from Saturday, 1.23 to Saturday, 1.30, and it's only $400. Yup, seven days in Park City for less than $60 a day. Oh, and I need a place to flop from Wednesday, 1.20 to Saturday morning, 1.23, if anyone knows or hears anything.

If a jarring or traumatic event happens in your adolescent or teen years, it can stay with you into adulthood, and can sometimes even trigger a neurosis or shape some aspect of your personality. This has been a recurring motif in I-don't-know-how-many dramas I've seen about coping with this or that lingering issue. But what about stories in which a traumatic event or some kind of metaphorical face-slap wakes a character up? Not right away but gradually, I mean.

Who hasn't had an experience that delivers some kind of stern but helpful cautionary tale? I certainly have, but I'm hard-pressed to remember a...Read More

The start of the 2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival in early February will mark the four-year anniversary of the first appearance of John Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?). It has the ironic distinction of being one of the best rock-music docs ever made and at the same time totally finished as far as distribution prospects are concerned.

If you haven't signed out a distribution deal after four years of trying your film isn't just dead -- it's fish...Read More

Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah, an Aboriginal love-on-the-run drama as well as Australia's official submission for '09's Best Foreign Film Oscar, won five Australian Film Institute awards last night, including Best Film. Thornton also won for Best Direction, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography, and costars Marissa Gibson and Rowan McNamara were co-recipients of the AFI's Young Actor award. On top of which Samson and Delilah has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Marissa Gibson, Rowan McNamara in Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah

So why wasn't I doing cartwheels in the Grand Palais after seeing about 45...Read More

An assessment of Los Angeles industry culture by HE regular LexG seems fairly sage. "I tend to think of Oscar movies as having to appeal to 'LA Taste,'" he wrote last night. "Los Angelenos, particularly the voting denizens of Brentwood, Bel Air, and Beverly Hills, have a certain cinematic palate that isn't just different from mass America, but from even NYC film fanatics or cineastes anywhere else. LA Taste is very milquetoast, very Clooney, very upscale. The kind of people who shop at the Grove and eat Whole Foods and prefer an intellectual barrier, an ironic remove.

Read More