And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg reported yesterday that "over the past few days, several L.A.-based rabbis -- either on their own initiative or at someone else's urging -- have written articles in which they describe Inglourious Basterds as a modern-day retelling of the story of Purim, the Jewish holiday which began Sunday and continues through today, and urging people to vote for it on their Oscar ballots (which are due on Tuesday -- i.e., tomorrow).

Remember the excitement that accompanied Robert Harris and James Katz's 1991 restoration of Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus? Called the "most extensive film restoration in history, painstakingly reconstructed from decades-old negative and color separation prints, at a cost of nearly $1 million," etc.? The sumptuous detail of a large costume epic (set in Biblical times but not the least bit Biblical in story or theme) shot in Super Technirama 70 and all that?

It's now nearly 20 years later and guess what? The 2001 Criterion DVD version of this restored epic, which I happened...Read More

Who doesn't despise President Obama's stated dreamscape belief in the notion of bipartisan support for health care reform, or more particularly the fantasy of Republicans having the slightest interest in allowing the less-well-offs to receive comprehensive health care at more affordable rates?

Apart from the general venality of Republican positions on this matter, there's nothing quite as contemptible as the inability of Democrats to achieve what they claim they want to achieve by whatever means necessary. Everyone loathes ineffectualness and flaccidity.

A portion of last Wednesday's chat with Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev covered his not having directed the two sequels -- The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest. Both were directed by Daniel Alfredson.

As I mentioned during our chat, Oplev's reason for declining to helm these films (or at least the one he shared) sounds similar to Catherine Hardwicke's reason for not wanting to direct New Moon. He basically felt that the...Read More

This is almost a Shutter Island-type shot -- gothic vibe, moonlight, ominous clouds -- and I took it without thinking the other night. I love this kind of accident.

The day I took this my little 12 megapixel Canon Digital Elph cracked open, leaving me no option but to return to Best Buy for a replacement. To my surprise they'd just gotten in a brand-new 14 megapixel model called the SD1400 IS. It takes noticably cleaner video than the other one, or so it seems. It's still only 720p, of course. Two or three years hence these...Read More

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island was the top ticket seller yesterday ($6.7 million) for a second weekend in a row. I have one question -- why? It's laboriously over-shot and over-saturated. Why would anyone recommend it to a friend with any enthusiasm? Is it the word "island" that's attracting people? Cop Out (Warner Bros.) is second with $5.9 million, and The Crazies (Overture) is third with $5.9 million.

Greenberg costar/mumblecore legend Greta Gerwig during a roundtable session at the Waldorf Astoria -- Friday, 2.26, 11:05 am.

To hear it from a trusted research-screening informant, Anne Hathaway's performance as Jake Gyllenhaal's Parkinson's-afflicted love interest in Ed Zwick's Love and Other Drugs is "wonderful, really wonderful...she knocks it out of the park." Plus their love affair, he says, is portrayed in strongly compelling terms. Resulting, he reports, in significant deep-down feeling plus some heavy love scenes with ample nudity.

Love and Other Drugs costars Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway.

My concern here is with Zwick, a problem director who's always emotionally overplayed this or that aspect of his films. But my informant, who saw the film last...Read More

A Roland Emmerich-level earthquake struck off the coast of Chile early this morning, and right now tsunamis are said to be spreading out across the southeast and mid-Pacific area, including Hawaii. If I was a Laird Hamilton-level surfer in the line of fire...

Just a reminder that the mustard-background 2010 Oscar Balloon is now up and open for additions and refinements. (Sitting just above the '09 Balloon.) As things stand now there are 19 films that...well, who knows which will earn Best Picture consideration? But a decent percentage certainly appear formidable. Plus I've listed another 17 or 18 that seem to have been made with some degree of X-factor exceptionalism. The game starts now.

Several midtown restaurants, coffee shops and delis closed late this afternoon to allow their employees to get home safely due to inclement weather. I for one am consumed with disgust. Remember that line in the Rolling Stones' "Shattered" that went "to live in this town you must be tough tough tough tough tough tough tough"? No longer. People who went home early today are babies. They probably lack the character to feel ashamed of themselves so let me invoke it on their behalf.

What kind of a flabby-bellied managerial mentality decides that wind gusts, falling snow, smallish snow...Read More

I'm mostly cool with Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the Danish-Swedish thriller that's finally opening in the U.S. on 3.19. I have a slight beef, however, with the over-hypers, particularly the views of a friend, Jeffrey Ressner, that I recently posted.

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev, star Noomi Rapace -- Wednesday, 2.24, 5:55 pm at Manhattan's Park Regency hotel.

Ressner called it "the best movie of the year thus far...in the same vein of gripping genre genius as Let The Right One In...The Silence of the...Read More

I saw this 60 Minutes/Kathryn Bigelow teaser at Awards Daily and copied the code-- big deal. Leslie Stahl and crew shot most of her piece during the Santa Barbara Film Festival. This is almost the only Hurt Locker uptick after all the "get the front-runner" potshots that happened this week -- i.e., the Nicolas Chartier thing, Martha Nochimson's dig at Bigelow for not being a womanly-enough filmmaker, and the military authenticity nip-nips.

Getting drowned, mauled and chomped to death by a killer whale is a horrible way to go, so my sympathies to the friends and family of the late Dawn Brancheau, 40, who suffered this grisly fate two days ago at a SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida.

The late Dawn Brancheau

But -- yup, here comes the thing that you're not supposed to say -- the instant I read this I said to myself, "This is a captive animal getting some payback...an inmate letting a prison guard have it across the chops on behalf of tens of thousands of...Read More

The following xerox of Todd McCarthy's Alice in Wonderland review is for anyone and everyone, of course, but it's particularly aimed at the HE reader/twerp known as Wrecktem, who earlier today (a) said that my alleged meme about how "'this movie is going to be a disaster' is a bust"; and (b) suggested that "the UK "exhibitor Wells supposedly talked to about this film should be banned from this industry for life for lying about the quality of the film."

Here's McCarthy's mostly dismissive assessment:

"'You've lost your muchness,' Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter remarks to his newly shrunken teenage...Read More

Greenberg director-writer Noah Baumbach's LA-to-NY flight was cancelled by the blizzard, so he did his round-table interviews at this morning's Greenberg junket at the Waldorf Astoria hotel via Skype and a portable speaker. Baumbach's confinement to a Macbook Pro screen reminded me of the Martian leader inside the glass bowl (i.e., "the sum of all intelligence") in William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars, and the two publicists who carried Baumbach into the room were like the three-fingered Martian goons.

I'll post my video of a portion of the Baumbach chat later tonight -- my YouTube upload troubles are...

Neither Kevin Smith's Cop Out nor The Crazies are going to make box-office history this weekend, but both will do nicely, reasonably, decently. Ditto Alice in Wonderland (3.5)...actually, this looks like a better-than-decent performer. The film that appears to be in trouble is Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, which opens on 3.12 and has only tepid definite interest numbers -- 36 and 38 among younger and older males, and 21 and 29 among younger and older females.

Wells to 42West: "I'm determined to attend your Waldorf Astoria Greenberg junket despite the blizzardtopia outside, but I'm just checking to see if you guys are having second thoughts. Damn the torpedos?" 42West to Wells: "The junket is on!"

Which means I need to be at the Waldorf by 9:00 am or so. I have no rubber boots, but don't get me wrong -- I love a good blizzard. But all the material I was meaning to post yesterday afternoon (but didn't due to that horrendous video...

In a Huffington Post-ed AP interview, Mo'Nique is asked about "a lot of talk about you not showing up early on to promote Precious because you were worried about money." And she replies as follows:

"Well, when they say Mo'Nique was worried about money, I wasn't worried about money. Mo'Nique has a talk show that comes on five nights a week and she tapes six times a week for that talk show. And yes, when I leave my home, I leave my home and get paid to leave my home, so I wasn't worried about money. They simply said, 'You know, well...Read More

I've been totally jammed on video upload issues. I'm getting instant error messages when I try to upload on both YouTube and Vimeo. The response from the online help staff, of course, has been less than instantaneous. It's been pure throbbing hell for the last three hours or so, and nothing posted the whole time. Now I'm down to calling freelance whiz kids for assistance. Delightful.

During a 2.18 conversation with Oscar telecast co-producer Adam Shankman, Fresh Air's Terry Gross was informed that the original request for a host was Sasha Baron-Cohen, but this was shot down by the Academy elders. "Too much of a wild card," Shankman explained.

Let me explain what the Hurt Locker-related, Nicolas Chartier wildcat e-mail non-story is all about...okay? A certain party saw a chance to somehow hurt The Hurt Locker's chances of taking the Best Picture Oscar, and thought that creating a little hoo-hah out of a relatively minor e-mail blunder might help in that regard.

In short it's a typical "do whatever you can to take down or damage the front-runner" maneuver -- no more than that. Except it's a non-starter.

On 2.19 (i.e., last Friday), one solitary guy with politically clueless instincts sent out an e-mail...Read More

I have to leave to do a Girl With The Dragon Tattoo interview and then a screening of Kevin Smith's Cop Out. Apologies for the black-blanket effect that the Crazy Heart skin ad has been having on some browsers. It's fine on Firefox and Safari but apparently Internet Explorer users have had difficulty. Is this pretty much the case?

Who cares if Nell Minnow -- a.k.a., "Movie Mom" at belief.net -- has a problem with the red-band Kickass trailer that features costar Chloe Moretz and other under-age actors going all potty-mouth? Where is the intrigue or value in lamenting the effect of redband trailers upon American youths? Most younger teenagers would laugh in derision if they read this article...hello?

N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes posted an article about this on 2.23. (It's in today's edition.) It's extremely curious to see a piece in a world-class newspaper giving voice to concerns of people who don't...Read More

Nikki Finke's story about Matt Damon being attached to a Robert F. Kennedy biopic (based on a 2002 Evan Thomas biography) is a bit of a "meh." I'd expect Damon to match Steven Culp's performance in Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days, at least. But I'm not sure what this would come to.

The Coen Bros. obviously wouldn't have chosen Hailee Steinfeld to play Mattie Ross in their True Grit remake if they didn't think she had the necessary spunk, piss and vinegar. Or if they weren't convinced that she'll make their beautiful Old West dialogue sing just right. But surely they understand, being wise fellows, that genetically she's about as Zane Grey as an iPad.

(l.) Hailee Steinfeld; (r.) Ethan, Joel Coen.

Steinfeld is fetching, all right, but in a radiant and (to me) almost dazzling-JAP sort of way -- she'd be right at home on the slopes...Read More

The usual Peggy Siegal-invited elites attended tonight's Monkey Bar party to celebrate The Hurt Locker: The Shooting Script (Newmarket Press) -- screenplay by Mark Boal, introduction by Kathryn Bigelow. The gathering was hosted by Bigelow and literary agent David Kuhn.

Hurt Locker screenwriter-producer Mark Boal -- Tuesday, 2.23, 8:35 pm.

Intrepid N.Y. Times "Carpetbagger" Melena Ryzik, Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow -- Tuesday, 2.23, 8:45 pm.

On 12.1.09 Hollywood Reporter columnist Roger Friedman wrote about Howard Lutnick's money-betting box-office site known as The Cantor Exchange, or CX. When officially launched on or about 4.20.10, anyone (DZ included) will be able to wager real money and potentially make real money on Hollywood box-office predictions. The site says it expects to receive final regulatory approval less than two months from now. Why, then, am I feeling so indifferent about this? Because the Movie Godz don't approve -- that's why. Ditto the ghosts of Manny Farber, Frank Nugent, Otis Ferguson, Pauline Kael, Dwight McDonald and Andre Bazin.

Vanity Fair's John Lopez has gotten hold of an early draft of James Cameron's Oscar acceptance speech, should fortune smile. Except it's not funny. We all know the cocky "king of the world" Cameron but that was codefied 12 years ago. Which means the Lopez thing is similar to someone repeating the old Marlon Brando-as-Marc-Antony joke ("Friends, Romans, Countrymen -- I got sumpin' I wanna tell youse") in 1965, or twelve years after Joseph L. Mankieweicz's Julius Ceasar.

I'm not trying to be dull or unresponsive, but there's simply more to Cameron than this. People resent the scope of Avatar's success...Read More

In an interview with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow, The Wrap's Steve Pond mentions the charge that her film doesn't take a political point of view," but then adds that "it seems clear to me that you have a pretty strong point of view...as you say, it's a hellish situation and we have no business sending our men into it."

To which Bigelow replies, "Well, that's certainly my feeling. I'm a child of the '60s, and I see war as hell and a real tragedy and completely dehumanizing. You know, those are some of the great themes of our time, and we...Read More

I've read an October 2009 draft of Allan Loeb's Untitled Cheating Project (a.k.a., Your Cheating Heart), which will costar Vince Vaughn and Kevin James under director Ron Howard. The Universal-funded Imagine project, reportedly based on an idea by producer Brian Grazer, will shoot in Chicago later this year or next. I'm mentioning this because I didn't much care for Loeb's script -- in fact I almost hated it -- and I'm figuring if I say something now it might influence the development. Or not. I don't care either way.

I'm not going to give the story away --...Read More

"Once upon a time, the Oscars were THE awards show," recalls critic Marshall Fine. "Literally. The Emmy Awards and the Oscars were the only awards shows that were broadcast -- those and the Miss America Pageant. They were events. They carried weight. They meant something, or at least we thought they did.

"Now Miss America is crowned on basic cable, the Emmys give out so many awards that I'm surprised I don't have one, and the Oscars seem to come so late that I don't even care about those movies anymore.

"Seriously: Inglourious Basterds came out...Read More

HE reader and Tim Burton buff Michael Mayo saw Alice in Wonderland last Thursday at Hollywood's El Capitan, and, contrary to yesterday's general opinion, was not only okay with it but actually feels it's "Tim's best work in a long time." Perhaps with a pinch of salt...?

"It's actually more somber than they're letting on," he says. "The setup is that Alice (Mia Wasikowska) comes back as a young adult and finds the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has taken over and is causing a "reign of terror," etc. Part of Wonderland has dense vegitation and forests like Pandora, but part of...Read More

"Rats! Rain! Lightning! Lunatics! Mausoleums! Migraines! Creepy German scientists! Nobody could accuse Martin Scorsese, in Shutter Island, of underplaying his hand," writes The New Yorker's Anthony Lane.

"The nominal task confronting [Scorsese] and his screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, is to take Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name and render it fit for the screen. But he has a deeper duty -- to pillage all the B movies he has ever seen (including some that were forgotten by their own directors), and to enshrine the fixations and flourishes of style on which they relied.

"In a celebrated...Read More

This Chicago Sun Times article would not only have us believe that columnist Laura Washington had never heard of Kevin Smith when she wrote it, but that her editors didn't advise to skip the part about being ignorant of Smith's fame. Where's the upside in confessing to this level of cluelessness? All it does is distract from her message about the pitfalls of obesity and make other journalists ask, "What's her problem?"

Consider the almost comical phoniness of the dialogue and particularly the awful acting in this scene from Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. I happened to watch this earlier today and felt genuinely stunned. I mean, it's just about unwatchable. Even more startling is the fact that the German-born Sirk is considered a legendary world-class filmmaker. Well, there's a reason for that.

Sirk is generally regarded as a pantheon-level guy because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism...Read More

I can watch this clip over and over. Puts me in the greatest mood. That's all.

I'm told that certain British exhibitors and theatre managers who've seen Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland feel it's "a true stinker of a movie...an unmitigated disaster," as one correspondent puts it. "It's no shock that Disney want to release this on DVD as soon as possible. Not sure what can save this though the promotion so far might guarantee it a great opening before poisonous word of mouth kills it."

To which I replied, "Wait...a stinker? Burton might be off his game, but I can't believe it's a...Read More

In an apparent exclusive, Cop Out star Bruce Willis has told MTV News' Josh Horowitz that (a) "I think we're gonna do" a Die Hard 5 movie for 2011, and that (b) he'd hire Len Wiseman to direct in a New York minute

It's being asked which of this year's Best Picture nominees will be watched by film buffs 50 years hence. Just as I've watched (and will watch again) a 50 year-old Korean War film called Pork Chop Hill, I can't imagine The Hurt Locker not being a fascinating timepiece for those looking to absorb what the Iraq War was for U.S. troops. And just as Ben-Hur is a necessary flick to own (especially when it finally comes out on Blu-ray) or at least see once, who can imagine Avatar not being a essential sit in 2060?

"This week President Obama is hosting a bipartisan gab-fest at the White House to try to tease out some Republican votes for health care," Salon's Robert Reich wrote this morning. "It's a total waste of time. If Obama thinks he's going to get a single Republican vote at this stage of the game, he's fooling himself (or the American people).

"Many months ago, you may recall, the White House and Dem leaders in the Senate threatened to pass health care with 51 votes -- using a process called 'reconciliation' that allows tax and spending bills to be enacted without filibuster --...Read More

Three reactions to the weekend's box-office tallies: (a) Shutter Island began the weekend with $14 million earned on Friday, but it was down to $10,792,000 -- a 34% drop -- on Sunday, which of course is due to word-of-mouth and grumbling about that Marshall Fine guy leading us astray; (b) Public opinion also resulted in The Wolfman earnings plummeting 76% from last weekend; (c) Avatar's domestic cume now stands at $687,851,000 -- only $13 million shy of the $700 million mark.

I have to see Avatar in IMAX3-D one more time before it gets pushed out by Alice in Wonderland. It'll be...Read More

After Hurt Locker wins with the PGA, DGA, WGA, BAFTA, BFCA, NSFC, NYFCC, LAFCA, ACE, GIFA, and IPA plus a co-leading nine AMPAS nods including vital ones for directing, acting, screenwriting, and editing, "we can now say with more than a fair degree of certainty that we know which film will win the top Oscar," writes And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg.

"Sure, arguments can be made for other films (and both studios and pundits are making them), and upsets can happen (you don't have to remind me). But the fact of...Read More

There's a riff about cops that I may have read in a Joseph Wambaugh book. It goes something like "poets, priests and politicians talk about what people might be, could be, should be, try to be. Cops deal with people as they are." (If it's not from Wambaugh, fine...whatever.) In this sense I feel a kinship with the law. No offense to 98% of HE talkbackers, but dealing with the talkback uglies really does affect your view of humanity to some degree. I've had the talkback thing going for almost four years now (it began in March '06), and dealing with dozens...Read More

At the just concluded BAFTA awards in London, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker has taken the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay (won by Mark Boal), Best Editing, Best Cinematography (Barry Ackroyd) and Best Sound.

On top of which An Education's Carey Mulligan won for Best Actress, and A Single Man's Colin Firth won for Best Actor. Christoph Waltz and Mo'Nique, of course, won for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.

Peter van Aftmael's snap of Jeff Bridges signing autographs outside the Santa Monica American Cinematheque -- dated 1.16.10 -- is easily the best shot in the N.Y. Times' Sunday Magazine's 7th annual tribute to great performers. The Times web guys don't allow you to save the image (typical) so Alexander Carter sent me a decent scan.

Along with Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, Star Trek and Up, The Hurt Locker is nominated for a sound-editing Academy Award," notes N.Y. Times staffer Virginia Heffernan. "For its cerebral, abstract and still deeply romantic sound tableau -- a kind of sonic Cy Twombly painting -- The Hurt Locker should win it.

"Sound editor Paul Ottosson's alignment of death and silence, instead of death and booms, partakes of an aesthetic based on the idea that you're deaf when you die. On The Sopranos, a series known for its exquisite deployment of silence, Bobby Baccalieri says of dying, 'You probably don't hear it when...Read More

In a 2.16 interview with Zaki Hasan (i.e, Zaki's Corner), The Wolfman director Joe Johnston complains about something I and Roger Ebert and others have moaned about before -- the deplorable tendency of commercial exhibitors to turn down the projection-light levels, which degrades the values in the film being shown.

"Standard projection brightness is intended to be 16 foot lamberts," Johnston says. "This is a measurement of the amount of light reflected off the screen, back into a light meter. Projection bulbs are expensive, and if the urban myth is correct, there is a near monopoly on them so...Read More

In a just-posted q & a with Harvey Weinstein, And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg asks how Inglourious Basterds can beat The Hurt Locker and Avatar. Harvey replies as follows:

"Well, I think it's fairly simple. I mean, if you do the Oscar math, the movie is supported by the actors -- it won the Screen Actors Guild against The Hurt Locker and a bunch of other good movies. And I think that, you know, everybody in the world is gonna pick Kathryn Bigelow for best director -- Quentin's already announced he is -- so I think that she...Read More

Anyone who says "even though Roman Polanski is a child rapist, The Ghost Writer is a pretty good film" is, in my eyes, contemptible. The absolute lowest level of film criticism or appreciation is to assign a lack of merit or to attempt a tarnishing of some kind by condemning a filmmaker for a single act (as opposed to a pattern) that is morally offensive. John Huston made me a cuckold in 1947 and '48 by seducing my wife so Treasure of the Sierra Madre...well, it's not a bad film but boy, that Huston!

Since most artists throughout history have been known...Read More

"Perhaps the most shocking element in Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or pertains to its eroticism, which, though tame by today's standards, is peculiarly, disturbingly degrading. Or perhaps it's the sequence, based on the Marquis de Sade's '120 Days of Sodom,' in which the chief sadistic erotomaniac turns out to be none other than Jesus Christ. Though much of the film is comic, and some moments may even seem laughable, the joke, now as then, is largely on us." -- The New Yorker's Richard Brody on 2.16.

L'Age d'Or is in...

"The narrative for The Hurt Locker is, 'We're the underdog...we will allow you to feel great about awarding the first female director ever...you like us, you really really like us...and there's not a lick of CG in our masterful little film...the kind of film Hollywood should be making but forgets to...send a message that you want more quality films.'

"Good story. And a great film with great work by director Bigelow and on down the line. But the only reason this narrative works this year is because of the other great narrative...

"'Over 2.5 billion dollars. We are the biggest f-ing film in...Read More

Websters.com has no recognition of/definition for "behanding." ("Do you mean beheading?", the site asks.) If Martin McDonagh hadn't decided to call his latest play A Behanding in Spokane no one on the face of the planet would have ever used the term. (If your right leg has been severed have you been belegged?) I'm fated to see this alleged black comedy, which costars Christopher Walken, Anthony Mackie, Zoe Kazan -- no! -- and Sam Rockwell, sometime in March.

Sean Penn is reportedly looking at time for this? He didn't even swing at the guy -- two kicks, "get out, get out," a snarly-dog expression. That's absolutely nothing.

I'm not condoning physical brutality, but paparazzi and the editors who pay them are vermin -- who other than terrorists and child molestors are more deserving...

"The Ghost Writer is a piece of thrilling cinematic creepiness, beautiful in its gloom and knuckle-crackingly sinister in its pacing that puts it right up there with the best things Roman Polanski has ever done -- say Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and his stupendous Knife in the Water," writes Daily Beast columnist Simon Schama.

"It seems amazing that this study in many kinds of contemporary isolation and confinement, including those of the public glare, was written and filmed before Polanski himself became involuntarily re-acquainted with those themes, though perhaps the editing might have been sharpened by his experience.

"Mostly Polanski...Read More

From Time Out New York's David Fear, Joshua Rothkopf and Keith Uhlich, a list of the 50 Most Deserving Oscar Winners of All Time. The cinematography for Barry Lyndon, Days of Heaven and The Third Man. The musical score for The Sting. Humphrey Bogart 's performance in The African Queen and Robert De Niro's in Raging Bull. The editing for The French Coonnection. The sound for The Exorcist and Apocalypse Now.

There was an LA screening last night of Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (20th Century Fox, 4.23). A friend of a friend attended. The first blast (i.e., from the guy who talked to the guy) read as follows: "I've heard it's a strong return to form for both Stone and Douglas. It also proves Shia can play with the big boys. A surprisingly satirical movie. It's the first time I've heard a Stone movie described as 'fun.'"

Michael Douglas, Shia Lebouf in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.

Satirical? Really? I asked for a bit more,...Read More

Two significant reactions have been posted in response to my 2.15 "Rally Round" piece in which I predicted deferential responses to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island because of a "give Marty a pass as long as the film isn't too bad" impulse that many older critics seem to hold dear. One is an Auteurs piece by Glenn Kenny called "Carrying Marty's Water"; the other is a piece by Marshall Fine called "In The Tank for Scorsese?."

Ben Kingsley, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese and Mark Ruffalo during filming of Shutter Island.

Significant Kenny quote: "If I...Read More

All these Inglourious Basterds-may-win-the-Best-Picture-Oscar stories have become ubiquitous. In fact, if you've got Nicole Laporte, Patrick Goldstein, Tom O'Neil, Jack Mathews, Steve Pond and Pete Hammond saying the same thing, isn't it fair to call it a blitzkreig?

And I'm feeling kind of hurt about this. How come I haven't been called by Harvey Weinstein? I can bang this stuff out as well as anyone else. Here, listen: "Is this an excitement tremor or what? Inglourious Basterds is a come-from-behinder, a last-minute sprinter...breathless at the Kentucky Derby! The old '90s Harvey is back in action! And Quentin's...Read More

A guy I spoke to this morning -- someone who gets around, knows the industry, talks to people -- disputes the whole Inglourious Basterds-is-surging meme. Here's how he put it in a phone conversation this morning:

"The reason is that while people like Inglourious Basterds, I don't think anyone is taking it seriously," he contends. "Even people I know who are voting for it don't take it very seriously. It's one thing to say they 'like' a film and another to vote for it as Best Picture. It's a jokey Nazi exploitation movie. It's fluff. You don't vote...Read More

To quote from a 2.17 HuffPost story, to wit: "Wired has been working on a digital version for an Apple tablet since before the iPad was announced. Last week, editor Chris Anderson showed off his magazine's iPad capabilities, and Wired has now uploaded a video demonstration to its website.

"This is what we've been waiting for for 15 years," Anderson said of the iPad. "We've been waiting for an opportunity to use all these visual tools at our disposal to tell these stories in a way...

Sony Classics' acquisition of David Michod's Animal Kingdom is an obvious change of pace. When was the last time Tom Bernard and Michael Barker had anything to do with a crime flick involving drugs and murders and cops? I spotted the similarities to At Close Range soon enough when I saw it at Sundance. My only hang-up was James Frecheville's too-subdued performance as the young lead; to me it suggested either retardation or a lithium overdose.

One interesting aspect of Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (20th Century Fox, 4.23) is that Oliver Stone's drama will be opening less than five months after its 11.30.09 wrap date. Obviously the high command at Fox marketing knows that Wall Street rage is peaking right now, and they're figuring the sooner the better.

I spoke yesterday morning with In The Loop director/cowriter Armando Ianucci. The point or goal of our chat was to advance the notion that Ianucci and his Loop co-writers (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche ) perhaps deserve to win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar more than the competition. If this is so (and I wouldn't argue against it), it's because no other film in the history of cinema has made such ringing poetry out of scatalogical rage.

In The Loop director/corwriter Armando Ianucci

I've said at least once or twice before that everyone swears, but you need...Read More

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott begins his Shutter Island review as follows: "[The film] takes place off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954. I'm sorry, that should be OFF THE COAST OF MASSACHUSETTS! IN 1954! since every detail and incident in the movie, however minor, is subjected to frantic, almost demented (and not always unenjoyable) amplification."

Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.

"The wail of strangled cellos accompanies shots of the titular island, a sinister, rain-lashed outcropping that is home to a mental hospital for the CRIMINALLY INSANE! The color scheme is lurid, and the camera...Read More

In his brutal pan of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott writes that "there are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt."

In a thread following a 2.15 riff called "Rally Round," I wrote that "Scorsese occupies a hallowed place in the hearts of the older, brainier, more thoughtful critics, and that it's usually in keeping with the character of this crowd to cut Marty some slack whenever a new Scorsese film comes out....Read More

Roger Ebert has written a response to Chris Jones' touching profile of his situation and the state of his soul in the current Esquire. Roger is fairly laid back about it, although he takes exception to the line that he is "dying in increments."

"Well, we're all dying in increments," he writes. "I don't mind people knowing what I look like, but I don't want them thinking I'm dying. To be fair, Chris Jones never said I was. If he took a certain elegiac tone, you know what? I might have, too. And if he structured...Read More

A blog on Austin's The Statesman website says that the guy who this morning crashed a plane into a cluster of federal offices in Austin (including an IRS office) had posted an online diatribe, and that the site is registered to one Joe Stack of San Marcos, Texas.

If Joe is/was the suicide pilot, he seems to fit the profile of a Tea Party wingnutter. Or...you know, some variation of this psychosis. Leave the good people alone, Ayn Rand without the intellectual wherewithal, screw the...Read More

According to a list of the 50 Most Racist Movies of all time, Breakfast at Tiffany's is the #1 mofo, Planet of the Apes is the runner-up, and Soul Man is in third place. I don't want to dispute or disparage, but there's above-board racism (i.e., the kind that Tarantino practices) and subterranean racism, which is the kind that needs to be pointed out and admonished. There are many films on this list that qualify as above-board and are therefore not so bad.

Anyway, White Chicks is sixth, Scarface ranks 14th, Dangerous Minds...Read More

Screen Daily has posted a list of the likeliest titles up for selection at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. The possible US entries include Woody Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, Jodie Foster's The Beaver, Terrence Malick's The Tree Of Life and Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary.

Not to mention Oren Peli's Area 51, David O. Russell's The Fighter, Julie Taymor's The Tempest, and Peter Weir's The Way Back.

Oh, and Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables. (This wouldn't be included in the festival...would it? More of a rue...Read More

I missed Keith Olbermann's President's Day (2.15) message to the Tea Baggers due to travel and whatnot. But he nailed it cold. It deserves a thorough listen.

James Cameron has said more or less the same thing to MTV.com's Josh Horowitz as he recently said to PBS's Charlie Rose, to wit: "It's an irresistable opportunity for the Academy to annoint a female director for the first time. That is a very, very strong probability, and I will be cheering when that happens."

Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer (Summit, 2.19) is a brilliant and masterful adult thriller. I just saw it this evening, and less than ten minutes after it began I knew I was once again in the hands of perhaps the most exacting filmmaker alive today, and as sharp as he's ever been. This film is so gloriously not run-of-the-mill-Hollywood I can barely stand it.

Pierce Brosnan, Ewan McGregor in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer

Anyone who says "very well made but not enough action, not emotional enough and not a big enough payoff" is asking for commonality...Read More

I spoke a couple of hours ago with FIND exec director Dawn Hudson about the swanky new downtown venue for the annual Spirit Awards. For years the independent film award show has been happening under a huge tent on a beach-adjacent parking lot in Santa Monica. This year it's moving downtown to a "panoramic event deck" atop a building at L.A. Live, AEG's downtown Los Angeles' events complex. And on the evening of Friday, 3.5, rather than the usual Saturday afternoon. Two nights before the Oscars rather than 24 hours.

An alleged shot of...

It's been 33 or 34 years since I first saw John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. It's a well-admired...make that beloved Howard Hawks/wild-in-the-'hood exploitation film, of course, but is especially memorable for Darwin Joston's tersely sardonic Napoleon Wilson -- a performance that encompassed a kind of studly melancholia, ironic machismo, flitting comic asides and a riveting aura of existential cool. And delivered with a sort of movie-conscious, wink-winky tone, but no less legendary for that.

I just watched Assault on Blu-ray last night, and was reminded what a beautifully iconic hard-boiled egg Joston and Carpenter managed to...Read More

Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling caught a workshop version of American Idiot last September at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and liked it enough to recommend my catching the spiffed-up version when it opens next month.

Wednesday, 2.17, 1:05 pm

I'll always be in awe of Harvey Weinstein's chutzpah, but Inglourious Basterds isn't going to win the Best Picture Oscar. How do I know this? I don't, not for certain. But I do know that the season has been dragging on and that entertainment journalists are getting bored and need to come up with scenarios that allow for some variation of the c.w. -- i.e., the winner will be either Avatar or The Hurt Locker.

I'm also sensing that the Movie Godz, the aspirational angels of our nature, are feeling a wee bit antsy as we speak, and...Read More

I've seen nothing and know nothing, but it makes sense to beware of The Pacific. Beware of any miniseries that may be a nostalgic generational tribute in sheep's clothing. Beware of all things Spielbergian -- barring a miracle he'll be nothing but trouble from here on. Beware of Hanks because he's too wealthy and settled. Beware of 1940s stock characters that may have been created out of innumerable viewings of William Wellman's Battleground.

Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the 2009 European hit thriller that's finally opening in the U.S. on 3.19, is, in the view of journalist Jeffrey Ressner, "the best movie of the year thus far. It's The Silence of the Lambs with a punk-rock Clarice. The Swedes know how to make great films, and this is in the same vein of gripping genre genius as Let the Right One In."

I blew off a Dragon Tattoo screening late yesterday afternoon in order to...Read More

A Monkey Bar party happened earlier this evening for Robert Kenner's Food, Inc., one of the five nominees for Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It's presumed that the only real competition it has is Louie Psihoyos' The Cove (or vice versa), so it made sense for Magnolia Pictures, Food, Inc.'s distributor, to hype things up a bit.

Food, Inc. director and co-writer Robert Kenner, Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman -- 2.16, 8:55 pm.

Documentarian Alex Gibney (Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson),...

I never went along with the general Zoe Kazan infatuation, which started with her Revolutionary Road performance, and I can feel myself pulling further away with each successive turn. She seemed irritatingly flighty in It's Complicated (especially with the texting), and excessively coy and mannered in Happythankyoumoreplease, which I hated at Sundance. And now I don't know if I even want to watch The Exploding Girl (Oscilloscope, 3.12) after watching this trailer. She isn't done -- she just has to get past what she's been doing.

Thanks to HE reader Jake Hughes, a Bay Area resident, for taking an hour or so to throw this together. A little weird but I can handle it. Much appreciated.

My interest in Toy Story 3 (Disney, 6.18) has mainly to do with the Pixar honchos having hired Michael Arndt, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, to do the script. I'm therefore expecting a certain snarky urbanity and sardonic flavor. In short, the good old double-track deal (i.e., appealing to kids and hip adults) that the best animated features achieve. The director is Lee Unkrich.

The Jeff Bridges of legend posed during Monday's Oscar luncheon with his fellow Best Actor nominees. But the portrait in the current Time magazine is...well, the word has to be Luciferian.

Zentropa producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen has told Screen Daily's Geoffrey Macnab that he's "seen it [the story] in the Danish film magazine" about the rumored Martin Scorsese/Lars von Trier remake of Taxi Driver and "what is written there is not true." Jensen confirmed that the directors had met at the Berlin Film Festival, but that the remake story is "rubbish."

Positive & negative reviews be damned -- the public has already decided to give Shutter Island a strong opening weekend. Definite interest of 46 and 53 among under-25 and over-25 males, respectively, and a surprisingly high 44 and 40 among under-25 and over-25 females. Go figure.

Marlon Brando's decision to briefly pause between the words "to" and "fight" in this clip constituted the only moment of wit or subtlety in an otherwise bombastic and broadly emphatic film. Which I'd nonetheless like to see on Bluray some day. Warner Home Video has already mastered for HD-DVD -- why not just offer it on Bluray? All 70mm and VistaVision films of the '50s and '60s need to turn up in this format, even the somewhat mediocre ones.

The above-quoted dialogue can be found...

I've been punched, kicked and spat upon, but never face-slapped. I take that back -- a pretty blonde who'd had a few drinks slapped me during a high-school party once. But that was eons ago. I suspect that face slaps are mainly a movie thing because they look and sound highly dramatic. I don't believe people actually slap each other in real life. I've almost never seen it happen, nor have I ever heard of it happening.

That said, this clip from Charley Varrick is one...

A quote from Leonardo DiCaprio in the current Esquire goes hand in hand with the Roger Ebert profile, if you think about it: "When I was eighteen, River Phoenix was far and away my hero. Think of all those early great performances -- My Own Private Idaho. Stand by Me. I always wanted to meet him. One night, I was at this Halloween party, and he passed me. He was beyond pale -- he looked white. Before I got a chance to say hello, he was gone, driving off to the Viper Room, where he fell over and died. That's a...

Chris Jones' profile of Roger Ebert, one of the most perceptive and deeply moving pieces I've read about anyone, is in the current Esquire. Here are portions:

"Roger Ebert can't remember the last thing he ate. He can't remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn't happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory -- it wasn't as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a...Read More

In Contention's Guy Lodge has called Noah Baumbach's Greenberg "a shaggy, often very funny addition to the recent mini-genre of manchild movies." And Variety's Todd McCarthy has termed it "an outstanding L.A. movie."

"As a study of stasis and of people conscious of not living the lives they had imagined for themselves," McCarthy continues, "Greenberg offers a bracing undertow of seriousness beneath the deceptively casual, dramatically offhand surface, even if the characters' vague ambitions and aimless actions leave the film seeming relatively uneventful on a moment-to-moment...Read More

Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer "has some of the same elements as Chinatown in that it's about "a hero who is never quite as smart as he believes because he's looking at only a small section of the puzzle, without realizing that there is more to it than he can take in.

"The script, by Polanski and novelist Robert Harris, does offer clues - but it resolutely puts us in the ghost's shoes. The Ghost Writer can be frustrating because you only know as much as the main character right up until the final scene. But when it all becomes clear,...Read More

There's a legit transcript of Benicio del Toro's visit to the Howard Stern Show last Thursday morning, provided by marksfriggin.com. Here are the YouTube recordings: #1, #2, #3 and #4.

Hard info #1: Benicio "said he was going to do a movie with Scorsese" -- a presumed reference to the dreaded Silence -- but that got "pushed." Hard info #2: Benicio said "the Three Stooges thing"," which he said is basically "three episodes" stitched together, is "still alive but they don't have a date for that." Here's a portion of the transcript:

"Howard read that Benicio's...Read More

"Christina Hendricks thinks all the talk about her body is a little embarrassing," writes New York's Amy Larocca. "'It kind of hurt my feelings at first," the Mad Men star remarks. 'Anytime someone talks about your figure constantly, you get nervous, you get really self-conscious. I was working my butt off on the show, and then all anyone was talking about was my body!'" Which is why Hendricks wore hot lingerie to illustrate the piece (and grace the cover of the current issue).

Larocca, by the way, has also written a shockingly cruel and thoughtless...Read More

55 minutes of battery time left means there's no time to tap out a 750-word Shutter Island review. But here's that David Edelstein New York pan that's giving pause to the Friends of Marty crowd. I agree up and down -- SI is a long slog and then some. Because it's purely a movie-atmosphere exercise with zero narrative intrigue (anyone could spot the third-act twist in the trailer), it's almost as difficult to get through as Kundun.

"Some great directors, as they age, strive to simplify and refine their technique in the hope of getting closer to their subjects," Edelstein begins,...Read More

I'm typing this from seat 9A (window) on an American flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth to LaGuardia It's 6:15 pm -- somewhere over Arkansas. $12 and change to connect the laptop; $8 and change for the iPhone. The pages are coming up a bit slowly, but it's better than nothing.

I can see right now where the Shutter Island discussion will go. Hip, older urban critics like Marshall Fine will do the usual solidarity thing (i.e., their standard response whenever a reasonably decent film by a venerated director comes out) and pass out "Friends of Marty" buttons at screenings and so on. And that's fine. A fair portion of their readers, of course, will feel a wee bit puzzled if not burned when they shell out their twelve bucks, but that's the rough and tumble of it.

I did my farewell hugs with the Santa Barbara Film Festival team last night. For the most part at a big noisy wrap party at a place called Eos. I was forced to leave when a large crowd started dancing to Kool and the Gang. Thanks to Roger Durling, Carol Marshall and the others who made my ten-day stay a pleasant one. (Excepting that goon who got in my face the other night.) Short hop to LAX, LAX to Dallas, Dallas to LaGuardia -- back around 9 pm.

A leftover pic from eight or...

Since mid December I've been 90% convinced that Kathryn Bigelow would take the Best Director Oscar with the Best Picture prize going to Avatar for mostly political reasons (3D game-changer, all-time champion earner, injector of economic vitality into the industry, tens of millions of dazzled international fans). Whenever there's a toss-up contest, the majority of Academy voters always favor the political.

But hearing last night that The Hurt Locker had won the Best Edited Feature (Dramatic) Eddie Award over Avatar made me go "wait a minute...I'm sensing an alignment of the planets here." It was actually that plus a web-journalist colleague confiding...Read More

I took some very sloppy and haphazard footage of Crazy Heart's Jeff Bridges during this afternoon's Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute. I'm sorry. It happens. I guess I didn't try hard enough. One reason that Bridges' on-stage discussion with In Contention's Kris Tapley's was over in a flash is that Bridges "had a dinner reservation" so Tapley kept it short so as not to hang him up. Good manners.

Bridges said he thinks his Crazy Heart performance is among his "top five." Tapley didn't ask what the other...Read More

Someone working for the Copenhagen film magazine Ekko allegedly reported today -- get this -- that Martin Scorsese is open to the idea of remaking Taxi Driver with Lars von Trier as some kind of creative partner. Or vice versa.

Can't be real. Has to be bullshit.

The report, allegedly emanating from the Berlin Film Festival, says Scorcese and von Trier are in attendance, and that the two men had discussed the possibility of a remake. And it gets more twisted. The Ekko story allegedly says that Robert De Niro would again play the title role -- presumably a reference...Read More

Tales From The Golden Age, the Romanian omnibus film that dispenses heh-heh (as opposed to tee-hee or yaw-haw) humor, will screen at Lincoln Center on Saturday night. I was down with Tales when I saw it last May in Cannes, but I wasn't exactly enthralled. The underpinnings of bureacratic torpor and enslavement keep it from being "funny." It's more in the realm of mild amusement.

4 Months, Three Weeks, 2 Days helmer Cristian Mungiu directed one of the segments. The whole thing runs 155 minutes.

Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez has written that Kawasaki's Rose, the latest from prolific Czech director Jan Hrebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky, is "easily the best feature of the first few days of the Berlin Film Festival -- the one undeniable find so far."

"A story about an elderly ex-Communist whose misdeeds during the Dubcek era are slowly revealed, it slipps easily back and forth between various perspectives (and such is Jarchovsky's skill, every character here was nuanced, contradictory, fully realized), and parceled out its revelations as deliberately and rigorously as a conspiracy thriller." Kawasaki's Rose "ranks among the writer and director's very...Read More

Copout director Kevin Smith tweeted last night that Southwest Airlines had bumped him off an Oakland-to-Burbank jet because he was "too wide for the sky." The airline's "customer of size" policy is that extra-large types have to buy two seats to contain their ampleness. If there are no twins available on a given flight, you're bumped. Smith was reportedly given a $100 voucher and put on a subsequent Southwest flight.

Sample tweets: (a) "Hey @SouthwestAir! Look how fat I am on your plane! Quick! Throw me off!"; (b) "The @SouthwestAir Diet. How it works: you're...Read More

I've never sprinkled an exotic seasoning (jalapeno, sour cream and onion, caramel, white cheddar) on popcorn in my life, and I never would under any circumstance.

Roger Durling's on-stage interview last night with A Single Man star Colin Firth went on too long, but the conversational vibe was easy and unforced. And yet probing, amusing, revealing. I love the smile that always follows after Firth delivers one of those wry, self-deprecating comments. A very mellow fellow. The tribute reel reminded that he does anger quite well when a scene calls for it, but he has virtually none of it on his own, or so it seems.

I was convinced Firth was the leading Best...Read More

During an interview inside Santa Barbara's Lobero theatre yesterday afternoon, director Oliver Stone (Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps) spoke about South of the Border, his still-unreleased documentary about a political sea-change brought about by a group of nativist, left-leaning South American leaders over the last few years.

Early in the discussion Stone riffed on the U.S. government's constant investment in creating, agitating and maintaining enemies, which is primarily fueled by perceptions that their values aren't sufficiently supportive of U.S. financial interests. He was primarily alluding to...Read More

In the view of Variety's Todd McCarthy, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is "expert, screw-turning narrative filmmaking put at the service of old-dark-madhouse claptrap."

I've seen Shutter Island myself and wholeheartedly agree about the last four words.

The film "arguably occupies a similar place in Scorsese's filmography as The Shining does in Stanley Kubrick's," McCarthy goes on. "Protean skill and unsurpassed knowledge of Hollywood genres [are used to] create a dark, intense thriller involving insanity, ghastly memories, mind-alteration and violence, all wrapped in a story about the search for a missing patient at an island asylum."

That's all well and good,...Read More

You may think you've absorbed all you can of the appalling Sarah Palin, but John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's Game Change manages to up the ante. Their account of her behavior during the '08 campaign is -- no exaggeration whatsoever -- mind-blowing. Particularly their reporting in the chapter called "Seconds in Command," which starts on page 395. Palin is portrayed -- quite convincingly -- as an astonishingly arrogant cretin.

Realizing she urgently needed to prepare big-time for upcoming press interviews, McCain campaign staffers Randy Scheuneman and Steve Biegun "sat Palin down, spread out a map of the...Read More

On May 25th Criterion is bringing out a remastered DVD and a Bluray of John Ford's legendary Stagecoach (1939). I've never thought of Bert Glennon's black-and-white capturing of this classic western as exceptional or stunning or anything in that realm, but maybe I've never really "seen" Stagecoach.

Cover of Criterion's Stagecoach Blu-ray, due May 3rd; John Wayne as the Ringo Kid.

I know it's an iconic film and all, but somehow it's never quite rung my cowbell. I love that famous rapid dolly-forward shot of John Wayne as much as the next...Read More

Why do I feel slightly conflicted about this musical Haiti heart video? It's well shot, well cut, well performed, etc. And everyone is coming from the right place. Except a voice is telling me it's an advertisement for the performers first and a plea for donations second. (Or third.) I guess it's also the sight of Jackostein at the original 1985 "We Are The World" recording. I was sorta with it until he showed. A bad taste.

Last night's Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute was a presentation of Cinema Vanguard awards to Up In The Air's Vera Farmiga, An Education's Peter Sarsgaard, Inglourious Basterds costar Christoph Waltz and Precious star Gabby Sidibe. (Lovely Bones costar Stanley Tucci was also honored but in absentia -- he's directing a play in New York.)

At Santa Barbara's Lobero theatre during last night's Cinema Vanguard tribute: (l. to r.) Christoph Waltz, Vera Farmiga, Roger Durling, Peter Sarsgaard, Gabby Sidibe.

Festival chief Roger Durling handled the introductions, patter and chit-chat with smoothitude and high intelligence. It was all to...Read More

My movie-monk life won't be fulfilled, I've just decided, until I visit the site where Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant shot the crop-dusting scene from North by Northwest. For whatever reason I've never learned before today where the location actually was. It's just east of the intersection of Corcoran Road and Garces Highway (155) outside the towns of Wasco and Delano, near Highway 46 off interstate 5.

In a 2.12 Huffington Post-ing, Center for Transatlantic Relations senior fellow Michael Brenner explains how President Barack Obama has gradually revealed his true nature as that of a "moderate Republican before the species became extinct."

The Obama enigma "grows day by day," he writes. "Contradiction after contradiction, abrupt gear shifts, perpetual motion that never reaches a destination. 'Obscene' Wall Street bonuses suddenly transmute into well-earned rewards for a good-guy golfing buddy; the imperative to act boldly on the jobs crisis means placing it the callous hands of Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley of health care fame; the plotting of exit strategies...Read More

Derek Elley's Variety review of The Ghost Writer "is nonsense...it's Roman Polanski's best in years," says an HE reader who's also seen it. I'm also struck by an observation from Screen Daily's Fionnuala Halligan that the film "bears all the hallmarks of Polanski's distinctive style" while Elley said that Polanski "brings not a jot of his own directorial personality or quirks" to the film. Disparate much?

(l. to r.) Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Pierce Brosnan in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer.

Here's a rave by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. He calls it "a gripping conspiracy thriller...Read More

Rachel Maddow's MSNBC interview with Quentin Tarantino begins with a clip from the infamous Donny Donowitz baseball-bat scene (i.e., the one I took great exception to last August), and then with Maddow smiling and chuckling and seeming to say "hey, Quentin, very cool" and so on, as if she's heartily approving of (or is certainly cool with) the scene.

Seeing this got me all riled again. Here's the nub of what I wrote six and a half months ago:

"The scene in which Inglourious Basterds starts to smell rancid is one in which Brad Pitt and the Basterds...Read More

The Associated Press reported today that in their weekly protest against the barrier near the village of Bilin, Palestinian protesters "have added a colorful twist to demonstrations against Israel's separation barrier, painting themselves blue and posing as nativist characters from Avatar. In so doing they were obviously equating their struggle to that of James Cameron's ten-foot-tall smurfs, and the Israeli position to that of Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang's. What say ye to this, Jim?

In a Valentine's Day piece called "This Video Will Get You Laid," Matt Zoller Seitz salutes the realm of "emotional gotcha" cinema with a montage of romantic moments.

Derek Elley's partial trashing of The Hurt Locker at the 2008 Venice Film Festival told me I had to henceforth regard his reviews with a grain of salt. That said, his Berlin Film Festival pan of Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer seems to put a damper on expectations.

I'm particularly concerned about this passage: "Pic's literalism is also its biggest handicap. Eight years since his last major success, The Pianist, the 76-year-old helmer brings not a jot of his own directorial personality or quirks to a political pulp thriller whose weaknesses (let alone lack of any real action or thrills) are...Read More

The full Oscar-nominated screenplay for Armando Ianucci's In The Loop is now available online. And here's a note from Iannucci about the script.

The Wolfman cost a ton of money (something close to $100 million), and it makes you feel like you're stuck inside a deep stone pit with Universal werewolves prowling back and forth and worrying about the grosses. Rowwrrlll! -- make it shorter! Rowf! -- let's throw in another beheading! Owwooooohhll! -- we need to at least get those research scores into the 70s! Let's bring in Walter Murch...snarrrrrll!

You can't say it doesn't look great -- every scene is expertly smothered in fog and smoke and ominous shadows, or is lit by candles. Cheers to cinematographer Shelly Johnson...Read More

If I was Jon Hamm, I'd have it locked into my contract that for every film I do my hair has to be the exact same early '60s Mad Men coif every time out. Okay, I'd be amenable to longish '70s hair...fine. But I'd make it double clear that I'll never have to wear hair that looks like a raggedy wig based on Richard Burton's appearance in Becket.

I have to abandon Santa Barbara for a day to take care of two or three things in Los Angeles. One of them being a Wolfman screening. I'm leaving in a half-hour or so. Santa Barbara's pastoral serenity can get on your nerves. It'll feel good to deal with the clutter and traffic snarls and billboard crap of West Los Angeles.

A frame capture from DVD Beaver's review of the forthcoming Bluray of Alexander McKendrick's The Ladykillers. I prefer this version to the 2004 Coen brothers version with Tom Hanks because of (a) Alec Guiness's performance as Professor Marcus (tied with his Bridge on the River Kwai colonel as my all-time Guiness favorite) and particularly his grotesque buck teeth, and (b) the fact that the original doesn't deal with irritable bowel syndrome.

It appears that Joe Johnston's The Wolfman isn't nearly as painful or problematic as Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day -- but they're both drawing primarily negative Rotten Tomato ratings. The Eloi couldn't care less, of course. Tracking indicates that both will do nicely this weekend with Valentine's Day pulling slightly ahead.

Valentine's Day's first choice open & release is 27 compared to The Wolfman's 24. Definite Wolfman interest is at 50/54 among younger/older males. Definite Valentine's Day interest among younger/older women is at a staggering 67/58. Has there ever been a more relentlessly brainless moviegoing demographic than 21st Century women under the...Read More

Last night the heroes of The Cove -- director Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry, the doc's sad-eyed, dolphin-loving, consience-wracked star -- sat for a q & a at Santa Barbara's Lobero theatre following a showing of the film. The recent news that The Cove has finally been acquired for theatrical distribution in Japan-- a major breakthrough in the campaign to put an end to dolphin killing in Taiji -- lent an air of muted satisfaction.

(l. to r.) The Cove director Louie Psihoyos, Ric O'Barry, Mike DeGruy during last night's Lobero theatre tribute.

The finale came with Psihoyos...Read More

Times Online DVD guy Michael Moran has written a fairly brutal pan of Joe Johnston's The Wolfman.

"As a late night DVD guilty pleasure with a bottle of wine and a playful disposition, it will probably make quite a few people very happy. As a 21st Century big screen experience, it's something of a howler.

"The Wolfman opens, naturally, with a 'boo' sequence to give you the idea that you're watching some sort of horror flick. After that you are necessarily treated to a big ugly lump of exposition that explains what Emily Blunt is doing there and why Benicio Del Toro...Read More

This just-posted Joy Behar Show clip of Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff and Jackie Collins passing along an anatomical observation about John Edwards (which allegedly comes from someone who's seen the Edwards-Hunter sex tape) is...how to describe? It's stunning to consider how far down into the swamp Edwards has sunk. On the other hand this is the first semi-positive news about the guy since the summer of '08. The content is icky, but it provided the first real laugh of the day. I'm sorry.

Vanity Fair's John Lopez has attempted to explain how the Academy preferential voting system is much more of a good thing than a bad thing. "The Academy grabbed our attention this year by expanding the best-picture nominees to an all-inclusive field of 10," he begins. "But amid all the [talk] about whether or not this devalues Oscar, no one seemed to notice that the Academy also switched to a preferential voting system for the Best Picture category.

"That is, until Steven Zeitchik at the L.A. Times exposed the system, painting a nightmare scenario in...Read More

Referring to President Obama's shockwave of an interview with Bloomberg News, in which he once again caressed and winked at bankers by rhetorically kissing their asses, N.Y. Times coluimnist Paul Krugman has asked "how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?

"First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn't brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.

"And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer...Read More

I honestly found David Denby's review of the Red Riding Trilogy better written, easier to understand and more thematically satisfying than the trilogy itself. By all means see this British-made miniseries if you're so inclined, but my advice is to read Denby's review and save yourself the grief. If for no other reason than the fact that the north-country accents are all but indecipherable. The only way for Americans to watch this immersion in murk and depression is to wait for a subtitled DVD.

Andrew Garfield, Rebecca Hall in Red Riding: 1974.

I hated Andrew...Read More

HE's Moises Chiullan vigorously riffs on how Surrogates, the Bruce Willis flick now available on DVD/Bluray, "directly confronts the addiction to little lit-up screens and avoiding real social contact in the world."

Anyone can repeat a generic list of worthwhile train movies. The very best is John Frankenheimer's The Train -- no arguments! -- followed by The General, Runaway Train, The Lady Vanishes, The Darjeeling Limited, Narrow Margin, Silver Streak, etc. But one that's been more or less forgotten (and which isn't half bad) is Francis D. Lyon's The Great Locomotive Chase ('56), a Civil War actioner that costarred Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

It'll never be anyone's idea of a great film -- it was a family-friendly Disney production -- but it's a completely decent one...Read More

Has anyone ever mentioned that Up co-director Pete Docter looks like a cartoon character? It's mainly that exaggerated jaw. I've been trying to put my finger on it, but it hit me last night -- he's almost a dead ringer for a thinner version of "Mr. Incredible" in Brad Bird's The Incredibles.

Up director Pete Docter; Mr. Incredible.

It's no good when characters afflicted with galloping lycanthropy turn into actual wolves. I like my werewolves to be hybrids -- hairy creatures with human-type bodies who run around in a kind of half-crouch position, and who sometimes keep their shirts on when they transform. Benicio del Toro's Wolfman beast follows this mode. Ditto Jack Nicholson in Wolf, Oliver Reed in Curse of the Werewolf, Lon Chaney in The Wolfman, etc. I hated John Landis's decision to turn his American Werewolf in London star David Naughton into a four-legged wolf with paws and claws.

"In one small experiment on sexual response to food scents, vaginal and penile blood flow was measured in 31 men and women who wore masks emitting various food aromas. This was the study that found men susceptible to the scent of doughnuts mingled with licorice. For women, first place for most arousing was a tie between baby powder and the combination of Good & Plenty candy with cucumber. Coming in second was a combination of Good & Plenty and banana nut bread." -- from a 2.9.10 N.Y. Times story by Sara Kershaw.

I'm not saying there hasn't been another instance in movie history in which the star of a film has looked this similar to the director. I'm asking someone to prove otherwise. Last summer I noticed a striking similarity between Public Enemies director and cowriter Michael Mann and costar Jason Clarke, but that's a different equation.

Inception director-writer Chris Nolan; star Leonardo DiCaprio.

Vulture editor Claude Brodesser-Akner shares some exclusive details on New Line's Escape From New York remake, which apparently has no director and no star. Early rumors mentioned Brett Ratner or Jonathan Mostow to helm and Gerard Butler to star. Kurt Russell's Plissken was a hoot but the original John Carpenter feature (which I did a Manhattan set story on back in '79) was, for me, no more than okay. All I could think of when I saw it was "boy, has Carpenter lost it or what?" (He peaked with the original Assault on Precinct 13.)

"It's not that Valentine's Day is a chick flick. I've seen funny chick flicks. This is a nitwit flick -- the movie equivalent of an elaborately wrapped package which turns out to contain only styrofoam peanuts. If you want to see a funny, romantic and touching film for Valentine's Day, rent Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. If you want to see Valentine's Day, light your money on fire and watch it burn -- it will have an equivalent entertainment value and you'll save on gas, parking and snacks." -- from Marshall Fine's just-posted review.

I've been keen to read Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit script for a while now. This morning a draft of it (their third, dated 6.12.09) arrived in my inbox. I was dazzled right away by the robust poetic flavor of the Old West dialogue, which I presume is partly taken from the Charles Portis novel. There's hardly a single line that resembles the English spoken today in the U.S. of Eloi, and it's pure pleasure. True Grit-speak is as specifically unto itself as the Elizabethan English spoken during William Shakespeare's day.

The Coens being the...Read More

The Rotten Tomato ratings so far for Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day (currently running at 14% positive) are easily the worst of the year. Then again, the year is only five weeks old. An industry friend confides that "even the stars at the premiere were appalled at how bad it is...it starts with the script." Will this have even a faint effect upon the interest levels of Eloi women?

The green-lighting of Mission Impossible 4 means that Paramount believes that Tom Cruise has moved past his nutter rep and everything's jake again. But JJ Abrams' decision to produce rather than direct means there are intuitions that the potential response may be less than ecstatic. If they get a journeyman to direct, Joe Popcorn will smell "boilerplate" and react accordingly. M:I:4 will be released Memorial Day weekend of 2011.

Here's a British-made short (directed by Richard Curtis, starring Bill Nighy) pushing the idea of a Robin Hood banker's tax. Good thinking, should be enacted here.

A few days ago I linked to the rear-entry Sports Illustrated cover photo of Olympic skiing star Lindsay Vonn. I noted the implication only to be told by several HE responders that I was reading too much into it, etc. Here's a photo of Vonn from another issue that's a bit more explicit.

Mark Adnum, the Australian writer and editor of Outrate, has thoroughly explained why giving a Best Actress Oscar to Meryl Streep for Julie and Julia is a bad idea.

"Putting fandom and loyalty aside," he writes, "does anyone really think that her performance in Julie and Julia is so great that it needs to be recognized with the same prize given to her work in Sophie's Choice? Giving Streep an Oscar for a performance that can't hold a candle to those that she deservedly won for -- as Dustin Hoffman's unstable young wife in Kramer vs. Kramer and as the undead Auschwitz...Read More

Earlier today The Playlist posted a Vimeo rendering of "Che and the Digital Cinema Revolution," a 33-minute documentary about the RED digital camera that was used to shoot Steven Soderbegh's two-part epic and its effect on modern film production.

Che and the Digital Cinema Revolution from high rez on Vimeo.

How many years has the Farrelly Brothers' Three Stooges movie been in preparation? Since at least 2004, which is when the New Yorker's Ian Parker wrote about the project as well as the Farrelly's hope that they might get Russell Crowe to portray Moe. The project is cursed. The only thing that can save it is Mel Gibson signing on.

On 12.2.09 Cinematical's Monika Bartyzel, following-up on a Variety announcement, reported that Paul Thomas Anderson and Philip Seymour Hoffman would be teaming up for a new flick "about a man who creates his own religion." The feature would cost in the vicinity of $35 million with Hoffman playing "the Master," an L. Ron Hubbardish figure "who starts a faith-based organization in the 1950s. He teams up with a twentysomething drifter named Freddie who becomes his lieutenant until the kid finds himself questioning the faith he's gotten himself involved in."

In its announcement story, Variety wrote that...Read More

I know Steven Soderbergh's forthcoming virus movie, called Contagion, is going to thrill and enthrall because there's nothing better than when a idiosyncratic high-integrity helmer goes down the primal popcorn route. Except I really don't want to see a virus movie about pale-faced people staggering around with their noses bleeding and sores on their cheeks. I don't want that stuff in my head. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, "Go sell virus someplace else -- we're all stocked up here." (The Playlist's Rodrigo Perez has the scoop.)

We're all expecting the humor is be sharp and bee-stingy during Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin's hosting of the 3.7 Oscar Awards. But it's highly unusual for an official Oscar poster to sell the hosts rather than the event itself...no? Hasn't every previous poster just settled on some new rendering of the classic iconography?

An iPhone repair site called iResQ has posted photos of a possibly authentic representation of the forthcoming iPhone 4G. The big news is that it's about 1/4 inch taller than the iPhone 3G . The 4G is supposed to come out sometime this summer. I may not be able to get it because of the terms of my AT&T contract. Everyone really despises AT&T, and with good reason.

Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling conducted an intelligent and intriguing discussion last night with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow at the Lobero theatre. You can't hear him as clearly as Bigelow on my video clip, but that's okay. The Loveless, Near Dark and Blue Steel weren't right for me. Like many others I got on the Bigelow boat with Point Break, and it was clear sailing until September '08 when I first saw The Hurt Locker, at which point she entered my all-time pantheon.

Rich Juzwiak of fourfour.com has compiled all the famous bathroom-mirror-shock scenes into one YouTube clip. He misses, of course, the seminal grandaddy of mirror-scare scenes from Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) -- i.e., the moment when Catherine Denueve closes her bedroom closet door and the mirror catches a guy standing behind her.

The Repulsion moment happens around 1.35.

I guess Juzwiak didn't use it because...what, it didn't take place in a bathroom? The man is handicapped. His montage is a perfect distillation of the...

Stephen Colbert's latest Sarah Palin riff (which aired last night) concluded with a blunt but stirring punchline. (It took him a while to get there.) More crackling is the argument about Palin on Joy Behar's CNN show between the disapproving Ron Reagan Jr. and the Medusa-haired Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com.

Eight years ago Newark Star-Ledger film critic Stephen J. Whitty asked Harrison Ford about Marshall Fine's notion that stinking rich film stars should consider using their power and freedom to make small personal indie-style films, and "he thought I was crazy," Whitty reports.

"Ford isn't just an actor but a movie star, too -- not just a celebrity but a commodity. He's extremely aware of how long he chased success in Hollywood, acutely conscious of the business of the show business he's in. And he's at peace with that. [During our interview to promote Kathryn Bigelow's K9], "the...Read More

Everyone wants health care reform but the Democrats "couldn't sell it," Bill Maher said to Jay Leno last Friday night. They're so impotent in their unwillingness to wield power that "they couldn't sell a cub scout to a pedophile," he said.

Ed Luce's Financial Times assessment of the Obama administration's failure says it's basically caught in a campaign mode, and that the principal bad guys behind this emphasis are Obama's four most trusted aides -- chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, senior adviser David Axelrod, spokesperson Robert Gibbs and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

A HuffPost summary states that "if current trends continue, this once mesmerizing Camelot-ish operation will be be seen in the history books as the presidential administration that -- to distort slightly and inversely paraphrase Churchill -- never have so many talented people managed to achieve so...Read More

Marshall Fine is wondering why three fabulously wealthy big-name actors who are past their prime and on their way down -- Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson -- don't just retire from the mass-market movie game and henceforth act only in pure indie or even straight-to-video flicks for young directors who could use their help.

In a pig's eye. You'd think that a marquee-name actor with several hundred million in his or her bank account would want to make movies for quality-chops alone and hang the box-office. But for some perverse reason the richer actors get the less inclined they are...Read More

Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond recently reported Avatar director-writer James Cameron believes that were it not for the Alice in Wonderland, Hubble 3D and How To Train Your Dragon eating up all the 3-D screens in March that Avatar might reach the $3 billion worldwide mark.

I asked Cameron about this myself two nights ago and he confirmed. I don't know about the $3 billion but he's almost certainly right that if Avatar could remain in all the 3-D venues it would continue to earn big-time into March and April.

"Back in 1979, Marty Feldman was concerned about the increasing piety of the right wing, the blind susceptibility of their followers, the insatiable reach of American corporations and people like Anita Bryant invoking God's name in regards to subjugating others," a friend writes. "I know exactly what he'd make of Sarah Palin today.

Feldman's In God We Trust, which he directed and co-wrote, bombed with the critics and didn't sell many tickets. It was also torpedoed, sand-bagged and dis-owned by its own distributor, Universal Pictures.

It's a...Read More

My strongest impressions regarding last night's Chopin Virtuosos tribute featuring An Education's Carey Mulligan, A Serious Man's Michael Stuhlbarg, The Lovely Bones' Saoirse Ronan, and Young Victoria's Emily Blunt, in this order: (a) the fact that Mulligan got the biggest laugh (see video below), (b) moderator Sean Smith's observation that Mulligan has "probably heard from scores of middle-aged men telling her that they loved An Education," (c) Ronan's Irish accent is endearing, and (d) a notion that Stuhlbarg is a man with great lakes of inner peace.

Carey Mulligan at last night's Chopin Virtuosos tribute at SB's Lobero theatre.

Earlier today And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg asked Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron to comment on the similarities between Strange Days and Avatar, the plots of which were both hatched sometime between '94 or '95.

As mentioned earlier, Quentin Tarantino had the best story-telling riffs during today's "Directors on Directing" panel discussion at Santa Barbara's Lobero theatre. I'm posting three Tarantino excerpts here. I'm sorry I missed his boast about being the owner of the only repertory house in Los Angeles (i.e., the New Beverly) and how he'll "burn the place down" before he shows anything there with digital projection.

The first [above] is a story that Brian DePalma told him about his feelings in 1980 regarding Blow Out vs. Raging Bull....Read More

For those who don't own the Criterion DVD of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (or who've never watched the extras), this Peter Ustinov recollection contains a funny, must-see Charles Laughton impression plus two or three stories about Laughton during pre-production and principal.

We all know that Hurt Locker helmer Kathryn Bigelow has been uninterested in playing the gender card when asked about her potential to become the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar. And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg is nonetheless running quotes from three female directors -- Gina Prince-Blythewood (The Secret Life of Bees), Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don't Cry, Stop-Loss) and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp, 12th and Delaware) -- about Bigelow being on the precipice.

Listen to Alex North's "love theme from Spartacus" before playing this brief video clip.

I've just come from the "Directors on Directing" panel discussion at the Lobero theatre. A good one. Quentin Tarantino delivered the most entertaining riffs; Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron, sitting beside each other, were a kind of tag team and ranked a close second. The other panelists were Lee Daniels (Precious), Pete Docter (Up) and Todd Phillips (The Hangover). It was moderated by Variety's Peter Bart.

As if by magic or cosmic intuition, yesterday's suggestion that Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute ceremonies could use a little less discipline and perhaps unfold less smoothly and uniformly came true hours later during last night's James Cameron tribute at the Arlington theatre. And everyone played their parts beautifully.

Except for the show starting almost 35 minutes late (i.e., around 8:35 pm), almost nothing happened as planned. Cameron began delivering his acceptance speech at the get-go as host Leonard Maltin stood on the opposite side of...Read More

Clearly the little kid in the hat was (a) feeling under-appreciated and wanted some attention, or (b) was indicating to the audience and the producers that he thought little of Back to the Future III and that people who felt otherwise knew what they could do. Either way this is one of the most blatant "why did they leave this in?" shots since the young kid in the cafeteria who plugged his ears before Eva Marie Saint shot Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

"I don't know what I'm allowed to say about Inception," Leonardo DiCaprio recently told a junket journalist for the Philippine Inquirer.

"It's Chris [Nolan] delving into dream psychoanalysis and, at the same time, making a high-octane, surreal film that came from his mind. He wrote the entire thing, and it all made sense to him. [But] it didn't make sense to many of us when we were doing it. We had to do a lot of detective work to figure out what the movie was about."

To me DiCaprio's statement as almost an iron-clad guarantee that Inception is going to...Read More

I was irritated earlier this afternoon at the absolute refusal of the L.A. Times/Envelope Oscar-preference software to allow me to buy a few shares of Christoph Waltz stock, but that's forgotten now. It vanished from my head the minute I saw the great-looking design of the L.A. Times All Stars rundown of choices and...uh, stock picks. It's the coolest-looking thing I've been a part of, visually, in any medium. I feel genuinely honored and gratified to have been included.

Some of the most gifted screenwriters in the business sorta kinda dropped the personality ball this morning. The goal of any participant in a panel discussion is to inject some energy and perhaps a little unruly pizazz into the proceedings. But this morning's "It Starts With The Script" discussion, moderated by Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson, never got off the ground, much less got my pulse racing.

How's this for a great angle and a great photograph? I would have shown up at the rear of Santa Barbara's Lobero theatre for the the pre-discussion photo op, but nobody told me...

Who cared/knew/gave a shit about Dear John, the Amanda Seyfried-Channing Tatum drama that kicked Avatar to the curb yesterday, and is expected to earn $35 million by Sunday night?

I had the tracking that pre-told the tale, but I couldn't be bothered with all the SBIFF razmatazz and running around.

London's National Film & Television School has created a tart comedy short -- Mr. Pixel Mrs. Grain: A Never-Ending Love Story -- that offers "a humorous illustration of the benefit from both worlds of film and digital." Fine and good, but the grain monks folded their tents and went into hiding after Martin Scorsese more or less sided with the HE view. Game over.

Last night Pete Hammond briefly mentioned Gun Shy, my favorite Sandra Bullock-produced film of all time, and then dropped it. Bullock said nothing (i.e., let's move on), and had little to add when I mentioned it at the after-party. "Some of us really loved that film," I said. "Elvis Mitchell did handstands over it in his N.Y. Times review." This is how good but under-appreciated movies die on Netflix -- even their producers are ready to sweep them under the rug.

There's always a vague...Read More

I was reminded of three or four things during last night's Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute to Sandra Bullock. One, she's whip-smart but uncomplicated -- she had a clean and concise answer for every question thrown her way, but she's not into soul-baring. Two, she worked long and hard to prove her way out of the romantic-comedy prison she felt trapped in about ten years ago. Three, she didn't want to portray her Blind Side character (the real-life Leigh Anne Tuohy) because she felt she was an unrealistic construct -- but she changed her mind after meeting her.

Sandra Bullock,...

I've tapped out a summary of the films I'm intending to put into the 2010 Oscar Balloon but without acting nominations, which no one ever knows anything about until they happen. Here's how the list looks as we speak -- suggestions/critiques are welcome. Nearly 60 films of some apparent distinction, or so it would appear.

BEST PICTURE

True Grit (Paramount, d: Joel and Ethan Coen; Inception (Warner Bros.), d: Chris Nolan; Fair Game (Zucker/Participant), d: Doug Liman; The Conspirator (Wildwood), d: Robert Redford; The Social Network (Sony/Columbia), d: David Fincher; Hereafter (Warner Bros.), d: Clint Eastwood; Green Zone (Universal), d: Paul Greengrass; Biutiful...Read More

Hotshot director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Kinsey, Gods and Monsters) is reportedly developing and co-writing a proposed half-hour series for HBO called Tilda, about a Nikki Finke-styled Hollywood blogger.

If Condon and co-writer Cynthia Mort base their character too closely on Finke they'll be stuck with a hugely unappealing character, to say the least -- thorny, indifferent to the Catholic-church aspect of movie-watching, vindictive tendencies, curiously hermetic, cut off from the Seinfeld-like aroma of average human experience, etc.

I wouldn't watch a half-hour series about a Finke-like character with a gun to my head. I would suggest that Condon-Mort focus on...Read More

"Black films looking to attract white audiences flatter them with [a] kind of stereotype: the merciful slave master," African-American author Ismael Reed writes in today's N.Y. Times.

"In guilt-free bits of merchandise like Precious, white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.

"It's no surprise either that white critics -- eight out of the nine comments used on the publicity Web site for "Precious" were from white men and women --...Read More

In a 2.5 Daily Mail interview, James Cameron's ex-wife Linda Hamilton quotes the Avatar director as having said the following: "Anybody can be a father or a husband -- there are only five people in the world who can do what I do, and I'm going for that."

I get that. I never felt this way about fathering, but my own dad kind of went that way -- he loved being a big-league advertising hot-shot, and wasn't that into hugging or nurturing his kids. So I have an understanding. Big-ego men of high or historic accomplishment tend to embrace whatever makes...Read More

It wouldn't be fair to write about Derek Magyar's Flying Lessons, which opened the Santa Barbara Film Festival last night. I watched the first few minutes, but I had to leave to buy some cough syrup and spray. For some reason a slight cough caused by a throat tickle blew up into something worse yesterday. It was awful. So I got the damn cough syrup, came back, watched the film for another 20 or 25 minutes. And then I gave up.

I don't have to watch...Read More

There's an aura of almost rapturous serenity in the hallways of the Hotel Santa Barbara in the early morning hours. It exudes a realm and a mindset so far removed from the world of Hispanic party elephants it's not even funny. I spoke to a local cab driver last night who didn't even know that Santa Barbara hosts an annual film festival, much that the festival was beginning last night. So many people live in their little bubbles.

It began to rain in Santa Barbara early this morning,...Read More

Cameron, Paxton, Rosenthal, Bigelow, Henriksen, Reiser, Reinhold and Pasdar, to name but a few. Movieline's Kyle Buchanan had this earlier today.

The first line of the second paragraph of Anthony Lane's review of Edge of Darkness (in the 2.8 issue of The New Yorker) reads as follows: "Mel Gibson, who looks and sounds not a day over sixty-five, plays a policeman named Thomas Craven."

The remainder continues: "The name is a joke, since the movie insists, time and again, that he has all but dispensed with fear. Warned by a fellow-officer that "someone armed and dangerous" is on the loose, Craven replies, 'What do you think I am?' This is delivered not with a wink and a...Read More

The YouTube description reads as follows: "Techno Remix of Mel Gibson's WGN interview with Dean Richards, during which Gibson called Dean an asshole on air."

The L.A.County Coroner's office has announced that Brittany Murphy died of "community acquired pneumonia complicated by iron deficiency anemia and multiple drug intoxication." They're calling it "accidental." It would appear, however, that the drugs didn't get into her system as a result of a gang of ne'er-do-wells kidnapping Murphy and forcing her to swallow them against her will.

HE Blu-ray correspondent Moises Chiullan reports that director William Friedkin has decided against screwing up the To Live and Die in L.A. Bluray in the manner of last year's French Connection debacle.

Friedkin's acid-washed version of his Oscar-winning 1971 film was the first corporate-sanctioned vandalizing of a classic film and the first known instance in which a respected director had defaced his own work. Good to see he's had second thoughts.

I like this teaser one-sheet just fine, but marketing-wise it's too conceptual, too Saul Bass, too Hollywood Key Art Awards. The plebes would take one look and go "naaah."

Leaving for Los Angeles in a few minutes. Won't be filing anything until mid-afternoon, which is when I'll be chilling (I.e., stuck) inside LAX for three hours.

According to "Hollywood's Top 40," a piece by Peter Newcomb on page 272 in the new Vanity Fair, the following filmmakers pocketed the following amounts in 2009: (1) Michael Bay, $125 million; (2) Steven Spielberg, $85 million; (3) Roland Emmerich, $70 million; (4) James Cameron, $50 million; (5) Todd Phillips, $44 million; (6) Daniel Radcliffe, $41 million; (7) Ben Stiller, $40 million; (8) Tom Hanks, $36 million; (9) JJ Abrams, 36 million; and Jerry Bruckheimer, $35 million.

JFK Airport, American Airlines concourse A -- Thursday, 2.4, 9:10 am.

Way down at the bottom of the list is Brad...Read More

Bloomberg.com's Kristen Haunss reported today about slick Wall Street types taking part in a mixed martial arts Fight Club scene at Manhattan's Renzo Gracie Academy.

"We get a lot of finance guys," says RGAA's program director Max McGarr. "It's a good release from their job. If you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's good to come here and get it out." Richard Byrne, CEO of Deutsche Bank Securities who practices jiu-jitsu and sparring at the club, calls it "a great stress reliever...talk about a great way to get aggression out, and it's an unbelievable workout."

Mixed martial arts is...Read More

How many top-tier actors today could do this scene and really give it their all and bring it home, like this fellow does?

"Beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return.

"Beware those who are quick to censor -- they are afraid of what they do not know.

"Beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone."

I've known hundreds if not thousands of people who've seemed to fit the description of those first and third lines. It goes without saying I've never forgotten them. Every time I meet someone new I find myself wondering who they really are (or may be) in the solitude of their cars, beds and bathrooms.

I'm trying to decide whether or not to spend $1500-plus so I can attend 2010 South by Southwest (3.12 to 3.20) and in so doing catch the following (which I haven't yet seen): Bernard Rose's Mr. Nice, Michel Gondry's The Thorn in the Heart, Alexandre O. Philippe's The People vs. George Lucas, Shane Meadows' Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, Steven Soderbergh's And Everything Is Going Fine, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas' American: The Bill Hicks Story, Mike Woolf's Man on A Mission, Jacob Hatley's Ain't In It For My Health: A Film About Levon Helm, Mark Landsman's Thunder Soul and Daniel Stamm's Cotton, as...Read More

If the 2.9.07 release of the dreadful Norbit damaged Eddie Murphy's chances of winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Dreamgirls performance, will last month's DVD/Bluray release of the dreadful All About Steve hurt Sandra Bullock's bid for a Best Actress Oscar? Probably not, but if Steve had been released theatrically this month, maybe. Is Bullock the first actress to have been nominated for a Best Actress Razzie and a Best Actress Oscar the same year?

Canal Street and Broadway -- Wednesday, 2.3.10, 6:15 pm

Hudson Street just south...

The Vancouver Sun's Chris Parry has cited numerous instances in which junket critic Paul Fischer -- an Australian commonly known for dispensing favorable junket-whore quotes -- has used festival notes and synopses to fortify his reviews.

As Parry puts it, "In a case of the world coming full circle, a film reviewer who has made a name for himself being quoted in movie marketing materials is accused of plagiarizing large chunks of his film reviews -- from movie marketing materials." I'm sorry for Fischer, whom I know from the junket/festival circuit, and the woes he...Read More

"Part Peckinpah, part Hong Kong, the movies Luc Besson creates -- including Pierre Morel's From Paris With Love, which he produced and wrote the story for -- are kinetic juggernauts, as carefully plotted with action beats as any of Jerry Bruckheimer's or Joel Silver's films, but with more wit and adrenaline. There's no pretense or wasted motion in Besson's films, and that includes little time spent trying to force sense into the script.

"Rather, Besson's films are like elaborate wind-up toys that seldom rest. You crank them up,...Read More

In yesterday's Network thread someone said that Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital (1971) is a better, more substantial film. I feel the same way. I adore Network but Barnard Hughes ' soliloquy/rationale for his hospital killings is the most eloquent slice of cinema that Hiller ever directed. I'm especially speaking of the portion that begins at 5:56 and ends at 8:00 (concluding with the words "the whole wounded madhouse of our times").

It's staggering -- nobody working today seems to be capable...Read More

It's Santa Barbara Film Festival and fragrant-weather time again. Early tomorrow I'm flying to Los Angeles. Tomorrow afternoon I'll sit for three hours at LAX before catching a puddle-jumper to the so-inconsequential-it's-almost-secretive Santa Barbara airport. Soon after I'll be checked into the Hotel Santa Barbara and walking up State Street to the opening-night film -- Derek Magyar's Flying Lessons. Under cloudy skies.

Held in the immediate wake of the Oscar nominations, the SBIFF is the premiere forum for Oscar Contemplation and Fortification, and a place for lively discussion panels and intriguing films (festival chief Roger Durling...Read More

Yesterday two or three people remarked that I periodically ban people because they voice differing opinions. This spoke more to the posters' shortcomings -- a slight difficulty with accuracy and fairness in their writing -- than to mine. I ban people who resort to personal slurs and a general tone of confrontational ugliness. I've said this until it's coming out of my ears, but I'm using the same standard any person giving a party in his home would hold to. If a guest becomes coarse and abusive, he/she would be asked to leave. Is that really so hard to understand?

I missed this A.O Scott video essay on Network due to my Sundance roamings. There's nothing left to say that's fresh or radical about this 1976 Sidney Lumet film, but I love Scott's response after we're shown a clip in which Robert Duvall says to Faye Dunaway, "For God's sake, Diana -- we're talking about putting a manifestly irresponsible man on national television!"

Another early correct call was made last October by Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling in booking Best Actor nominee Colin Firth...way before it was clear to anyone that the star of Tom Ford's A Single Man would end up as one of the five contenders.

L.A. Times/Envelope columnist Pete Hammond was way in front of everyone on calling The Blind Side as a Best Picture contender and especially as a Best Actress shot for Sandra Bullock. Here's how it went down, according to an e-mail he sent around this morning:

(l. to r.) Sandra Bullock, Pete Hammond, Roger Durling.

"I first saw The Blind Side on the WB lot on October 15th. This was roughly five weeks before opening, and there were about five people in the screening room. I called WB the next day and asked them...Read More

With the exception of a single Best Costume Design nomination for the work of Janet Patterson, Bright Star was shafted big-time this morning -- up and down and around the town. Obviously few cared for the film as an emotional whole, and so all the participants were made to suffer slights. Director Jane Campion , star Abby Cornish and cinematographer Greig Fraser received no nominations. The latter's contribution to Bright Star was perhaps the most award-worthy. Fraser's perfectly measured, vermeer-lit photography was easily the equal of John Alcott's work on Barry Lyndon.

I don't get Penelope Cruz's performance in Nine -- decent, respectable, nothing earth-shaking -- being nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category since it doesn't hold a candle to Marion Cotillard's in Public Enemies. If you add Cottilard's fine Nine performance to the equation it really makes no sense that Cruz made the cut and she didn't.

Except for people possibly saying "well, Cotillard won the Best Actress Oscar for playing Edith Piaf a couple of years ago so she can sit this year out." And their deciding to simultaneously vote for Cruz's work in Broken Embraces. Right?

We all know Mo'nique will...Read More

The five Best Supporting Actor nominees are Christopher Plummer (The Last Station), Woody Harrelson (The Messenger), Matt Damon (Invictus), Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds). Damon? He was okay as South African rugby player Francois Peinaar, but no one in my circle did cartwheels over his performance. Where did this fervor come from? Find me one review in which a critic said Damon had scored in a truly exceptional way.

Tucci gets nominated for speaking in a flavorful accent, playing down the creepiness and wearing a blond wig and rimmed glasses? If you ask me Harrelson was juicier and...Read More

The Best Picture nomination of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man was the only whoo-hoo! among this morning's officially announced Oscar contenders. Even I, one of the film's biggest supporters, had lost hope that it would be included among the ten because so few seemed to share my feelings. After a while you just give up. But good sense prevailed among enough Academy members -- thank the Movie Godz and the better angels of their nature.

Let it be loudly proclaimed and fully understood here and now that the Gurus of Gold who said that A Serious Man had no...Read More

Oscar nomination anticipation woke me up 4:30 am this morning. I've been down this road, know how it goes. It was illogical -- pointless -- to be up that early (particularly knowing that the most rabid Oscar-covering L.A. journalists wouldn't be waking up until 7 am Manhattan time) but when the internal clock says "wake up," there's no choice.

After floating the rumor that Paramount may be picking up Catfish, First Showing.net's Alex Billlington suggests that a title change is in order, whoever acquires the rights.

"I've seen the documentary," he writes, "and I can tell you that the title has nothing to do with anything in it. At one point it's mentioned, but that line is pretty much irrelevant and has no connection with the rest of the story."

Billington is correct. As a title, Catfish is a perfect fulfillment of marquee death. It was arguably the worst Sundance movie title of the entire 2010 festival,...Read More

If the wordless, exquisitely done life-of-a-marriage sequence hadn't been part of Up, would anyone be talking about this animated Pixar film being a likely/deserving Best Picture nominee? We all know the answer.

Up is "simply is not worthy of consideration," writes Sammyray in a piece called "Down on Up." "Most positive reviews (including mine) mentioned the truly beautiful and wordless montage at the outset that tracked the lifelong love of Carl and Ellie. This sequence is easily among Pixar's finest work, mixing complex emotions with a truly magnificent series of images. But 20 minutes does not a Best Picture make."

GeekWeek's Mike Le has compiled a list of the 20 greatest extended takes in movie history (along with 20 YouTube clips illustrating same). His all-time #1 favorite is the entering-the-Copacabana sequence from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. My lifetime favorite is the assault-on-the-van sequence from Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (which ranks #4 on Le's list).

An extended take "is a cinematic hire-wire act that pushes the director, actors, cinematographer, art department, sound design, and every other department to their limits," Le explains. "They take a very long time...Read More

This statistic-driven article posted today by And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg, called "WILL THE ACADEMY REVEAL ITS (COLOR) BLIND SIDE?", conveys the root of the general thinking behind the Precious and Mo'Nique praisings by dutiful Hollywood liberals. It also underlines my repeatedly-stated point that if Precious was about a white-trash Tennessee girl being horribly abused by her low-rent hillbilly mom, it wouldn't have been paid the slightest attention by anyone, much less the award-bestowing critics and Academy members.

If Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man fails to land a Best Picture nomination tomorrow morning (which is somewhere between a likely and more-than-likely scenario) but Todd Phillip's The Hangover does, there will be "so great a cry throughout the land," as Charlton Heston once put in Ben-Hur.

It will be a lamentation for 21st Century movie culture, for the provincial thinking of the Academy types who failed to value the humor in the Coens' misanthropy, for those who constantly fail to consider the Movie Godz perspective, for the failure to understand the difference between a generally pleasing film and...Read More

I don't know if the 2009 Razzie nominations were announced today or over the weekend or whenever, but here are links for Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Actress, Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Supporting Actress, etc.

The physical and stylistic differences in the baseball players and outfits in these two stills express a thousand words worth of cultural deterioration. Early '60s pro players had a kind of classic studly cool (reasonably trim bods, tailored uniforms, knee socks, black leather shoes with cleats) while today the homie look has taken over (pot bellies, pajama pants, sneakers). Go ahead and throw darts, but players had a much more attractive look during the Kennedy administration.

Mickey Mantle (far left) and Roger Maris (far right) in publicity still for That Touch of Mink; latter-day professional wearing...

"In many respects, Sundance is always the same. Movies you expect to be good, disappoint; the films you shy away from because they sound bad on paper turn out to be wonderful. Half the time you feel as of you're in the wrong theater. That said, I thought the mood this year was high. Positive, not poisonous like last year. People seemed upbeat, invigorated, inspired." -- Best quote in Eric Kohn and Sharon Waxman's 1.31 Sundance 2010 sum-up piece.

I've just been invited to a February 8th press day for Adam Kane's Formosa Betrayed, a drama about an attempt by a 20-something real-estate shark to lease the legendary but ailing Formosa Cafe for the covert purpose of turning it into a Burger King franchise. It's kind of a Mike Judge-type dramedy about the extermination of pre-1950s architectural traditions in Los Angeles...something like that.

Formosa Betrayed actually tells the story of an FBI Agent (James Van Der Beek) investigating of the murder of a Taiwanese-American professor on U.S. soil. With the help of an FBI colleague...Read More

During my first day at Sundance I tapped out a piece for Fandango called "Confessions of an Oscar Blogger." It's q & a thing between myself and a Park City priest. Here's an excerpt:

Priest: "Do you believe in God?"

Me: "The question is, does God believe in me? I do believe that at their best movies allow for a kind of God discussion -- a profound communion with all dreams and faiths and spiritual longings. And that the winning of an Oscar amounts to a kind of sanctifying of the dreams and longings that a...Read More

What a luxuriously hellish, repetitively empty, medieval-prison-cell existence Sam Raimi must be enduring now. Let's see...I've made millions and could make many millions more by continuing to make super-hero movies that aren't Spider-Man. Iconic guy, lonely lone-wolf attitude, distinctive outfit, derring-do, savior mentality, etc. Hey, what about The Shadow?

This would be the same old CG megaplex crap and a manifestation of the same old agent-pleasing, kid's-college-fund affluent quicksand. If Raimi does this his soul will slip through his fingers like water and seep through the cobblestones. He needs to man up and direct another film in the vein of...Read More

Mike from Milwaukee, the famous Phantom Menace reviewer with the really weird deep-dorky voice, nails various Avatar shortcomings but misses the transporting aspects. I think he wanted another shot of attention and figured an Avatar trashing would do better than a praising -- simple as that.