In Matt Reeves' Let Me In, 13 year-old Chloe Moretz gives a deeply affecting award-calibre performance as an emotionally conflicted 300 year-old vampire named Abby, and she does it almost entirely with her eyes. She's Jodie Foster in 1975 only more so, and has really earned consideration as a Best Actress nominee. Catching this emotional puppy-love vampire pic for the second time convinced me. As did Moretz's appearance this evening at the School of Visual Arts Theatre -- she's got poise, smarts, the whole package.

Let Me In costars Elias Koteas, Chloe Moretz,...

"If the over-60 Academy members fail to note that The Social Network is a brilliant, whippersnapper Citizen Kane-level movie about the Realm of the Now (and the Very Recent) that addresses CLASSIC THEMES, what am I supposed to do about it? Send them a complimentary month's supply of Depends?

"I'll tell you what SHOULD be done about it. All past-it, over-the-hill geezers should be COMPASSIONATELY EXPELLED FROM THE ACADEMY. This is not a put-down or a putsch or a purge. It's just that when a genuinely good movie comes along and people are too thick to at least show respect and acknowledge...Read More

Having seen Secretariat, I really don't get where the alleged faith-based Christian marketing angle fits in. The film is aimed at family audiences-- it has a square and conservative vibe -- and director Randall Wallace is something of a rightie, I'm told, but there's nothing in the story/screenplay that proclaims Christian or conservative values per se. I saw that vein in The Blind Side but it's simply not in Secretariat.

Thematically it's a quasi-feminist thing, being about Diane Lane's Penny Chenery defying her husband (who wants her to stay at home and raise the kids and cook) and brother (who wants her...Read More

Two seconds after glancing at this ad for The Freebie (Phase 4, 9.17) my eyes went right for those red sores or chicken-pox spots on Dax Shepard's upper right arm, right above the tattoo. "What're those...self-applied needle marks?" I asked myself. "Or pimples? Who has pimples on their upper arm? The movie's about a couple who decide to give each other permission to play around for a single night, so why introduce an element of bacteriological infection on the husband's arm? How could this possibly boost the want-to-see?"

In Contention's Kristopher Tapley has seen Tony Goldwyn's Conviction (Fox Seatchlight, 10.15), and said yesterday that he "liked it." Okay. I saw it myself the night before last, but I have to say it didn't exactly wind me up. It's one of those films that you just want to pat on the head and smile at and offer best wishes to and leave well enough alone.

Conviction is a stacked deck of uplift cards that's based on a true-lfe story and made in the vein or spirit of Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich, but it just isn't that snappy or...Read More

Okay, so Melville Shavelson was no Sam Fuller or Budd Boetticher or Nicholas Ray. But the sight of a spry and relatively trim James Cagney prancing and tapping around on a big banquet table, and with very few edits to interrupt the action, feels cool right now. (Even with the deeply irritating Pentagon clown Bob Hope huffing and puffing alongside.) Call it a Thursday afternoon mood-pocket thing.

Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, Get Low star Robert Duvall, Focus Features chief James Schamus and Conviction star Hilary Swank will be specially tributed at the Gotham Independent Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on 11.29. Which sorta kinda sounds like they've already decided to give Black Swan the top Gotham award for best feature...no? Maybe not. And maybe Duvall hasn't been selected to win the best actor prize.

Limo guy Steve Coppick drove Tony Curtis around once, and says he "was one of the warmest and nicest celebs I've come across over the years. At first I didn't think it was going to be, as that day the company I was with was stretched thin for sedans so they had decided to upgrade Curtis to a stretch. He walked out a little past the pick-up time, and I knew from the body language he wasn't in a good mood. I had the back door open, but he just glanced inside.

"'I ain't gettin' in there...I'm not dead yet!' he said, very...Read More

A statement from Falco Ink's Janice Roland and Shannon Treusch about the passing of their patron saint: "Tony Curtis was a true talent. We are sorry to hear of his passing. When we started Falco Ink 13 years ago we tipped our hat to Curtis's role as press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. When Curtis heard of this company through Jeffrey Wells, he contacted us and we began a friendship that continued through the years. We felt honored to know Tony, a true inspiration to us all."

Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs -- a movie that Screen Gems likes so much that it won't release it until September 2011 -- has gotten a boost from an Ain't It Cool contributor called "Le Stephanois," who caught Lurie's melodrama at a recent Syracuse University screening. I'm impressed by this because (a) Mr. Rififi writes well and (b) claims to prefer Lurie's remake to Sam Peckinpah's 1971 original.

Straw Dogs local bad guys (l. to r.) Billy Lush, Drew Powell, Rhys Coiro and Alexander Skarsgard

"It's hard for me to recall a remake that has drawn as...Read More

I was searching this morning for my March 2000 Tony Curtis interview, which was written during my Reel.com period ('99 to '02). Not only has the Curtis piece disappeared, but the whole Reel.com archive (when the column was called Hollywood Confidential) has vanished along with it. A Site Called Fred had archived my 300-or-so columns, but now they've apparently dumped them. Three years of work down the toilet...great.

The legendary Tony Curtis -- the nervy, blunt-spoken Bronx street guy who had a great movie-star run from 1952 to 1968 or thereabouts -- died of a heart attack last night about 9:25 Pacific, or just after midnight here. He was 85, and had lived a hell of a life -- about 16 years at the top, and then a long active sunset that lasted 42 years. He was a decent painter, a raconteur, a legendary poon hound in his day ("I fucked Yvonne DeCarlo!) and an excellent guy to hang and shoot the shit with.

"In two weeks I'm starting Whit Stillman's new film, called Damsels in Distress," Greta Gerwig has told WWD. "I play a girl named Violet who runs a suicide-prevention center at a liberal arts college. She prevents suicides through the powers of 1930s song-and-dance numbers. So it's a very dark comedy. I'm not really worried about my indie cred. I don't think there's any danger of me going, 'I only do franchises now.'"

I ran my first "return of Whit Stillman" piece on 12.13 09, basing it on a screening of Metropolitan at 92YTribeca.

Fandango is reporting that as of 11 am today, The Social Network ticket sales accounted for only 32% of the total. This doesn't indicate an opening in the mid to high 20s, which is what I've been hearing over the last three or four days, but closer to the low 20s.

"If it was selling 50% to 60% of the total right now, we'd be looking at the mid to high 20s," an analyst just told me. "But a lot of openings have been mild recently. Wall Street 2 only did $19 million or thereabouts, so I wouldn't forecast too high...Read More

As totally expected, and as I predicted on 9.25, N.Y. Press critic Armond White has panned The Social Network.

The Social Network "is simply Hollywood's way, post-Obama, of sanctioning Harvard's 'masters of the universe' mystique," he writes. "It's an attempt at glorifying a contemporary aristocracy-cumplutocracy through flattery of Zuckerberg and his ilk. Like one of those fake-smart, middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It's really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness.

"Here's the truth: Citizen Kane was not about a brat's betrayal, but about a sensitive braggart's psychological and philosophical shift inward....Read More

I need help in trying to identify the submitted Best Foreign Language hopefuls that have a decent chance of being included on the short list. I know Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful has to be on it...c'mon. And that star Javier Bardem (winner of Best Actor prize in Cannes) should be included among the Best Actor hopefuls, and that it ought to qualify for Best Screenplay, Cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto), Musical Score (Gustvao Santaolalla) and Editing (Stephen Mirrione).

After that I'm more or less lost. Adrift. Looking for guidance. Because I really don't know very much.

Possible frontrunners: Rachid Bouchareb's Outside The Law...Read More

HBO and BBC Worldwide Production has working to develop Trent Reznor's Year Zero, a 2007 Nine Inch Nails album, into a miniseries based on the album's premise about a right-wing Christian takeover of the U.S. government.

Which, if it happens, could one day be shown alongside with Jack Webb's Red Nightmare, an early 1950s short film about a Communist takeover of the U.S.

By the time I interviewed Arthur Penn in 1981, during a press junket for Four Friends, he was over. Let's face it -- he had about a 15 year period ('61 to '76) when he was really crackling. He had a great start doing live TV in the '50s, and kept his hand in as far as it went after The Missouri Breaks, his last half-decent film. And now he's passed on.

My favorite Penn film after the classic Bonnie and Clyde is Mickey One --...Read More

Scott Brown's Wired piece about The Social Network backstory is catchy and well-written, etc., but the real grabber is the art -- i.e., the illustrations by Martin Ansin. (Thanks to Awards Daily's Sasha Stone for the tip.)

I was chuckling yesterday about that "Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook" comic book, but if the illustrations in this Bluewater Productions comic are as good as Ansin's, (and if the writing was as punchy as it should be), I think I'd buy it.

The idea is for HE readers to come up with overly emphatic 1950s-era tag lines -- shock! shame! defiance! never before in Hollywood history! -- for present-tense films like Let Me In, The Social Network, Wall Street 2, The Town, Easy A, Case 39, Due Date, Nowhere Boy, It's Kind of a Funny Story, etc. If you don't know the shot with these films then please don't submit. (Original idea inspired by this Film Experience riff about tag lines for 1950s Susan Hayward films.)

In a 9.28 DP30 interview, Client 9 director Alex Gibney explains, as his film does, that former call girl and current N.Y. Post advice columnist Ashley Dupre "did" former N.Y. Governor Eliot Spitzer exactly once. She was not his girl of choice -- that role was filled by another prostitute called "Angelina."

"You think Ashley is 'the one', [but] Ashley is kind of like the woman who happened to be on call that night, or that afternoon," Gibney says. "She's like a sub who came off the bench, probably because Angela wasn't available....Read More

Two days ago L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik reported that Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky has "had discussions" with Superman-reboot producer Chris Nolan, This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. If this story (if true) doesn't represent a diseased equation -- i.e., acclaim and success from the making of a brilliant psychological thriller puts you on the short list to direct a bloated franchise flick about a superhero character whose time has totally passed and who means nothing to everyone -- I don't know what does.

"It's over. The franchise is dead. The press killed it. Your magazine fucking killed it. New York magazine. It's like all the critics got together and said, 'This franchise must die.' Because they all had the exact same review. It's like they didn't see the movie." -- Sex and the City costar Chris Noth speaking several days ago to Vulture's "Party Line" reporter.

Well...mission accomplished! All concerned should take a bow. Sometimes life does offer a happy ending. But the critics "didn't see" Sex and the City 2? Sure thing, Chris.

Warner Home Video's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Bluray is the most exquisitely finessed, luscious-looking black-and-white film I've seen in high-def since WHV's Casablanca. The needle-sharp detail and deep velvety blacks are magnificent. There are some dupey portions but nothing to worry about -- most of it is pure pleasure. It's so crisp and alive-looking, so perfectly honed and lighted that you can enjoy it entirely for the visual benefits alone. Which you wouldn't want to do, of course, but I'm just sayin'.

A Toronto Film Festival interview with Let Me In director Matt Reeves that I thought I'd accidentally dumped was found today, so here it is. Middling iPhone-level video, tolerable sound, so-so chatter. But at least it wasn't lost.

The only Star Wars film I'd like to see converted into fake 3D is The Empire Strikes Back. The best of the bunch, certainly the most handsomely photographed, etc. You can have the rest of them. And how good is the fake 3D going to be anyway? We've seen what it is, and that it doesn't quite make it.

No, I'm not excerpting another Social Network rave. I'm quoting a piece of a review by Time's Richard Corliss because the description he offers of genius innovators like Mark Zuckerberg is sly and zingy and exactly right. The film is saying that "geniuses are abnormal," Corliss states. "The obsessive focus that these blessed, cursed minds bring to their goals often excludes social peripheral vision. They don't notice, or care about, the little people in their way. Zuckerberg, incarnated by Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale, Zombieland) with a single-mindedness so cool as to be lunar, isn't inhuman, exactly; more post-human,...Read More

First the Segway guy flies off a cliff and into a river and dies, and now editor Sally Menke, 56, has lost her life from a similar-type accident, possibly from succumbing to heat exhaustion and falling off a cliff (or a steep ravine) during a hike in Griffith Park. I'm very sorry. Menke was a gifted cutter and way too young.

But there's no stopping unforeseen bad stuff in this life. I wish it were otherwise. A friend once said that the odds of leaving the planet in a quiet and peaceful way are not high. It's a much...Read More

In the third act of A Clockwork Orange, Patrick Magee's agitated liberal-activist character -- white-haired, ruddy-faced, excitable -- is phone-chatting with a superior about the necessity of leadership. "The common people will let it go," he says. "Oh yes, they'll sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be led, sir...driven, pushed!"

I am Patrick Magee, and this is more or less my view of the older, reputedly lazy Academy fuddy-duds. "The older Academy members will too often bypass true quality and reward films that offer the usual familiar comforts. Oh, they'll give it all away for a calmer, warmer,...Read More

Bluewater Productions has announced a forthcoming "Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook" comic book Written by Jerome Maida, penciled by Sal Field and cover designed by Michal Szyksznian, the 48-pager will be out in December.

"Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?," the press release asks. "The young billionaire and creator and CEO of Facebook who announced recently that he is generously donating $100 million to public schools in Newark? Or the cold-blooded businessman who walks over people to get what he wants -- the way he's portrayed in The Social Network?

The road to success, Maida says,...Read More

From 11:30 am to 1:30 pm I took part in a press luncheon/schmooze session at Manhattan's Essex hotel for the forthcoming Bluray of William Friedkin's The Exorcist (due 10.5). It was pouring outside and the Bluray hadn't been sent out (it won't be ready until 9.30), but it was very cool to chill and shoot the shit with Exorcist writer-producer William Peter Blatty, dp Owen Roizman, costar Linda Blair and sound designer Chris Newman.

Where was Friedkin? Upstairs and hanging around (he dropped by for a...Read More

Yesterday morning Envelope/Gold Derby L.A. Times guy Tom O'Neil said that The Social Network "has a quality that gives it an edge in the current derby: It reflects the national zeitgeist during this Age of Facebook... Oscar voters want their best pictures to say something important about our times."

In response to which Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet said that he likes the "cultural and cinematic card" (i.e., championing films that clearly reflect present-tense realities and conditions), as this would have earned The Dark Knight a nomination (and perhaps even a win) over such films as The Reader, Frost/Nixon and...Read More

Yesterday L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, writing from a standard city-desk, big-city-newspaper, shoe-leathery perspective, cast doubt upon the general cred of The Social Network by sugggesting that its portrait of Mark Zuckerberg is, in the words of Facebook Effect author David Kirkpatrick, "horrifically unfair."

One retort (which also posted yesterday) came from New Yorker critic David Denby. He says in his Social Network review that "the debate about the movie's accuracy has already begun, but David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, selecting from known facts and then freely interpreting them, have created a work of art...accuracy is now a secondary issue."

Biutiful's submission as Mexico's official entry for a possible Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar is a big boost. A sad but vivid lower-depths drama with a knockout Javier Bardem performance, it now has a niche that will give it traction all around. I toppled hard when I saw it in Cannes, comparing it to Italian neorealist cinema and so on. Which is why I was stunned and enraged when the Guy Lodge contingent sauntered into the Orange press cafe going "nyick, nyick, nyick, nyick."

I'd written...Read More

Moving Image Source guys Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas have assembled a brief video tribute (sans narration) to the legendary opening credit sequence in David Fincher's Se7en (1995). At the very end they give credit to Kyle Cooper for having designed the sequence, presumably in collaboration with Fincher. But why do they go on and on about Fincher in their intro, as if it was primarily his idea? I'm honestly confused.

Success has 100 fathers, and failure is an orphan.

I'm relatively comfortable with this Ranker.com piece called "The 7 Most Annoying Kids in Action Movie History " because I agree with 83.3% of it -- simple. Except I'd put The Phantom Menace's Jake Lloyd at the top of the roster. The list includes Edward Furlong in Terminator 2, Jonathan Ke Quan in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards in Jurassic Park, the wussy Rupert Grint from the Harry Potter films, Shia LeBeouf as Mutt in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds. (Fanning is quite...Read More

For what it's worth, the Hollywood Stock Exchange forum has posted MTC (Major Theatre Chain) tracking figures and they're forecasting a $28 million opening for The Social Network (Sony, 10.1). MTC numbers "come from some mysterious source within a major theater chain," I'm told, "and are usually pretty accurate." So yesterday's projection of $26 million from Boxoffice.com was within the same estimated realm. The figures will be honed on Wednesday and Thursday once everyone factors in online ticket sales and yaddah-yaddah.

A 21-gun salute to CNN's Anderson Cooper for telling North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Renee Ellmers, an ignorance-baiting opportunist, that one of her remarks about the Ground Zero mosque situation "is the lowest response I have ever heard from a candidate, I have got to tell you." Ellmers has run a TV ad that deliberately blurs the line between Muslims and terrorists. Is there any way I can avoid calling this woman other bad names?

I know a Beverly Hills woman (now living in Malibu) who has...Read More

The Social Network "is absolutely emblematic of its time and place. It is shrewdly perceptive about such things as class, manners, ethics, and the emptying out of self that accompanies a genius's absorption in his work. It rushes through a coruscating series of exhilarations and desolations, triumphs and betrayals, and ends with what feels like darkness closing in on an isolated soul. And it has the hard-charging excitement of a very recent revolution, the surge and sweep of big money moving fast and chewing people up in its wake." -- from David Denby's lengthy but exhilarating review in the 10.4.10 New Yorker.

Roman Coppola directed this New Yorker iPad app promo featuring the whimsical Jason Schwartzman, but the attitude is pure Wes. I just went to find the app on my iPhone and it's not there -- I found only a New Yorker cartoon app and a New Yorker Festival app. Not right, not fair, not kosher, not cool. But the spot's cool.

One of the nicest dreams ever offered by Hollywood is that death frees you. Not just from having to grapple in a tough, cruel world but, if you pass in your 80s or 90s, from a body that's been sinking into physical decline. Death means you can be a kid again. This, at least, is a fantasy I considered when my father went a couple of years ago, and it's what I'm thinking now that Titanic star Gloria Stuart has passed at age 100.

Jim Cameron...Read More

About 12 hours ago Cinema Blend's Katey Rich tweeted about two films "ending with overly literal Beatles songs" -- the most recent episode of Mad Men, which ends with an instrumental of "Do You Want To Know A Secret?," and The Social Network, which ends with "Baby, You're a Rich Man."

The latter is kind of a weird song because it says two diverse things. The chorus makes fun of people with scads of dough but don't have much of a life ("keep all your money in a big brown bag inside a zoo / what a thing to do") but...Read More

Wait a minute, c'mon...the guy who owns Segway (James Heselden) goes off a cliff while riding on a Segway and plunges into a river, killing himself? This actually happened?

This is the kind of comically absurd death that Blake Edwards might have invented for one of his '60s or '70s farces. It would have fit right into J. Lee Thompson's What A Way To Go!, which is about four guys who die "comically" (Dick Van Dyke, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly) after marrying Shirley MacLaine, who carries some kind of black-widow, rotten-luck curse.

What A Way To Go!...Read More

Olivier Assayas' Carlos (IFC films, 1o.15 -- 10.20 On Demand) is "a fascinating, never-boring, you-are-there masterwork of a certain type," I wrote during last May's Cannes Film Festival. "Not exactly a levitational thing and more in the realm of a long triple than a home run, but exquisitely done in so many small and great and side-pocket ways that there's really no choice but to take your hat off and say 'sure, yes, of course.'

"This is a politically crackling, intrigue-filled saga of Carlos the Jackal...Read More

Here's the really long version (i.e., about an hour) plus the 20-minute cut of the debut podcast of Oscar Poker. Hats off to partner and colleague Sasha Stone of Awards Daily for making us both sound good as well as well as her technical expertise (i.e., she knows everything). We'll show more discipline next time, but I have to say that the extended director's cut flows along pretty well.

Richard Tillman, brother of the late Pat Tillman, talklng to Bill Maher two nights ago on HBO's Real Time. Here's an early assessment of Amir Bar Lev's film. (Video originally spotted on Sasha Stone's Awards Daily.)

I don't care what anybody says (and I know there are naysayers out there), but the last seven minutes of Sam Mendes' American Beauty deliver one of the most mystically calming finales I've ever sat through, or will sit through. And the music! "Yellow leaves from the maple trees that lined our streets"...serenity itself. A new Bluray/DVD is about to hit the shelves.

Let's not forget that The Social Network isn't the only upcoming film with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. There's also the more-or-less-perfect rating for Matt Reeves' Let Me In (Overture. 10.1), which is based on 12 film reviews (including Variety's Peter Debruge and the Hollywood Reporter's Michael Rechstaffen) so far.

"I would argue that Matt Reeves' Let Me In is at least as good as Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In, which Reeves' film is a remake of," I wrote on 9.11.10. "I'm guessing that this view will be regarded as heresy...Read More

Which super-budgeted Warner Bros. tentpole attraction will be more depressing to sit through -- Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Homes 2 or the Superman reboot that Chris Nolan is producing? Which is more likely to make you feel as if a plastic tube filled with green poison is snaking out of the screen and leaking into your bloodstream?

For me, it's definitely Homes 2 (shooting this fall, opening on 12.2.11). And yet the idea of Nolan's Superman (even if Matt Reeves directs) is also immensely depressing. The Man of Steel is dead, dead...irreversibly dead. Let it go, for God's sake. If Bryan...Read More

I've always had a sight problem with actors who "act" -- i.e., performers who are clearly using acquired skills to inject varying degrees of feeling into a given scene. The rule of thumb is that a performance that is driven by "acting" is very admirable and enjoyable, but not necessarily one you can believe in 100% because you're too aware of the gears moving and various tricks and devices being applied.

(l.) Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network; (r.) Colin Firth in The King's Speech.

As good as Colin Firth's King George performance is...Read More

Okay, it's finally time for Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I to record our first Oscar Poker podcast. We'll be starting approximately 90 minutes later than our initial timeframe, but that's the racket for you -- issues arise, edits need to happen, you need to figure something out about the weekend's boxoffice. 3:29 pm update: Okay, it's done -- and we went over an hour. We're going to post a longish version and a short version for optional sampling.

In the space of 10 or 12 minutes (yeah, right) we'll be discussing (a) Wall Street 2 and what...Read More

I don't want to be a killjoy about the Wall Street 2 boxoffice performance this weekend, but I'm not entirely sure about the use of the words "solid" and "bullish" to describe the $19 million take. It reps the best opening for an Oliver Stone film ever, but the fact is that the boxoffice.com crunchers (i.e., Phil Contrino and the gang) were projecting $21 million yesterday. They presumably didn't just pull that $21 million figure out of their collective posterior, so what happened?

On Friday Wall Street 2, playing on 3565 situations, did $6,900,000 for a per-situation average of $1935. The...Read More

On 4.24.10 I ran my initial euphoric review of Alex Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. "I knew it would focus on the sudden and scandalous fall of Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor, due to his involvement with prostitutes," I began. "What I didn't anticipate, and what in fact surprised the hell out of me, is that the doc unfolds and holds like a masterful political suspense drama.

"I was expecting a smart and comprehensive recap of the Spitzer saga --...Read More

Armond White's contrarian rep will obviously be compromised if he approves of The Social Network. I'm guessing he'll write a pan and thereby wreck the current 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating, based on 14 reviews thus far. That's not counting another rave from Newark Star Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty, and an especially well-written one by Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny.

The Social Network "does throw you into the insular but seminal Ivy League world of its characters pretty much head-first," Kenny notes, "and then zooms along, and if you don't get into the swim of it right away, you...Read More

I often have the tube on as a white-noise companion, and over the last couple of weeks I must have heard (and sometimes watched) this iPad spot at least 30 times -- no exaggeration. It's the first nine notes of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes," repeated over and over.

BoxOffice.com's Phil Contrino is projecting $21 million for Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2 by Sunday night.

Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go has been limping along in limited release. It doesn't seem fated to break out -- let's face it. 20 days I ago I mentioned the possibility that it might have been cursed by a certain hard-working fellow whose unbridled enthusiasm for films in the early stages has tended to spell doom. I'm sorry this has happened, but if I'd been calling the shots at Fox Searchlight I would have said ixnay to any film about young people meekly submitting to a cruel early death.

At last night's Social Network party a...Read More

I won't go along with the idea of Ben Affleck's The Town deserving a Best Picture nomination, and neither, I suspect, will a certain percentage of Academy members. (I spoke to a top-tier director-screenwriter at last night's Social Network party who said The Town is "really not very good.") But Anne Thompson's idea (voiced during yesterday's Oscar Talk podcast with In Contention's Kris Tapley) about Affleck being the new Sydney Pollack is perfect.

What she meant, I think, is that Affeck has shown he has the chops to be the industry's leading...Read More

I say this every year so here we go again. I recognize that some blogger-columnists feel that sitting on the sidelines during awards season and gauging the industry's political and emotional sentiments regarding this or that nominee is what they do and should do, and that this is both important and expected of them and so on. I've never gone along with this. In fact, my reaction to this philosophy has always been "what?"

I believe that the proper role of a good Hollywood columnist is not just to report on the conversation (which passes the time and...Read More

"Why is everyone so high on The Fighter?," Indiewire's Anne Thompson asked In Contention's Kris Tapley during their latest Oscar Talk discussion. More to the point, why is Thompson so skeptical about this film sight unseen? Her first explanation: "Mark Wahlberg?" But her second comment gets down to the nub of it.

"I'd like to bring up the topic of [Fighter director] David O. Russell ," she begins. "Right, no shortage of enemies," Tapley replies. "That is an understatement," Thompson said. "There is no single...Read More

Pure Oprah kiss-assery. What everyone gets when they come on the show. An infomercial about your boundless enthusiasm, kindness, optimism, humanity, and wonderfulness. "It's a movie, it's fun," Zuck says about The Social Network. "This is my life so I know it's not that dramatic....maybe it'll be fun to remember it as partying and all the crazy drama."

If nothing else Bill Maher's latest Christine O'Donnell clip fortifies David Robb's 9.22 Hollywood Reporter piece that said, without being so bold as to mention Teabaggers, Sarah Palin and/or Christine O'Donnell, that yahoo sentiments voiced in Inherit The Wind are alive and well in 2010 America. Extra: O'Donnell's greatest hits.

My second viewing of The Social Network kicked up the impact by 25% or 30%, and the swanky after-party at the Harvard Club (44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues) was the absolute epicenter of the New York entertainment world between 11:30 pm and 1:30 am. Everyone was there (including Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach). Except I didn't try hard enough to snap decent photos. I spoke with Justin Timberlake for three minutes (an achievement!) and never got a decent shot of him; ditto Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield.

Greenberg director-cowriter Noah Baumbach, Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes...

Eight months ago I saw and reviewed Rodrigo Cortes' Buried out of Sundance 2010. It opens today via Lionsgate. I may as well re-run it, but know once again that a kind of SPOILER is contained within.

"I'm giving this Ryan Reynolds-trapped-in-a-large-coffin movie an A for execution and a C-minus for story because I'm a nice guy. It really deserves an F because it jerks you around on a nail-bitten popcorn level (escape from a tight spot) with no intention of paying off on that level. Great filmmaking, shitty payoff = overall C grade, at best.

"All the critics having...Read More

I got so caught up in posting photos and videos from this morning's Social Network press conference and writing my "Zuckerberg vs. King George" piece that I didn't jot down any quotes from the Social Network team. So here's a pretty good summary from Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale.

You can't lament the ridiculous right-wing persecution of President Bill Clinton for an Oval Office blowjob and then turn around and say you can't wait for an alleged N.Y. Times story about an alleged affair between House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner and a lobbyist named Lisbeth Lyons. The only politicans who deserve to be outed are gay ones who've voted against gay-rights issues. Otherwise they should be left alone. Even wretched rightwing obstructionists like Boehner.

Scott Feinberg's recent "Citizen Zuck" piece points out several similarities between The Social Network and Citizen Kane. A stretch in a couple of ways, cosmetic in others, in other ways interesting. But a piece that no one on The Social Network team would want to be taken seriously. They're slapping their foreheads right now and muttering to themselves, "Please, Scott -- you're hurting us!

But I thought of Citizen Kane as I read David Poland's Social Network review, a mostly positive response that nonetheless says "where's the metaphor?" It struck me that a critic could have said some of the same...Read More

At yesterday afternoon's Apple Soho q & a, Social Network director David Fincher was asked about accusations that his film had altered or misrepresented certain aspects of Mark Zuckberg's life and personality. His response struck me as honest, reasonable, fair-minded.

The death of Eddie Fisher, whom no one cared very much about or paid attention to except as an object of derision for the last 47 years, was reported last night. He was 82.

Fisher had a ten-year run in the big-time, first as a popular crooner from the early to late '50s and then as a tabloid/gossip-column joke from the late '50s to early '60s after he dumped wife Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, only to be himself dumped by Taylor for Richard Burton in 1962.

The man lived for nearly 50 years after that with the...Read More

Ten days old but well cut, well acted, amusing. Missed it until today,.

I left my Canon Powershot SD1400 at the apartment the day I was set to talk to Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky during the Toronto Film Festival. The video looks like faded grainstorm hell but there are some interesting portions. This is the personable, easy-going Aronofsky in amiable interview mode. The real guy, I suspect, is Genghis Khan, and that's why he's so good.

The Soho Apple store guys made a point of not allowing anyone sitting in the front "reserved for media" row to ask a question of Social Network director David Fincher and star Jesse Eisenberg. So all my questions went un-asked. The thing that surprised me was Eisenberg's admission that he hasn't seen the film yet, but will probably see it at tomorrow night's New York Film Festival premiere screening. With a certain trepidation, I sensed.

Social Network director David Fincher( l.), star Jesse Eisenberg (r.) during this afternoon's Soho Apple store appearance -- Thursday, 9.23, 5:45 pm.

Deadline's Tim Adler is reporting that three out of the four principal roles in Roman Polanski's God of Carnage have been cast, and that the chosen are Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz.

Having seen the original B'way version, I'm guessing that Foster has the Hope Davis vomiting role, Waltz has the Jeff Daniels role (lawyer, compulsive cell-phone calls, Davis's wife), Winslet the Marcia Gay Harden role (book on Darfur) and James Gandolfini's role (hardware store owner, Harden's husband) is the one yet to be cast.

Filming of Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning play will...Read More

I spotted this on Awards Daily, copied the code, etc. I'd prefer a YouTube or Vimeo version, thanks.

The quietly growing underground cabal of Social Network dissers has, in Manohla Dargis's just-posted N.Y. Times review, another cartwheel-in-the-lobby piece to get riled about. Enough, dammit! Too many people are flipping for this thing and we're sick of it. This is war! We need to get together this weekend and plan a counter-attack.

Who will be the anti-Social Network crusader to lead the troops? Who will be their King Harry? David Poland? Armond White? For those who haven't yet reviewed it (particularly for a certain type of ego-driven critic), there is only way to not sound like a me-too kiss-ass.

"The...Read More

What is the eerie alien vibe coming out of Matt Damon's right eye in the new poster for Clint Eastwood's Hereafter? Damon plays a guy with a problematic gift -- the ability to speak to and hear the thoughts of people who've passed on -- which is what the eye effect is trying to suggest. But it makes him look like (a) one of Nastassja Kinski's friends in a black-and-white version of Paul Schrader's Cat People, or (b) an adult version of one of the kids from the 1960 Village of the Damned.

Marshall Fine admires Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl (Oscilloscope, 9.24) , which "is about many more things than just a poem," he writes. "But if you boil it down to its essence, it's a movie about a poet and his creation - about the writing and transmission of a work of poetry. And unlike last year's overrated Bright Star, this one is actually interesting.

"Howl was originally meant to be a documentary. But the writer-directors (who also did The Times of Harvey Milk and The Celluloid Closet) decided instead to create an impressionistic movie...Read More

The Envelope/Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil, TheWrap's Steve Pond and Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet have all written that as of right now (i.e., without anyone having seen True Grit and The Fighter, and not enough people having seen Made in Dagenham and The Way Back), the Best Picture race has boiled down to a choice between The Social Network and The King's Speech.

May I say that Brevet gets it exactly wrong when (a) he calls The Social Network "a good film but not the masterpiece [or the] front runner [that] so many others are painting it as" while (b)...Read More

70% of me hates this damn photo. The photographer's timing was immaculate in that he caught me licking my lips at just the right moment, making it look like I'm scowling at the entire world and all of its peoples and faiths and creeds. But the capturing of the inside of the Grand Theatre Lumiere, the biggest inside the Cannes Palais, is better than anything I've ever gotten myself.

Taken last May by Indiewire's Todd McCarthy inside Grand Theatre Lumiere inside the Cannes Palais, prior to one of the big screenings.

Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez has flown the coop for a gig as director of digital strategy with the Film Society of Lincoln Center -- a marketing job that will presumably pay him a higher salary than he made at Indiewire, and which will open the door to all kinds of blue-chip jobs in the future. Hernandez, a man of the pavement whose basic attitude is that of an apartment-dweller (and I mean that in the best sense), has been invited to hang with the folks on the hill -- the swells.

2:26 pm Update: Hernandez has told Deadline's Michael Fleming "that he'll keep...Read More

David Robb writes a 9.22 Hollywood Reporter piece about how Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind, a film about rural fundamentalism vs. educated and open-minded urbanism, is still relevant today and doesn't once mention the words "Teabagger" or "Palinism"? And makes a statement that this 1960 film "is to my mind the quintessential parable about McCarthyism"?

All Robb manages to say about today's political theatre is that "the arguments that creationists make in [Inherit the Wind] haven't gone away -- they've only gotten dumber and...Read More

The just-announced decision by Facebook honcho Mark Zuckerberg to donate up to $100 million to the Newark, New Jersey school system has nothing to do with countering the "asshole" image of Zuckerberg that The Social Network advances...right? The bequeathment will arrive in the form of "Facebook's closely held stock," accordign to a 9.23 Wall Street Journal story by Barbara Martinez and Geoffrey A. Fowler.

There's a mild irony in the fact that awareness is growing in journalistic circles and elsewhere that Zuckerberg's assholery (as depicted in the film) is nowhere near as acute as Aaron Sorkin's script suggests. Zuckerberg is withdrawn...Read More

A putrid right-wing stink filled my den this morning when this ad played on MSNBC. It's so infected with the Big Lie virus (i.e., indifferent to the fact that Bush-era deregulation and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan created catastrophic conditions before Obama took over) that it creates a kind of instant soul-cancer effect.

It's obviously aimed at stoking ignorant Teabaggers, but is really about Republican slime wanting to play more golf and kick back with screwdrivers inside their McMansions and cruise like they used to during...Read More

The unanswered question about the secret Wachowski Bros. project known as Cobalt Neural 9 is whether or not there will be any girl-on-girl action. To me a Wachowski Bros. movie isn't a Wachowski Bros. movie without this element. The Iraqi woman whom Butch-the-marine falls in love with a hot Iraqi pre-op shemale...wait, pre-op or post-op? And he/she has a girlfriend. That's one way to approach it.

Deadline's Pete Hammond has run three responses from possibly vested viewers about Mel Gibson's performance in Jodie Foster's The Beaver. They all said Gibson is "extraordinary," he reports. One person said that Gibson "gives an incredible performance...if you can forget what happened, and I didn't have tabloid images racing through my mind watching him, it's really something...I still don't want to be his friend but he's great in this." Another says, "I don't bullshit about these things...he's amazing."

GQ has an excellent recollection piece about the making of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, which opened 20 years and three days ago (on 9.19.90).

Martin Scorsese (director; co-writer): "I'd seen Ray Liotta in Something Wild, Jonathan Demme's film; I really liked him. And then I met him. I was walking across the lobby of the hotel on the Lido that houses the Venice Film Festival, and I was there with The Last Temptation of Christ. I had a lot of bodyguards around me. Ray approached me in the lobby and the bodyguards moved toward him, and he had an interesting...Read More

Two New York Film Festival press screenings (and one press conference) ate up the morning. First came Michael Epstein's LennonNYC (set to air 11.22 on PBS's American Masters), a celebration of the commerciality of the late John Lennon under the guise of a recollection of his last nine years of life, most of which were spent in Manhattan. And then Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' Letter to Elia, a tender and intimate personal recollection doc about what Eliza Kazan's films meant to young Scorsese, particularly from the mid '50s to early '60s.

LennonNYC director Michael Epstein, Film Society...

Blue-chip restorationist Robert Harris is driving -- driving! -- all the way from Chappaqua to Ottawa this weekend for The Lost Dominion Screening Collective's 70mm Film Festival at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (9.24 through 9.26). As the years slip by the opportunities to see mint-condition 70mm prints of classic mid 20th Century films are diminishing, particularly in first-class venues with optimum projection standards. I'd be up there in a heartbeat if my schedule permitted.

In the view of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, Woody Allen has slipped into a mode (or mood) that is beyond autopilot. For him making films has become a kind of rote errand -- a calling he needs to pursue because without that calling there is only the void. But doesn't this express what all movie lovers feel? That they need to see and absorb and consider the next film -- proverbially, repeatedly, eternally -- because the absence of these encounters would constitute an intolerable nothingness?

"The metaphysical pessimism that constitutes Woody Allen's annual greeting-card message to the human race -- just...Read More

I'm hearing an idea that the departure of White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, announced a couple of hours ago, had something to do with a recent Washington, D.C. screening of Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (Sony Classic, 10.8). I don't even know for sure if there was a recent D.C. screening. The Sony Classics guys aren't picking up.

Inside Job charts all the Wall Street gambling and thievery that went on for years starting with the Reagan administration and particularly during the eight years of Dubya, and then makes a persuasive case that Summers,...Read More

Is there a more admirable personal trait than to show you're not a fair-weather friend? So here's to you, Beaver director Jodie Foster, regarding your statement to MORE's Sheila Weller about Mel Gibson: "When you love a friend, you don't abandon them when they are struggling. Of course, Mel is an undeniably gifted actor and director, and The Beaver is one of his most powerful and moving performances. But more importantly, he is and has been a true and loyal friend. I hope I can help him get through this dark moment."

HE to Summit's Rob Friedman: There's no sensible reason on...Read More

Despite what Deadline's Pete Hammond has reported, Ben Affleck's The Town has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming a Best Picture candidate. No. Effin'. Way.

The best liberal neck-rub of the day is Peter Beinart's Daily Beast article predicting that Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul and the purist Teabag contingent are going to push the conservative agenda to such a rightist extreme that the 2012 election will be a disaster for Republicans in the same way the candidacy of the ultra-liberal George McGovern (beautiful man! should have been elected!) destroyed mainstream Democratic hopes in 1972.

"It may seem odd to talk of a blowout Republican defeat in 2012, when the GOP is headed for a blowout victory in 2010. But it is precisely the over-interpretation of...Read More

Here comes another immensely shallow but entirely honest statement from yours truly. The instant I clapped eyes on those mid-1800s women's bonnets in those stills from Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, I said to myself, "I'm going to figure some way of avoiding this film for as long as I can." I suspected it would be a quality-level thing because Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy proved she's a talented, dead-serious director. Attracted to downer-type women-facing-tough-odds stories, okay, and not exactly into narrative propulsion, but Reichardt's films require respect and attention.

Meek's Cutoff costars Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan, Michelle Willliams.

I know all these Social Network posts are getting tiresome and that they may inspire a backlash of some kind (though I can't imagine this happening), but Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez has written the following "little blog post" called "The Best Movie of the Year? Probably":

"I know it's only September and a lot of Oscar-hopeful films are yet to unspool, but I doubt I'll see a better movie this year...screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who can start making room on his mantle for an Oscar right now, has taken the story of Mark Zuckerberg, who created...Read More

I love how Justin Chang's Variety review of The Social Network -- a rave -- notes that "the mile-a-minute line delivery recall[s] the verbally dexterous comedies of Howard Hawks and Paddy Chayefsky." On 9.18 I wrote that "the high-throttle dialogue in David Fincher's film is "like His Girl Friday on Adderall," and "spoken with the same rapidity that Ken Russell chose for 1980's Altered States," which was written by Chayefsky.

Some Chang tidbits:

"Moving like a speedboat across two hours of near-nonstop talk, scribe Aaron Sorkin's blow-by-blow deconstruction of how Harvard computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg...Read More

Yesterday afternoon a reportedly dark and murky-looking presentation of David Fincher's The Social Network was shown to Boston-area critics at the AMC Boston Commons plex. The reason for the far-from-optimum screening, to go by information provided by two top-level projection consultants, is that the film, beautifully shot by Jeff Cronenweth, was (a) diminished by being projected through a Sony SRX-R220 or SRX-R320 4K digital projector, and (b) more specifically by a decision by AMC execs not to swap out 3D lenses when showing 2D movies, which produces a much darker image.

Sony's SRX-R220 (or SRX-R320) 4K digital projector

Popeater's Rob Shuter has filed some unsettling but probably accurate comments about the situation behind Michael Douglas's non-verbal appearance at last night's Wall Street 2 premiere. Thinking about Douglas's situation makes me shudder and tremble. I'd rather focus on a thought that came to mind last night as I re-considered his Gordon Gekko performance, which is that in one particular scene Douglas does deliver in an award-quality way.

Shia LeBeouf, Michael Douglas, Carey Mulligan at last night's Wall Street 2 premiere at the Zeigfeld. (Photo by AP's Evan Agostini.]

I recognize that I may be allowing sentiment to...Read More

Lindsay Lohan's probation has been revoked and a bench warrant issued for her arrest due to having failed two drug tests. She won't be cuffed and sent back to the pokey until she appears in court this coming Friday morning. Hey, Lindsay -- catch a screening of The Social Network on the Sony lot this week (they're showing it a few times). You're probably going to get a much longer sentence this time and you don't want to miss out.

Social Network director David Fincher and star Jesse Eisenberg will take part in a public discussion of their film at Soho's Apple Store on Thursday, 9.23 from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm. This was just pulsed a little while ago.

Quoting the gist of a Total Film article, The Playlist is reporting that Paul Thomas Anderson's 1950s-set Scientology drama, tentatively titled The Master, has been "postponed indefinitely at this point."

"I was really bummed about that," costar Jeremy Renner is quoted as saying. "It really kind of stalled because when we were rehearsing -- Phillip Seymoour Hoffman, Paul and myself -- we kept coming up against a wall that we couldn't overcome. Or at least Paul couldn't overcome."

"Hoffman revealed in an interview with The Playlist during press rounds for Jack Goes Boating that 'I don't have any new information [on the...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I agreed in principle today to launch a new weekly Oscar discussion podcast. The intention is to call it "Oscar Poker with Jeff & Sasha." We're figuring the term "Oscar poker" will make it turn up in search engines more readily. Record every Sunday, post every Monday.

Strictly tentative art (whipped together within the last hour), but not bad.

The idea is that Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson's weekly discussion is perhaps a little more mild-mannered than it needs to be (no offense, guys!), and that maybe we'd try and toss a...

I was milling around the 1980 New York Film Festival as a would-be wannabe. (Pant, pant.) At a French Embassy party I struck up a conversation with Catherine Deneuve that lasted about eight or nine seconds -- she sized me up and moved on. I was determined to speak with the legendary Francois Truffaut (whose Montmartre grave I've since visited) so when I saw him at Alice Tully Hall I asked if he knew where mutual friend Annette Insdorf was at the moment. "Hotel Empire!," he said. "Empire!"

Sometime tomorrow night New York's "Vulture" column will be going indie, becoming a stand-alone site that will reportedly not use the words "New York magazine" but will maintain certain ties with New York in that and that way. "Vulture" editor Adam Moss will still run the show, of course.

"I'm one of your middle class Americans," a questioner said to President Barack Obama during today's CNBC Town Hall meeting. "And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for."

Obama's response: "Times are tough for everybody right now, so I understand your frustration."

My very first response to this trailer for Ron Howard's The Dilemma (Universal, 1.14.11), a dramedy about an infidelity situation, is that Vince Vaughan and Kevin James have become very amply proportioned. Their wives, however, are played by the slim and svelte Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder. And that's not how it works in the real world.

Fat guys tend to marry women with weight issues and vice versa. A husband or wife will sometimes sympathetically gain weight as a way of showing allegiance. (Like when...Read More

Right now several Bluray screeners are about to be sent to Hollywood Elsewhere central, and it feels like Christmas. The Criterion Blurays of Paths of Glory and The Thin Red Line are on the way. Ditto the Psycho Bluray from Universal Home Video, the Bridge on the River Kwai Bluray from Sony Home Video, the Apocalypse Now Bluray from Lionsgate, and five Warner Home Video Blurays -- The Exorcist, the two Humphrey Bogart Blurays (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon), Ocean's 11 and King Kong.

Not to mention the Read More

Marshall Fine's review of Woody Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (Sony Classics, 9.22) is a little kinder and gentler than my own, which I posted four months ago during the Cannes Film Festival.

Fine is calling it "yet another change-up in the Woody Allen approach - a drama played with comedy rhythms"that "continually surprises you by coming back to earth, rather than launching into the heavens with laughter and romance." And I described it as "a mildly amusing, somewhat chilly film with no piercing performances or dramatic highlights even,...Read More

The Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit is reporting that Anthony Peckham has been tapped to re-write Paramount's Jack Ryan reboot. Previously written by Adam Cozad, pic is reportedly an origin story with Chris Pine as Ryan and Lost's Jack Bender directing. No offense but this hiring strikes me as a downmarket move -- an aesthetic tilt that could lead to a dilution of the Ryan brand.

Peckham's screenplays for Sherlock Holmes and The Book of Eli are dismissable offenses in my book. Holmes was glib horseshit -- it was my idea of torture -- and Peckham was...Read More

I've forgotten to ask HE rank-and-filers about their reactions to Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, which opened last Friday. I never tapped out a full review, but my basic reaction was that it's really sensitive, delicate, anguished and very carefully made. But it's morose, and this plus the passivity and resignation doesn't work. It very gently suffocates.

As Kazuo Ishiguro's book makes clear, once the layers have been peeled back and the situation is laid bare, Never Let Me Go becomes a piece, essentially, about resignation and doom.

"If the film is difficult for some people, it's not because of the...Read More

Barack Obama isn't exactly Jimmy Carter, but he comes awfully close. This time, however, there's no Ronald Reagan waiting in the wings to defeat him in the next Presidential election. It's not enough for a sitting President to have inspired anger and frustration and suffer low approval ratings. There also has to be a much better liked and tougher-talking alternative running against him/her.

What right-leaning candidate would be killer enough to unseat Obama? Nutbag Newt Gingrich? Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin? Florida's Charlie Crist? Jeb Bush? Bobby Jindal of Louisiana? Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota? I don't see anyone out there who's commanding and...Read More

While promoting Pan's Labrynth Guillermo del Toro spoke of his earliest childhood horror -- a standing horned goat hiding behind a bedroom armoire in the dark. My imaginary childhood horror -- one that thrives to this day -- is a six-foot-tall standing black panther. Whenever I'm alone and hear an unexpected noise there's a part of my mind that expects to see this guy. Not attacking or growling but just standing there in a slightly crouched position, legs apart with half-cat and half-human arms. Mouth open, tongue exposed, and staring right at me with those big yellow cat eyes.

...

How would the world be a lesser place if Kim Kardashian was to fall headfirst down a well and drown? She's redefined the words "nothingness" and "worthlessness" in ways that would give even F. Scott Fitzgerald, the creator of Daisy Buchanan and husband of Zelda Fitzgerald, pause. The fact that she's famous and desired for her hot bod, for being rich, for her Ray J sex tape, and for Keeping Up with the Kardashians amounts to a societal indictment of the first order. Put her on Charlie Rose and she'd say...what? I'm asking.

The key to this...

Tom Hooper's The King's Speech winning the Toronto Film Festival's People's Choice Award tells you that festivalgoers, like the older Academy contingent, will go for the accessible emotion every time.

Speech is a tidy, traditional portrait of British royalty and a profound friendship between a king and a commoner. It's a very fine film for what it is, appropriately framed in a conservative light and true to the era in which it unfolds. But it isn't nearly as exciting or audacious as Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan -- sorry.

The People's Choice Award For Documentary winner was Sturla Gunnarsson's Force of Nature:...Read More

I'm having trouble remembering Due Date (Warner Bros., 11.5), the Todd Phillips road comedy with Robert Downey, Jr and Zach Galifianakis. The title, I mean, because it alludes to pregnancy and...you know, doesn't seem to indicate guy humor or Son of Planes, Trains and Automobiles or anything in that realm.

On top of which I've had a problem with Galifianakis since The Hangover. He's not funny, I hate Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, and I don't want to see another Galifianakis man-diaper performance.

The only actor I'd like to see less in the Galifianakis Due Date role is the...Read More

I saw Randall Wallace's Secretariat (Disney, 10.8) about a month ago, but it feels a bit longer than that. And it won't open for another 18 days as we speak. I knew I'd be sitting on my reactions for quite a spell, so I tapped them out the night I saw Secretariat and sent them to a guy who'd also seen it. Otherwise it might have been difficult. You have to tap it out fresh.

Two days ago the Hollywood Reporter's Lindsay Powers reported that David Letterman was in on the Joaquin Phoenix meltdown joke all along.

She quotes Late Night staff writer Bill Scheft as follows: "Dave knew about it and Dave loved it because he could play along. It was great television. I've told people that [everyone was in on the joke], and not only don't people believe me, they tell me that I'm wrong and that [Phoenix] is a schizophrenic and he needs help and he's going to...Read More

Legendary Hollywood columnist and chronicler James Bacon died yesterday (or the night before) at age 96. Last night I searched for documentary or talk-show clips of Bacon passing along stories, anecdotes...anything. All I found was this video report of Bacon attending a 4.6.07 ceremony in honor of his getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (somewhere near 1637 Vine Street).

Bacon, whose career rested upon trusted relationships with scores of A-list stars during his peak years, began as a general assignment AP reporter in the 1940s. His Hollywood era spanned from the late '40s to the...Read More

Two days ago (i.e., Friday, 9.17) Vanity Fair's "Little Gold Men" columnist John Lopez posted a glowing review of Guillame Canet's Little White Lies, which he saw at the Toronto Film Festival. I saw it there also -- my last TIFF screening -- and couldn't have felt more differently.

Little White Lies begins with a 30something party animal (Jean Dujardin) leaving a night club at dawn and getting slammed by a truck as he's heading home on his scooter. Hands down, this is the most absorbing sequence in the film; no subsequent portion put the hook in...Read More

Yesterday's lament about the reported refusal of Warner Home Video technicians to do anything about diminishing excessive grain in the new Bluray of Merian C. Cooper and Willis O'Brien's King Kong reminded me of an observation I shared about five years ago, about how deliciously unreal the old Kong looked due to his white eyeballs.

"Cooper's Kong didn't look like any gorilla, chimp or orangutan that had ever walked the earth. He was something between a prehistoric hybrid and an imaginary monster of the id...a raging nightmare beast designed to scare the bejeesus out of...Read More

Another enjoyable discussion between In Contention's Kris Tapley and Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson, this time focusing on the Toronto Film Festival highlights. They also get into the strange (some would say reality-defying) winning of the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion by Sofia Coppola's Somewhere.

The best film I saw at the Toronto Film Festival -- the most sharply sculpted, exciting, electric -- was Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan . I wasn't the only one to feel this way, and this consensus gave the Fox Searchlight release serious Best Picture heat.

The most delicious film I saw during the festival -- the most culturally profound and deeply satisfying all around -- was David Fincher's The Social Network, but then I had to travel to catch it.

Danny Boyle's 127 Hours was certainly one of the best acted (i.e., James Franco's lead performance), the most surprising (in terms...Read More

It was first reported last April by Movieline's Kyle Buchanan that Social Network director David Fincher made Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara perform an eight-page scene -- the first in the film, a breakup scene -- 99 times.

The same story is reported in Mark Harris's New York article about the making of The Social Network.

"Yes, you do a lot of takes," says Social Network costar Armie Hammer, "but you feel extremely protected. He told me he knows that actors are inherently vain -- we sit in front of a mirror and think to ourselves, Oh, in this moment, I'm...Read More

A little more than three months ago I begged the Warner Home Video guys to consider respectfully and tastefully degranulating their then-forthcoming Bluray of the original King Kong. Not radically, and certainly not in a way that would compromise detail, but to do what they could to diminish that blanketed feeling in certain portions of this 1933 classic, that unnecessary sensation of Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray being swarmed over and bitten by a billion silvery mosquitoes.

Well, they didn't listen.

DVD Beaver's Gary W. Tooze has reviewed the new Kong Bluray...Read More

It's not that Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell flirted with witchcraft. A mildly creepy thing to admit, sure, but at least she was honest in doing so on Politically Incorrect in 1999. The problem is that O'Donnell explained it by saying that she "dabbled into witchcraft." That's a disqualifier right there. What else doesn't she know how to correctly express?

Complete O'Donnell quote: "I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they...Read More

Posted a month ago. Decent effort. A legit Tree of Life teaser could be easily assembled at this stage, of course, but the Fox Searchlight marketers (a) haven't had the time to put it together and (b) have probably said to themselves, "What's the hurry? We're probably not putting it out until the fall of 2010 anyway." You know what would be cool? A mid-summer counter-programming release in June or July.

This video would have worked a little bit better before Scott Pilgrim vs. The World had come out and bombed. Now with everyone on the planet understanding that Michael Cera has screwed the pooch and jumped the shark, it seems curious that any male actor would want to attend MCSA. What for? To double-down on chances of terminating his own career?

Presumably Ben Affleck's The Town (i.e., the weekend's top film) has now been seen by a fair percentage of HE regulars. Did anyone find Rebecca Hall's character -- a fetching, upstanding, kind-hearted bank officer -- remotely believable? Particularly her immediate romantic embrace of Ben Affleck's amiable, blue-collar Charlestown shlub, particularly after he confesses that he's a bank robber?

Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall in The Town

The script is basically about Affleck's felon seeking a kind of redemption from Hall, but I didn't believe a woman like her -- cautious, business-suity, emotionally balanced -- would pick...Read More

The high-throttle dialogue in The Social Network is, for me, a key reason why it works as well as it does. As I wrote last Monday night, David Fincher's film is like "His Girl Friday on Adderall." It's also spoken with the same rapidity that Ken Russell chose for 1980's Altered States (a decision, incidentally, that so angered screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky he removed his name from the credits).

(l.) Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg, (r.) Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg

The reason for the pacing of The Social Network, in any event, is explained in Mark Harris's...Read More

"Nowadays, when you hear people talking about 'the Facebook movie,' chances are they mean The Social Network, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's soon-to-open inquiry into the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook. But the description might be even better suited to "Catfish," a documentary by Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman." -- from A.O. Scott's 9.17 N.Y. Times review.

Same riff in lead graph of Catfish assessment piece in current Esquire (i.e., the one with Javier Bardem on cover).

I slept late this morning, piddled around, didn't start work until noon. My flight leaves around 7 pm so I have to start packing and get rolling. No more filing until late this evening, if then. I'll miss the cool Toronto weather. Back to the razmatazz.

I don't have time to discuss my brief chat last night with Patricio Guzman, director of the elegant and poetic documentary Nostalgia for the Light, which I saw here last weekend. It's basically a double-track exploration of two uses of Chile's Atacama Desert -- an ideal place for astronomers to watch the stars, and a location where the victims of Augusto Pinochet's reign of terror in the '70s were buried decades ago.

Nostalgia for the Light director Patricio Guzman and translator -- Thursday, 9.16, 9:35 pm.

Guzman (who knows Guillermo del Toro from way back)...Read More

I don't know if the just-announced casting of Sacha Baron Cohen in a biopic about late flamboyant Queen frontman Freddie Mercury is an inspired idea, or a dreadful one. The producers presumably reached out to Cohen not just because he physically resembles Mercury but because image-wise he's steeped in the realm of gay flamboyance. Mercury was fairly Bruno-ish himself -- one of the first openly gay performers in mainstream rock, making no bones about being a Taxi Zum Klo-ish enthusiast.

GK Films' Graham King is co-producing...Read More

I just finished a 15-minute phoner with 127 Hours director Danny Boyle, who was calling from London. There's always a feeling of vigor and relish in Boyle's voice -- a general mood of "can't wait" (or "couldn't wait") excitement. We covered several topics. I was telling him that my general impression of the film, looking back a week or so, is one of sensual delight -- it's full of explosive color (sandy ambers, reds, blues, browns) and ripe with aromas, secretions, tastings. And is nothing if not emotionally intense each step of the way.

Hollywood Elsewhere will either (a) find a way to attend and cover Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity and Stephen Colbert's March To Keep Fear Alive (despite plans to attend the Tribeca Qatar Film Festival from 10.26 through 10.30) or (b) at least be there in spirit. The Stewart/Colbert event will happen on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, 10.30. Any mass-supported statement about how pathetic the hee-haw Teabag fatass fungus-on-their-toenails contingent is will be good for the soul, and a balm in the eye of history.

On top of which it'll be cool...Read More

Apparently freaked or at least alarmed by recent negative reactions to I'm Still Here, his Joaquin Phoenix meltdown documentary, Casey Affleck has dropped the pose and confessed to N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply that "almost every bit of" I'm Still Here is pretend, put-on theatre.

To this I say bullshit. I believe that some or much of the doc may have been staged and performed, okay, but I'm convinced that it was inspired by genuine career despair on Phoenix's part, and that a sizable portion of it came straight from his real heart, head and gut.

What happened, I...Read More

Two nights ago Woody Allen spoke about the Ground Zero mosque issue with N.Y. Daily News "Gatecrasher" columnist Frank DiGiacomo at a Manhattan event for You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. "Of course I think they should build the mosque," he said, "[but] the only people who have a right to weigh in are the people that were personally involved in 9/11.

"The people who lost friends or relatives have every right to protest and say what they want to say. All of the other people weighing in" are doing so for "political and exploitation reasons. I feel those people...Read More

TheWrap's Brent Lang is reporting that Lionsgate has acquired domestic distribution rights to John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, an exceptional grief-recovery drama with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart that I reviewed yesterday. The plan is to open the film later this year and mount campaigns for Best Picture and Best Actress.

It's rainy and coldish and misty in Toronto today. I've been pushing it for eight days now (today is the ninth) so I'm in no hurry to get out there. But I should push myself to achieve one final productive day before flying home tomorrow. Options include I Saw The Devil, Mother of Rock, Cirkus Columbia, Little White Lies, Bad Faith, Sensation, etc. Possible re-viewing of Casino Jack, a dinner with Nostalgia for the Light's Patricio Guzman, etc.

I don't mean to sound cavalier about the curious career arc of an excellent actor, and I always flinch when I read "whatever happened to...?" articles because they sound blithe and dismissive. But fuck it -- whatever happened to Michael Pitt? An Esquire article about fashion styles seen in HBO's Boardwalk Empire (which premieres this Sunday) alerted me to Pitt's steady recurring role as Jimmy Darmody, and my immediate reaction was "whoa...he fell off the radar and I hadn't even noticed."

Michael Pitt in HBO's Boardwalk Empire.

Pitt was all the rage from '02 to...Read More

If nothing else this recently-released one-sheet for Ed Zwick's Love and Other Drugs (20th Century Fox, 11.24) conveys comfort, ease, self-satisfaction. It certainly doesn't indicate heavy-osity. It seems to be saying, "All that 'this movie is really exceptional' and 'Hathaway kills as a Parkinson's sufferer' stuff you were reading about earlier this year? Maybe or maybe not but we're okay either way, and you should be too."

Jamie Stuart's Filmmaker video interview piece with Never Let Me Go director Mark Romanek is, no offense, more intriguing than Never Let Me Go itself. Sorry, but it got and held me right away, which is pretty much the opposite of what happened when I sat down with Romanek's feature.

My apologies for not having seen or commented on this apparently un-aired 2008 ad before today. A little broad, a little old-fashioned in a Mel Brooks-y sense, but Eve's expression at the end is still priceless.

I should have linked two or three days ago to this eloquently written review of The Social Network by In Contention's Kris Tapley. It's one of the most cleanly composed, clearly thought-through pieces I've read about this film.

I'll admit that the physical disparity between Rabbit Hole costars Nicole Kidman and Tammy Blanchard, cast as warring sisters in John Cameron Mitchell's well-regarded film, doesn't seem that acute in these shots, which were taken at a TIFF press conference three days ago. But their differences are accentuated in the film, trust me. And it's definitely a problem.

(l.) Nicole Kidman, (r.) Tammy Blanchard during TIFF Rabbit Hole press conference earlier this week.

If Blanchard doesn't look "chubby" in her scenes she certainly appears well-fed and is clearly on the road to ampleness once...Read More

You can tell right away that Tyler Perry is pushing the material too hard. You can tell that right off the bat. Or I can, at least.

The Social Network "takes [Facebook's] success story and turns it into art," says Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, "[in] much the same way Orson Welles took the story of William Randolph Hearst and turned it into Citizen Kane. Was it really Hearst's story? Not exactly. Is it an American story? Absolutely.

"Sorkin is on fire with this script. There is not a fatty piece presented, not a glossed-over sappy moment. It turns out that his collaboration with Fincher is a match. Fincher's coldness and Sorkin's passion are combustible. Both are obsessive compulsive with their projects and have harnessed...Read More

The Social Network "is possibly one of the most important movies of the decade," declares PopEater's Jett Wells in a 9.15 post. "It not only unveils the stage and strings behind the biggest cultural phenomenon since the invention of the internet, but also how one of the most era-defining companies started with backstabbing and betrayal. It's dark, tragic and unfolds like a classic Greek play jacked on amphetamines and Red Bull.

"After taking in an early preview of David Fincher's [film], several scary thoughts come to mind, including: (a) Mark Zuckerberg comes off like an Adderall-fueled sociopath, and (b) Justin Timberlake might...Read More

For whatever reason the MPRM people did nothing during TIFF to encourage my interest in John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole (not a single invite, appeal, cajoling...nothing), so I missed last Monday night's premiere and party and everything else. Thanks, guys! But I caught up with it this afternoon, and it's not half bad. A bit more than that actually. It isn't quite A-plus or A but a solid A-minus, and it may begin to penetrate as a Best Picture contender down the road.

It also contains Nicole Kidman's best acting in a long while (and I didn't have...Read More

John Madden's The Debt, which I bailed on at the 40 minute mark, had, by the time I left, administered several self-inflicted wounds. Bruises, scratches, cuts, scrapes -- they kept coming non-stop. The biggest wince was realizing early on that all the actors -- principally Sam Worthington, Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Martin Csokas -- had been urged to "act." There wasn't a moment in the portion that I watched in which they didn't seem to be (a) speaking lines and (b) using every thespian trick in the book to let us know how their characters are feeling. There's nothing...Read More

I meant to link to David Poland's 9.9 review of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful last week, but better late than never. And he's right on in saying that Inarritu has "probably done the best work of his career here. He's finally abandoned the triptych.

"So even though Javier Bardem's character is still engaged in multiple stories, the film feels whole. It's the beginning, middle, and end of the story of this piece of this man's life. And in just weeks of time on screen, there is a real arc...and it doesn't feel forced.

"There is still plenty of pain and, yes,...Read More

I decided to catch an 11 am public screening of John Madden's Israeli Mossad guilt thriller The Debt, so I waited in front of Toronto's Elgin for nearly a half-hour in hopes of finding one of the film's publicists and mooching a free ticket. The nearby TIFF volunteer waited 25-plus minutes to inform that talent (i.e., Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington) wasn't expected. And therefore no publicist. So I paid $15 Canadian bills for admission and it's now about to begin.

And here's John Madden arriving onstage and offering remarks. So the volunteer gave me a bum steer. Thanks.

Today's films include Richard Ayoade's Submarine, Adam Wingard's A Horrible Way To Die, John Madden's The Debt, Tom Tykwer's Three, John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, Justin Lerner's Girlfriend and perhaps a peek-in revisiting of Alex Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. Of these seven, I may see three. I'm blowing off The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town (i.e., the Bruce Springsteen doc) as it'll be on cable fairly soon.

Three exceptional DVD Beaver captures from Criterion's The Thin Red Line Bluray, available (a) 13 days hence, (b) a week from Tuesday, and/or (c) 9.28.

This is probably the Thin Red Line shot that inspired the line "I've never met a leaf I didn't like." I don't know who originally said it, but this line stuck in the same way "a movie about cufflinks" stuck to Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and "a movie about a man walking through the woods" stuck to Anthony Minghella's...

(a) "Polls say we'll be throwing the Democrats out in November and bringing back the Republicans. Which is like hearing the words Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and saying 'I'll take Frankenstein'"; (b) "Not all the troops exiting Iraq are coming home. Some are going to Afghanistan in order to fight those who attacked us on 9.11, who are now in Pakistan. It's all perfectly logical if you just don't think about it."

Phillip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers ('78), a new Bluray of which came out yesterday, didn't work at all as a metaphor for what was happening in the culture 32 years ago, and therefore didn't seem like quite the right thing. Creeping conformity wasn't an issue for anyone I knew in the late '70s, or at least not on the level that applied when Don Siegel's original came out in 1956.

Which is why, for me, the Siegel still resonates. The Kaufman version is an eerie, well made, grippingly acted thriller -- it's a higher-grade thing than the Siegel --...Read More

I did two interviews after returning from New York around 10:30 am or so -- Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky at 12:30 pm, and then Let Me In director Matt Reeves at 2:30 pm. I love both these guys and especially their films, but interviews are killers. They eat your schedule and vaccum your day up -- they just take everything. And then I tried and failed to upload, convert, edit and post both video files before the 4:45 pm screening of Sarah's Key that I've decided is important. Next comes a Bruce Springsteen-Ed Norton stage interview happening at the Bell Lightbox around...Read More

In a recently posted New Yorker profile of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tells Juan Antonio Vargas that the film is "a classical story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and jealousy."

Sorkin describes Zuckerberg as a "brilliant guy who's socially awkward and who's got his nose up against the window of social life. It would seem he badly wanted to get into one of these final clubs" -- one of the exclusive, elite-within-elite party clubs at Harvard.

"In the movie's opening scene, according to a script that was leaked online, Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), a student...Read More

Kevin McCarthy's indelible screen moment happened in 1956, in the last scene of the original version of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His small-town doctor character is wildly freaking out -- terrified, out of breath, screaming -- in the middle of congested traffic as he tries to warn everyone about the pods.

The point, of course, was that creeping conformity was spreading across the land, etc. (Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was saying roughly the same thing, if I'm not mistaken.) This ending was jettisoned in favor...Read More

HitFix's Drew McWeeny also saw The Social Network last night and, like me, had kittens.

David Fincher's The Social Network (Columbia, 10.1) is Zodiac's younger, geekier, greedier brother. That means it's good, as in really good -- a movie for guys like myself and critics like Eric Kohn, Karina Longworth and Robert Koehler to savor and consider and bounce up against, and basically for smart, sophisticated audiences to savor in every cultural corner, and....can I just blurt it out? It's the strongest Best Picture contender I've seen so far this year, and in saying this I'm obviously alluding to Inception.

I flew down from Toronto today [i.e., Monday] to...Read More

Who in Errol Morris's Tabloid can you believe? Or rather, who do you want to believe? Or what slant on the Tabloid story do you feel better about accepting as probable truth? That's the key consideration, I think. Apart from the fact that everyone should try to see this deliciously entertaining, thoroughly bizarre comedy doc, which screened for Toronto Film Festival press this morning.

Tabloid is the fourth triple-A rated Toronto Film Festival flick I've seen over the last five days, the previous three being The King's Speech, Black Swan and Let Me In.

I'm typing this on...Read More

Clint Eastwood's films have been less-is-more propositions all along. They're never been complicated or cluttered or tricky; all the moves are straight from the shoulder. But in Invictus and now, especially, Hereafter, there's been a detection of a less-is-less thing going on. I'm sorry to say this, but I don't sense a strengthening at work here. I feel a lack of inquiry and vigor and snap -- a lack of focus and demand, perhaps a little too much of a "good enough, this'll do" attitude.

Eastwood has spoken before about not believing in succumbing to "constipation through concentration." He doesn't believe in...Read More

To stay or not to stay? You're feeling more and more irked, anxious, unsettled. You knew the movie wasn't working almost immediately, and now there's no question. All you have to is grab your bag and get up and "slip out the back, Jack."

It's really that easy. You don't have to explain yourself or face recriminations from publicists. You can just escape -- twenty or thirty paces and you're free. And that's what I am right now -- a free man.

All to say I've just walked out of Dustin Lance Black's What's Wrong With Virginia?. I'm sorry but I don't...Read More

I riffed a week or two ago about moments in movies that just shut things down like that. You may be happy, unhappy or undecided about a film you're watching, but along comes one of these moments and whap...you're gone. Because you've just seen a harbinger of twenty or a hundred or a thousand similar wrong moments-to-come in this film, moments that will make you twitch or shudder or otherwise go "eewwhh," like Humphrey Bogart did when he discovered all those leeches stuck to his chest, back and legs in The African Queen.

I experienced a dozen or so disengagement leeches during the...Read More

I was just told that legendary French director Claude Chabrol, whose view of human nature was jaded in a darkly humorous way, has passed. I never really agreed with his being regarded as the French Hitchcock. He was just Chabrol the consistent.

For me, Saturday's big winner was Matt Reeves' Let Me In, as I briefly noted in an iPhone jotting yesterday afternoon. Today I'll be trying to catch Emilio Estevez's The Way, The Conspirator, Submarine, Errol Morris's Tabloid, Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light and perhaps a re-encounter with Alex Gibney's Client 9. What is that, six films? Sure thing.

In Contention's Kris Tapley, filing from his Los Angeles home, has been keeping better tabs on what's been happening overall than myself. Here's his summary about reactions to Let Me In and to Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, which, according to Tapley's understanding, landed...Read More

"For quite some time, Martin Scorsese's personal passions and enthusiasms have been channeled into his documentaries, not his dramatic features," Indiewire's Todd McCarthy wrote four days ago. "His first two major documentaries about the cinema, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy, were surveys shot through with personal insights. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan thrived on Scorsese's enthusiasm for another artist and his great feel for music and '60s New York, while Shine A Light, a concert film featuring The Rolling Stones, felt more like a technical exercise.

"But A Letter to Elia cuts closer...Read More

Two nights ago a big, bear-sized bearded guy in white pants had one of those "no, no...everyone!...listen to me!" experiences (possibly LSD-enhanced) at Hollywood's American Cinematheque during the finale of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was being shown in 70 mm. Let's have a round of applause for the AC's security staff, who obviously cared more about the feelings of this loon and treating him with kid gloves than giving the rest of the audience what they were entitled to receive.

Todd McCarthy's account...Read More

Warner Bros. publicists are asking critics to hold their Hereafter reviews until Sunday midnight, so that's all for that one. (I just came out of it about an hour ago.). I'm now in line for a 5:30 pm screening of Danny Boyle's 127 Hours. Three parties follow -- Sony Classics at Creme Brasserie, Robert Redford/Conspirator gathering and a Fox Searchlight shindig.

I would argue that Matt Reeves' Let Me In, which I've just come out of, is at least as good as Tomas Alfredson's Let The Right One In, which Reeves' film is a remake of. I'm guessing that this view will be regarded as heresy in some quarters, particularly since there's no denying that much of Let Me In feels like a scene-for-scene, and in some portions a shot-for-shot "copy" rather than a remake.

But it's very carefully copied with a meticulous, unhurried, highly absorbing style, and there is a Reeves signature of sorts here and there.

Hollywood remakes of European-made...Read More

There apparently can be no universal standard of happiness (or contentment even) regarding Blurays of Carol Reed's The Third Man. First there was the infamous Criterion grainstorm Bluray edition that gave me (and perhaps others) so much anguish and frustration, and now there's another source of agony -- the Studio Canal Third Man Bluray (out 9.21). And yet it must be said that Nate Boss's High-Def Digest review is hilarious.

Boss is a colorful impassioned writer. I like him because he hates like I do.

"Let me just say I wouldn't have...Read More

"The most fascinating aspect" of Robert Redford's The Conspirator (which won't have its TIFF press screening until Sunday) "is the historical resonance of the story it tells," writes L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein. "After Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed, America was traumatized, much as it was after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And as the film makes clear, the 1865 War Department, run by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), is determined to quench the country's thirst for vengeance, even if that means bending the law and sending a seemingly innocent woman to the gallows.

Hotel workers picketing in front of Toronto's Hyatt on King Street -- Friday, 9.10, 5:40 pm.

The mere sight of this put a dent in my day. To think that there are guys who actually go out and buy these things and put them on before going out to the local coffee shop and say to themselves, "Yeah...looks good. Enhances my image."

I hate those usherettes who stand around in theatres with their little flashlights. If you get up and move for any reason they turn them on...beam. "Please turn it off," I always say to them. "Thank you but I don't need your assistance. I can see fine." One of these women was standing about twelve feet away from me during this morning's screening of Black Swan. Every time someone went to the head she turned on her damn flashlight, and again when they returned. This became extremely annoying; it messed with my concentration. Who needs flashlights to see where they're going? Little old...Read More

Late last month MCN's David Poland predicted that Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls "is a lock to end up in this year's Oscar race come December" providing that Lionsgate advances the opening (currently skedded for January 2011) to sometime in December. Due respect to the source material, but this is not a credible projection since Perry is incapable of making an Oscar-worthy film, due to a profound lack of talent.

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (Fox Searchlight, 12.1) is immediately admitted into the Best of 2010 club. It stands head and shoulders over every previous Aronofsky film -- it's way in front of The Wrestler and don't even mention Requiem for a Dream. It's also cinched a Best Picture nomination (obviously) and totally locks in Natalie Portman as a Best Actress nominee. Done, settled, no arguments.

This is Portman's Bette Davis performance in All About Eve mixed with a little Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? twitchy...Read More

I've been trying to write my Black Swan review for the last 90 minutes, but my favorite Mac image-manipulation software -- picnik.com -- is acting wacked, forcing me to use the irritating and altogether tedious iPhoto. I need to find something that's as easy as Picnik -- easy for dumb guys, I mean -- but doesn't twitch out on me. On top of which I need a lover who won't drive me crazy, but we'll let that go for now.

King Street -- Thursday, 9.9, 8:40 pm.

The Inside Job team prior...

Prior to last night's 9 pm screening of Charles Ferguson's Inside Job at the Ryerson:

Ben Affleck's The Town (Warner Bros., 9.17), which I saw early this afternoon, never made me miserable. It's "professionally done" for the most part, but I did lose faith in it early on. It's not what I'd call a mediocre thing, but it's certainly not what anyone would call a believable crime flick -- certainly not in terms of how a decent, open-hearted bank-employee girlfriend (as played by Rebecca Hall) could be expected to respond to a nice, open-hearted felon (Affleck) with serious mother issues who's looking to escape the criminal fastlane.

Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner in The Town....

Re-experience Robert De Niro's jailhouse wailing and wall-punching scene in Raging Bull. And then imagine a followup moment in which Joe Pesci's Joey sneaks into Jake La Motta's hotel room as he's sleeping, and then climbs onto the bed, drops his pants and takes a dump on his brother's face. And then Jake leaps up and beats the crap out of Joey and runs into the bathroom to clean his face off, going "Eeoohhwww! I can't take this! Eeooohhww!"

I've just described the essence of Casey Affleck's...Read More

Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, which screens at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday (with an alleged press screening on Saturday), "has a big, harrowing special-effects scene early on and reserves its third act for something far less bombastic," reports the L.A. Times' Geoff Boucher.

Clint Eastwood during filming of Hereafter.

Screenwriter Peter Morgan says "he wrote a different ending that would have a grander scale," Bouncher writes. "Everyone agreed, though, that in the final analysis, Hereafter was going to keep its unconventional contours.

"'The classic thinking is you can't peter out in your third act, you...Read More

Why has Fox Searchlight decided to release Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, which they've just acquired from Bill Pohlad, in 2011 instead of later this year? Theoretical Answer #1: They don't want to complicate or compromise their already-underway campaigns for Black Swan, 127 Hours, Never Let Me Go and Conviction. Theoretical Answer #2: Even if they've decided that Black Swan and 127 Hours are their only serious contenders, they're figuring they can't ramp up a new Tree campaign fast enough. I think they're wrong but what do I know? I guess the Malick will finally peep through in Cannes 2011 after all.

With Robert Redford's The Conspirator only two days away from its first Toronto Film Festival showing (the first public screening being on Saturday at Roy Thomson Hall), I'm reposting what I wrote last April about the film's potential, and about James Solomon's script in particular:

"The calibre of Robin Wright Penn's performance as Mary Surratt, the rooming-house operator who was wrongly executed for allegedly conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, is unknown. But last night I read a shooting draft of James Solomon's The Conspirator, the Robert Redford-directed drama about Surratt's trial, and it's obviously a sturdily-written,...Read More

Drafthouse Films, a new Austin-based distribution company headed by Tim League, has announced the acquisition of Chris Morris's Four Lions, an Islamic terrorist comedy which has been wandering in the woods and looking for a home since playing Sundance eight months ago. It'll open in mid October in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, and take it from there.

Here's my brief review, initially posted on 1.24.10:

"Early last evening I saw Chris Morris's Four Lions -- an unsettling, at times off-putting, at other times genuinely...Read More

The cost of a monthly New York subway pass is...what, about $90? And is good for a solid month from the day you buy it. Toronto sells weekly passes for $36, and they're only good on a specific date-to-date basis. The one I bought yesterday afternoon (Wednesday) is good until Sunday night. Two rides per day x four and a half days = nine rides at $4 a ride. And then I have to buy another $36 weekly pass to cover next week. Is this reasonable? Not a fan.

So where are the basic elements (trailer, one-sheet, website) for Tom Hooper's The King's Speech (Weinstein Co., 11.24)? The Weinstein Co. has a locked-down Best Picture nomination plus a guaranteed Best Actor nomination for Colin Firth (for his performance as Albert, Duke of York, who later ascended as King George VI) plus a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Geoffrey Rush (as Lionel Logue, "Bertie"'s unconventonal speech therapist) so where's the razmatazz? The film opens in six weeks, guys. Hubba-hubba.

"This is a very...Read More

A pre-screening conversation at the Tribeca Screening Room last night, two or three minutes before The King's Speech began, was about a review that called Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight, 9.15) a "masterpiece." He's wrong, one guy said. It's one of those films for which the phrase "very well done for what it is" was invented, said another. It very gently suffocates. "Really sensitive, delicate, anguished and very carefully made," I replied. "But it's morose, and that plus the passivity and resignation doesn't work."

Update: Arrived in Toronto at 1:15 pm. Welcomely cooler here than Manhattan. Before: I saw Never Let Me Go and The King's Speech back-to-back last night. Now there's no Friday morning press-screening conflict and I'm free and clear to see Black Swan. I 'm leaving now for Newark and my Toronto flight. (I'm actually past my departure hour.) No more filings until the late afternoon.

Forget the silliness and consider all that beautiful headroom above R. Lee Ermey and Matthew Modine's heads. This is the 1.37:1 Full Metal Jacket I know and love and wish I owned on Bluray.

Obama has screwed himself with caution and timidity (he didn't go far enough with stimulus funding) and allowing the uglies to lead the conversation, but boil the current catastrophes down to basics and it all tracks back to Bush-era excesses and abuses.

So how are Average Joes going to vote in the mid-terms? Simple -- they're going to vote for a Republican majority in Congress, and thereby block any chance of Obama pushing anything through legislatively. They're going to give more power to those who caused all the problems in the first place (i.e., righties committed to exploiting stupidity and serving the...Read More

John Curran's Stone (Overture, 10.8) is some kind of mind-blower. It really and truly steps outside the box. It serves up moral/spiritual issues and past nightmares and demons and asks you, the viewer, to decide where the real morality and salvation lie.

I spoke to Curran a week or two ago. My audio digicorder was lost at the time so I used my Canon SD1400 camera. In the above clip we talk about Ed Norton, the film's sexuality, Robert DeNiro, Milla Jovovich, and the challenge facing the...Read More

Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' A Letter to Elia, which will play at the Toronto Film Festival, will be shown on PBS's American Masters series on 10.4, and then appear within an 18-disc Elia Kazan DVD set that 20th Century Fox Home Video will release on 11.9. One of the films in the set, naturally, will be Kazan's long-missing Viva Zapata ('52).

The 1.78:1 brownshirts who feel Psycho looks better when it's been top-and-bottom cropped within an inch of its life will perhaps be greatly distressed to learn that Zapata will be mastered at 1.37:1.

This is the most satisfyingly shot and performed poker-playing scene in Hollywood history because it's not about poker, but about two cheats trying to out-fuck each other. Paul Newman's smug and rascally confidence is key, but the whole thing really depends upon Robert Shaw's seething rage -- the scene wouldn't play without it. It's all about boiling blood.

I can watch this all day long and never get bored because it's perfectly shot, acted, lighted and timed. It's the kind of thing that big-studio movies used to...

Until last night I'd never seen this grainy copy of a b & w still, obviously taken from a cut scene in John Boorman's Deliverance ('72). Apparently a long-after-the-fact scene, or perhaps one of Jon Voight's nightmares. The Aintry Sheriff (James Dickey) has found a decomposed body, and has summoned Voight, Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty to identify and explain.

Last night TheWrap's Sharon Waxman reported about a seemingly horrific atmosphere at the Hollywood Reporter. The new guys -- i.e., the gossipy chip-chippies hired by new honcho Janice Min, formerly of Us magazine -- are talking only amongst themselves while the trade-wise old guard are suffering in morose isolation.

"The outward changes at the new Hollywood Reporter have led to an estrangement inside the newsroom between Janice Min and the staff she has brought in, and the veteran journalists who take orders from the newbies and are otherwise ignored," says Waxman.

"The alienation has become so severe that the...Read More

For me, the most enticing short-burst appraisal of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan was penned two days ago by First Showing's Alex Billington.

Two key portions: (a) "Wow. Now I know who I'm going to be rooting for to win the Best Actress Oscar next year"; and (b) "A brilliant, psychologically intense film that takes the audience on a very operatic thrill ride. I truly believe Aronofsky has outdone himself once again. [He's] achieved a mesmerizing and utterly brilliant fusion of two performance mediums -- theater (specifically ballet) and film in an extraordinary way that...we've never seen...

Updated, corrected: The first MCN Gurus o' Gold Best Picture chart was posted last night, and it's nothing. It's too early, nobody knows zip -- everyone's hedging or spitballing or opting for safe ground. It's significant, though, that each and every Guru -- Greg Ellwood, Pete Hammond, Peter Howell, Dave Karger, David Poland, Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Anne Thompson, Suzie Woz -- voted for Tom Hooper's newly-arrived The King's Speech.

Of the top sixteen films -- Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King's Speech, Toy Story 3, The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit, Another Year,...Read More

Bill McCuddy of Forbes.com (and Fox News entertainment guy for several years) wrote yesterday on his Facebook page that he'd seen a sneak of Ed Zwick's Love And Other Drugs. He described it as a "light romantic comedy about a girl" -- played by Anne Hathaway -- "with Parkinson's disease. Hathaway good [but] movie mediocre. (Bonus points for not doing a 'shaky prospects at box office' joke.)"

McCuddy's view strenuously argues with several non-pro opinions noted in this space for several months running. On top of which it's not about "a girl with Parkinson's" as much as about a...Read More

Critics aren't allowed to like Jeannot Szwarc's Somewhere In Time (1980), in part because it's been a huge sentimental hit with the wrong crowd for so many years. I'm not much of a fan, but I am a huge admirer of the final out-of-body and into-the-light sequence that ends the film. No, not the version shown in this YouTube clip, but a version that I saw at a critics' screening nearly 30 years ago...but which hasn't been seen since.

I asked about this when I happened...Read More

A short pip-pip-pip from the Telluride-attending Glenn Zoller: "I know I'm late in chiming in, but Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is an easy lock for Best Picture, Best Actor (Colin Firth) and Best Supporting Actor (Geoffrey Rush). Very much a crowd-pleaser at Telluride in the same way Slumdog Millionaire, Walk The Line, The Reader, Babel, Brokeback Mountain and Juno have been."

Here's Kris Tapley's Telluride interview with Hooper, Firth and Rush.

I don't personally know Michael Douglas, but I know people who know him and have heard he's not one for sentiment. He's presumably proud or very satisfied with his work in Wall Street 2 and Solitary Man, but the last thing he'd want would be a sympathy vote for Best Actor. So no more of this talk, a little dignity, no need, etc.

"Gemma Arterton has a slight chance for consideration for Tamara Drewe, certainly for a Golden Globe nod, right alongside Easy A's Emma Stone." -- Sasha Stone, "The State of the Race -- Dream Big," 9.6.

Arterton has a chance, yes. She has a chance of surviving the stink-bomb mushroom cloud effect of Tamara Drewe, arguably the most loathsome film of Stephen Frears' long and distinguished career. Emma Stone is a gifted personality-driven actress who's made a breakthrough with Easy A, and that's all. No, that's not true -- the HFPA whores will nominate almost anyone in a comedy-musical context. I spoke...

Being one of those who excerpted and linked to Eugene Novikov's Cinematical review of Peter Weir's The Way Back, I feel obliged to link to Kris Tapley's counter-review, and particularly his feeling that Novikov's review "completely misrepresents the film.

"Starting with the first line, Novikov says Weir's film is 'sadistically intent on making you feel as much of its subjects' physical agony as possible,'" Tapley notes. "It's a struggle, to be sure. This isn't a happy time in these people's lives. But there's nothing here defying convention when it comes to a survival film,...Read More

Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' Letter to Elia "doesn't ignore Kazan's 1952 testimony," writes The Independent's Geoffrey Macnab. "But the film turns out to be as much about Scorsese as it is about Kazan.

"What does it take to be a film director? Scorsese believes that his hero possessed 'a very thick skin and a very sensitive soul.' As a child growing up in 1950s New York, Scorsese used to 'stalk' new Kazan films, following them as they moved from cinema to cinema. He always...Read More

Last night I read Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic piece about the apparent likelihood that if Barack Obama doesn't man up and do something about Iran's nuclear-bomb capability (aside from economic sanctions, which aren't likely to influence anything), Israel will probably bomb Iran's nuclear sites sometime next year. Which will bring hard rain down upon everyone and everything, to put it mildly.

"You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs," Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells Goldberg. "When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that's...Read More

"Essentially a two-hander carried by Don and Peggy, last night's electrifying Mad Men episode once again reinforced just why the 60's set series deserved last week's Best Drama Emmy," says producer Richard Drew in an Atlantic.com discussion. "This really was TV at its best and yet more proof that we're in a golden age of the medium. No wonder movie attendance is on the downturn.

"Last night's show used the famous Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston rematch as a backdrop, but the real battle was between Don and Peggy, as they bonded and battled through the night,...Read More

With a more or less unanimous "not good enough" verdict delivered at last week's Venice Film Festival, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere -- which won't open until 12.24, and will probably be hiding out for the next couple of months -- can now relax. Impressions of it not being a Lost in Translation-level thing -- a mildly meandering mood piece -- means it's probably out of the awards game. Which takes the load off. I won't see it for a while, but Richard Corliss's Time review (filed from Venice) seemed like the best-written assessment.

"Over the past...Read More

Jean-Luc Godard's girlfriend and partner Anne-Marie Mieville has explained to The Australian's Matthew Campbell and John Follain why the legendary French director will not be personally accepting his special Oscar. "Jean-Luc won't go to America," she says, largely because he won't be given the award on the Oscar show itself, but at some piddly pre-Oscar event in November.

Bottom line: You don't relegate the great Jean-Luc Godard to a side-show. For what it's worth, I agree. I'd tell the Academy to shove it also.

"'He just told me, 'It's not the Oscars,' Mieville says, referring to Godard's reaction on learning about...Read More

There are scores of generic movie-dialogue lines that everyone recites on cue. "You're gonna need a bigger boat," "Laugh it up, fuzzball," ""Jack, I swear," "Who are those guys?," "I can see you're really upset about this, Dave," etc. Basic stuff, right?

But the greatest loser line of all time -- "I've been waiting all my life to fuck up like this" -- has yet to make it into the pantheon. Run a search and it doesn't pop up on any of those movie-dialogue sites. Which doesn't seem right. Because this is a great and lasting utterance...Read More

A summer 2010 summary piece by Lewis Beale had been locked behind a pay wall, and now it's free: "As far as the film industry was concerned, summer 2010 was seriously bipolar," it begins. "The first half looked like the biz was on its last legs, at least creatively. Sure, there were some hits, but almost everyone agreed that Iron Man 2 wasn't as good as Iron Man, Robin Hood wasn't even close to being a great Robin Hood, and Shrek Forever After was possibly the lamest entry in the series.

"All these films (and several others) were not exactly original concepts,...Read More

Why doesn't DVD Beaver's Gary W. Tooze let his hair down and just say it? A Bluray of Jean Luc-Godard's Breathless (1960), which was shot on the cheap using natural light for the most part, can't look that crisp or shimmering. It's just a cool little landmark black-and white film, but hardly a Greg Toland masterwork. Restoring it was a good thing, but a regular Criterion DVD (which is also available) will more than suffice.

Jean Seberg in a frame capture from Criterion's Bluray of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, an essential film to see and...

"Christopher Nolan proved there is always room at the multiplex, even in swimsuit season, for a smart, original story. Will Ferrell bounced back. Michael Cera fell flat. Animation was the No. 1 genre. Sorry, Sex and the City ladies: It's over." -- N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes in a summer-wrap-up piece that will appear in tomorrow morning's print edition.

The big winner was Sony, which "owned all of its wide releases and delivered hit after hit, albeit on levels lower than most of its rivals," Barnes reports. "Sony's modestly budgeted remake of The Karate Kid was one of the summer's biggest...Read More

Yesterday's news that Anton Corbijn and George Clooney's The American would out-perform Machete by a million or so was surprising enough, but now guess what? Machete has fallen to third place behind Takers and is now looking at $11 million or so for the weekend. What a tumble! I presume it's that word-of-mouth Trejo + Rodriguez + too-much-blood-and-wanking-around factor. A major stunner for Team Rodriguez. Right now they're all sitting around with forlorn faces and asking themselves, "What happened?"

The American is now estimated to finish with about $16.3 million, Takers (down 44% from last weekend) will snag about $11.4 million,...Read More

So what have we learned so far from the dual unfoldings of the Venice and Telluride film festivals? Neither has ended, of course, and there are always different perspectives and views, of course, and no one senses finality, of course, but here's a stab:

At today's Sunday panel at Telluride Film Festival (l. to r.): Real-life arm-slice guy Aron Ralston, 127 Hours director Danny Boyle, James Franco, moderator Annette Insdorf, The Way Back director Peter Weir, Werner Herzog. (Photo by Glenn Zoller)

(a) Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan may or may not be more of a favorite among impassioned...Read More

Danny Boyle's 127 Hours "has been expertly brought to the screen by [a] director who finds a way to put 'urgency' in every frame," Deadline's Pete Hammond writes from Telluride, "despite the fact that the entire film is basically one man vs. the elements."

The film is "a tour-de-force for James Franco," he adds, noting how the 32 year-old actor "is virtually never off screen in the same way Spencer Tracy triumphed in the similarly spare The Old Man And The Sea (1958). Franco's performance could put him in contention for a best actor Oscar nod just as Tracy's did over...Read More

I've sat and chilled at The Bean (1st Avenue and 3rd Street) three or four times. A week and a half ago I got out the laptop and did some work there for 90 minutes. Early this morning some jackass yellow cabbie hit another car and crashed into The Bean, injuring five and seriously maiming one guy in particular.

I used to drive a cab in Boston. I can guess what that cab driver was thinking and doing.

This kind of thing happens in urban action films from time to time, usually...Read More

The Toronto Film Festival is offering one press screening of Darren Aronofsky's hotly anticipated Black Swan, which pulverized nearly all discerning critics at the Venice Film Festival. It happens on Friday, September 10th, at the Scotiabank theatre at 9:30 am -- great.

But wait. Another highly anticipated film, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech, which excited many viewers yesterday at the Telluride Film Festival, is also having its one and only press screening at nearly the exact same time -- 9 am -- on the very same morning, and at the same venue.

Each film has at least two...Read More

Filing from Telluride, Cinematical's Eugene Novikov says that Peter Weir's The Way Back "enters the canon of survival films as perhaps the most sadistically intent on making you feel as much of its subjects' physical agony as possible. Despite its impeccable awards pedigree and prestige pic status, it may be too straight-up harrowing to get much traction, either with the Academy voters or at the box office. [But] for those with the fortitude to take the plunge, it offers an intense, morally thorny exploration of the limits of human endurance."

HE reader Terry Woods calls it "a...Read More

A studio's weekend projection says that by Sunday night Anton Corbijn's quiet, meditative and art-housey The American will triumph (very slightly) over Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis' Machete, a "funny" cheeseballer about blood, babes and Tex-Mex immigration politics. The George Clooney assassin-in-Italy drama will end up with $15 to $16 million, it says here, and the Danny Trejo taco-stud comedy will end up with $14 to $15 million.

I wasn't expecting this. I thought Average Joes would run in the opposite direction from an austere Antonioni-ish minimal-action flick and flock instead to a lowbrow entertainment with a Grindhouse attitude. Instead they evenly split....Read More

Dan Mecca's "The 25 Most Memorable Opening Scenes In Film" article on thefilmstage.com (which I found via Awards Daily) slightly angered me on two counts:

(1) The opening of Antichrist is not especially good. (Mecca ranks it as #23 among 25 he singled out.) The tragedy of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg's young son falling out of a bedroom window to his death as they madly copulate in a nearby bathroom is simply not absorbing or believable. The child's fall doesn't seem accidental -- it seems cinematically fake and laboriously pre-ordained. The snowfall and slow-motion only worsens the...Read More

An HE reader from Portland who saw a rough cut of Matt Reeves' Let Me In last June says that the murder-and-chase sequence (which I posted here yesterday) goes on a bit longer without cuts, and actually warrants comparison to the extended sequence in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men that begins with the van ambush and the shooting of Julianne Moore's character.

Reeves' camera "is in the locked-down position, and it remains there for another minute or so as the car gets hit and then rolls off the road to the bottom of a ditch," he reports. "We see...Read More

If the legend of the Poland Curse still means anything, MCN's David Poland may have stuck a shiv into Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight, 9.15) by calling it "a masterpiece...a film we'll be discussing, frame by frame, in schools, 20 years from now." He also praises it as "smart and demanding and emotional and rigorous and profoundly artful. It is more than 'a good story well told' [but] humanity on a screen. And it trusts us, as thinking, feeling adults, to do the work."

I say this as someone who (a) is...Read More

In Contention's Kris Tapley has joined the ranks of the frustrated regarding Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go, and for the same simple reason. He can't understand (and is perplexed that the movie fails to satisfactorily explain) why the lead characters, all trapped in a situation that threatens their lives, don't try to escape.

Romanek's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "kept me at arm's length from frame one," he writes. "There is a distance here, a cold sense of removal from what would otherwise be an extremely moving narrative. I wanted desperately to feel for the characters and their plight, but...Read More

HE reader Josh Shelov has suggested the following for discussion, to wit: Quentin Tarantino's entire reputation rests on his having delivered six variations of a single scene, which could be called "The Torturer's Monologue." Michael Madsen vs. tied-up cop in Reservoir Dogs, Samuel L. Jackson vs. Frank Whaley in Pulp Fiction, Jackson vs. Tim Roth in Pulp Fiction, Chris Walken vs. Dennis Hopper in True Romance, Christoph Waltz vs. French farmer in Inglorious Basterds, and Nazi soldier vs. Michael Fassbender's British impostor in restaurant/tavern scene in Inglorious Basterds.

In the view of HE's Telluride correspondent Glenn Zoller, Errol Morris's Tabloid, which screened late last night, is "the equivalent of a normal-seeming documentary, handsomely shot and edited, that has dropped a tab of acid. What a trip! Morris fielded a few questions at 1:15 am and seemed almost as shell-shocked as the audience (and the subjects) from this wacky but intense memory-lane fever dream."

In Contention's Kris Tapley also attended, and has given Tabloid three and a half stars. "It's a great year for documentaries at this year's fest and Errol Morris's latest is right...Read More

A friend has heard people describe this woman as (a) someone who should be cast in movies or (b) used as an example how to pitch a story to executives.

That Home Theatre Forum guy who today posted impressions of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, having seen it a day or two previously, says (a) "it's finished" (but only Mr. Whackadoodle knows for sure!), (b) "it's about three hours," and (c) "I believe it releases in October but it may be a limited release [as] there is talk of a cut-down version, which Malick did for The New World as well, but nothing confirmed."

The guy's general comments, as transcribed on thefilmstage.com: "Saw Tree of Life the other night at work and it really is amazing or hypnotic, more...Read More

This beautiful photo of the storm that would soon besiege the Venice Film Festival was taken by producer Julia Chasman (25th Hour, Driving Lessons). I was a little too rough on Indiewire's Anne Thompson earlier today by suggesting she wasn't trying hard enough, etc. The festival's wifi press room was shut down during the rainstorm, forcing everyone (including Anne) to stop filing what they were working on and go elsewhere for wifi. So I get it. Criticism withdrawn.

Hobo With A Shotgun is one of the greatest B-movie titles ever conceived. The fact that it's not a joke trailer but an actual movie kicks it up another level. (It's coming out sometime in 2011, although I know not when.) Seriously -- when's the last time anyone on the street said "hobo"? That's a 1930s and '40s Woody Guthrie term.

When's the last time guys with holes in their soles squatted by a campfire next to railroad tracks and heated up a can...Read More

I don't even remember this sequence being in the original Let The Right One In. Maybe I need to see it again. In any event this scene is nicely shot, cut, everything. It tells me that Let Me In (Overture, 10.1) may be exceptional in its own way, along with doing a good job of aping Tomas Alfredson's original.

Not that I minded or was turned off by the red-band trailer, but trailers lie, cheat and hoodwink. That's what 94% of them do (and are intended to...

In the view of Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is basically a pallid thing, a B-side, "a movie which just floats through its running time without any sort of crisis."

Somewhere star Stephen Dorff, director-writer Sofia Coppola, costar Elle Fanning at the Venice Film Festival -- Friday, 9.3

Except, that is, for "the subtle, insidious crisis of identity creeping up on Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a pampered movie actor, holed up in the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles -- a self-absorbed guy who is fawned upon by assistants, producers and especially beautiful women.

"Yet...Read More

Sofia Coppola "retreads familiar territory with Somewhere, which is a smaller-scale companion piece to Marie Antoinette and Lost in Translation," writes Indiewire's Anne Thompson. "Witty, spare and gorgeously framed [with] breakthrough roles for Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, [it] should play well for the young smart-house set."

Okay, but how did Somewhere's journey feel? Where does it actually take you, and does the trip seem well worth it (or at least worth it) at the end? Does it succeed on its own terms? Is it finally a single, a ground-rule double...what? These are things I'd like to know.

In his debut Deadline posting, Pete Hammond reports that he ran into Alexander Payne, director of the forthcoming The Descendants, during his trip to the Telluride Film Festival, and that Payne said "he was coming back this time as a fan just to 'see movies.'"

George Clooney, Alexander Payne during shooting of The Descendants, in a photo taken last March.

Hammond apparently didn't ask Payne about The Descendants, his Hawaiian dysfunctional family drama starring George Clooney, or decided not to report this if he did. I'd been holding out hope that The Descendants might...Read More

Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, which will have its Venice Film Festival premiere this evening, has received its first review from the Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm, and it's basically a "hmmm"-type response.

Somewhere's Elle Fanning, Stephen Dorff.

"Anyone expecting fireworks from Sofia Coppola after the lavish and controversial Marie Antoinette will be disappointed with Somewhere," he begins. Fireworks?

"This quiet and restrained portrait of Hollywood star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and his on-off relationship with his 12-year-old daughter Chloe (Elle Fanning) is not the noisy showbiz chronicle other directors might well have made it.

"Johnny, divorced,...Read More

"It's thundering in Venice," Indiewire's Anne Thompson tweeted a couple of hours ago. "Torrential downpour. Folks in the press room are looking out the windows as a driving storm hits the Lido. I guess I'm not taking the ferry [to the] San Marco district in the near future. I did not bring an umbrella or a raincoat."

If I was in Venice you would see video of this rainstorm up right now. And I would buy an umbrella and go wherever I wanted. One of my best...Read More

This is the Jerry Lewis I know, as opposed to the guy who nearly wept with gratitude when he accepted his special Oscar. The octogenarian World War II generation and the Lindsay Lohans of the world generally don't get each other, and guys as old as Lewis (84) are usually dismissed when they talk about spanking whippersnappers. But he's not without perspective. He's been there, used to get loaded and chase tail, knows what goes.

Michael Joseph Gross's profile of Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair strikes me as careful, scrupulous reporting. It confirms, of course, that this woman is ugly, bestial, etc. She is Gregg Stillson, the raging nutter politician played by Martin Sheen in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. Will her followers read the piece, reconsider, etc.? Get outta town.

I was nodding at Bilge Ebiri's 9.2 "Vulture" piece about Steven Seagal's bad guy performance in Machete, which inspired thoughts of a comeback and "hey, he almost seems cool again." I was thinking the same thing too, except I got hung up on Seagal's hair. The guy's 58 years oid and he's dying it inky black, and he seems to have at least 50% more hair today than he did in the late '80s.

I'm not saying Segal has to pull the hair plugs out, but if you don't let a little bit of...Read More

Warner Bros. will stage a Boston premiere of Ben Affleck's The Town at Fenway Park on 8 pm on Tuesday, 9.14. A 50-foot-tall screen out in center field, one presumes, plus digital projection and sound that can be heard as far as Revere. Affleck and costars Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall, Blake Lively and Chris Cooper will walk out on the diamond and take bows like the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

I'm posting Ayz Waraich's This Place I Hurt To Be, a six-minute short, because it's well made and compellingly acted by Stephen L. Sullivan and Jessica James, and nicely shot by Drew Suppa. But it's also cool that Vimeo is now providing embed codes that are viewable on iPhones and iPads. 5:32 pm Update: I just checked and it works on my iPhone.

THIS PLACE I HURT TO BE from Ayz Waraich on Vimeo.

The 70mm Todd AO version of Oklahoma! (top) was shot separately from the 35 mm version, which is what most general audiences saw when it was released in 1955. The Todd AO version, shot in 30 frames per second, looked pretty good on the old laser disc, but the elements had gone south by the time the 2005 DVD came out. For some reason a DVD rendering of this version was included, and it looks like hell.

The responsibility for this long-gone loss is with 20th...Read More

The menu for the new Forbidden Planet Bluray is the most stirring thing about it. I've seen never actually seen this sci-fi cult classic start to finish, only portions here and there, but to go the distance is to tap your fingers and roll your eyes. Okay, it's mildly arresting now and then. The docs and extras pick up the slack to some extent.

No big wows or mild surprises, even, at this year's Telluride Film Festival, which announced its slate about an hour ago. The title that has my interest most of all, frankly, is Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' Letter to Elia , a documentary about Elia Kazan that will be discussed in a panel consisting of Todd McCarthy, Michael Barker (whose presence presumably confirms that Sony Classics will distribute?) and Jones.

Photos by HE correspondent Glenn Zoller.

The selections include Mike Leigh's Another Year (played at Cannes), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful (ditto), Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack...Read More

Variety's Justin Chang is throwing the same intifada stones as Indiewire's Anne Thompson at Julian Schnabel's Miral. Who's standing up for this film? How about the British critics? These reviews are fairly brutal.

The thrust of Chang's criticism is that while Schnabel is obviously drawn to and engaged by a militant Palestinian perspective on this decades-old conflict, he lacks the stones and conviction to really go to town with it and risk giving offense in some quarters.

"While any film addressing the Israeli-Palestinian divide can expect a measure of controversy, few hearts or minds are likely to be stirred...Read More

Who would've expected Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson, a sage industry reporter not exactly known for dispensing blunt or blistering film reviews, to bitchslap Julian Schnabel's Miral (Weinstein Co., 12.3), a pro-Palestinian drama about compassion for orphans and growing anti-Israeli militancy?

While calling Miral "heartfelt" and confessing to crying during the film's bookend sections, Thompson, filing from Venice Film Festival, says that Schnabel "tells the wrong story," that the film is "earnest agit-prop" with a likely "narrow art-house niche," and that star Freida Pinto, playing...Read More

Okay, now I want to see this. I finally realized it's Son of Planes, Trains and Automobiles -- Robert Downey, Jr. as Steve Martin and Zach Galifianakis as John Candy. Which may be doubly enjoyable as I've never liked Galifianakis (he turned me off in The Hangover...bearded anal retard) and will enjoy seeing him get treated like a bad dog.

There's been a bit of an upstate rumble about my 8.20 "Gulag Archipelago" piece, which criticized Rochester, N.Y., as being a strange place for a film director to reside. I was interviewed about this twice today. Here's the result of a chat with Jim Stinson, business reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

Here's another chat with WNEC's Pat McGonigle.

Rochester-area resident to yours truly (direct quote): "Your [sic] a complete douche. Rochester rules and Hollywood is for phoney dick-wads such as yourself." Another one: "You are wrong, Mr. Wells, for trashing Rochester. Perhaps your impressions of our wonderful city...Read More

There's a bit in George Lucas's THX-1138 that makes me chuckle every time. A group of social undesirables -- shaved-head baldies, dressed in white -- have been put into an asylum of some sort, and while one of them (Donald Pleasance) rants on about some political or philosophical issue, a fellow misfit a few feet away begins assaulting a droid robocop, and then beats his skull in.

Maggie McOmie, Robert Buvall in George Lucas's THX 1138, available on WHV Bluray on 9.7.

Pleasance turns around, notices, stops talking for three or four seconds, doesn't...Read More

It's a bit unusual for a Toronto Film Festival party to go 14 hours straight. The hosts will be obliged, of course, to serve not only breakfast but also lunch on top of a gargantuan amount of alcohol. What festivalgoer would want to revel this hard? I'm not identifying the hosts, of course, but I'd give the idea a re-think if I were them.

I don't exactly "like" Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis ' Machete. I found it mildly agreeable because of three or four factors that I'll explain in a second. But it left me persuaded all the more that Rodriguez lacks the sensitivity to be an A-level director. His movies are always about blood, bullets, hot babes and primitive emotions. He really does seem to lack the wit and the savoir faire to do anything else.

You're not a serious director unless you can see, feel or...Read More

Is it okay if I bypass Will Gluck's Easy A (Disney, 9.17) and proclaim Emma Stone as the next big thing -- a sassy Michelle Monaghan-resembling actress-comedienne in the Elaine May-Eileen Brennan mold -- on the strength of this trailer? Or do I have to actually go to this afternoon's 4 pm screening and sit through it? Because the trailer makes me feel as if I've pretty much seen it.

if you were Quentin Tarantino, currently serving honcho of the Venice Film Festival jury, why would you be walking around with an emotionally vivid black cowboy hat? He's never worn one before. Some kind of gesture of support and solidarity for fellow genre-wallower Robert Rodriguez?

Last night Michael Douglas told David Letterman that he has Stage IV throat cancer. Is that "not where you want to be?" Letterman asked. "Uhm, no," Douglas said. "No, you like to be down at stage one."

"The big thing you're always worried about is it spreading," the 65 year-old Douglas explained. "So I am head and neck. I am above the neck, so nothing's gone down, and the expectations are good." He said his chances of recovery are 80 percent "and with certain hospitals and...

Indiewire's Todd McCarthy, filing concurrent with the Venice Film Festival, isn't as blown away by Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan as Obsessed With Film's Rob Beames, who fell to his knees and had kittens, or In Contention's Guy Lodge, who experienced heart fibrillations.

While acknowledging Aronofsky's fully-earned rep as "a serious, driven director interested in discovering and charting outer boundaries," McCarthy has a problem with Black Swan's equation between fervent commitment to art and offing yourself, and with a finale that he feels is excessive and "grand guignol"-ish.

"Much as I'm enamored of The Red...Read More

Former L.A. Times/Envelope Oscar columnist Pete Hammond will provide awards season coverage for Deadline's Nikki Finke, it was tweeted (and then reported by Kris Tapley) last night.

In an odd twist, Tapley has also reported that "all of Hammond's material that runs at Deadline will also run at Movieline.com, so make that two outlets getting into the Oscar game in a big way this year." Double posting on organizationally-linked-but-separate industry websites? That can't be right.

One presumes that Finke's flattering 8.13 profile of Pete's industrious and well-liked life Madelyn Hammond ("The Job Whisperer") was somehow linked to the...

In an impassioned review excerpt from the Venice Film Festival, Obsessed With Film's Rob Beames is calling Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan the "best film I've seen all year.

"[It] left me devastated, excited, tense and emotionally drained," Beames texted. "[Jury chairman Quentin] Tarantino will be a fool if he doesn't give this the Golden Lion...unless, of course, something even better is coming up. Aronofsky has made his first masterpiece and Natalie Portman must now be considered a favorite for the Oscar. [This is a] perfect film that blends The Red Shoes with Antichrist, via Cronenberg."