What does this poster (snapped at the corner of Sixth Ave. and 57th Street about an hour ago) say above and beyond everything else? Answer: "This is a comfort movie about charming people with snappy repartee and big incomes, aimed at over-25 couples and women attending in groups of three and four. We will not surprise you -- honest. And we probably won't touch you that deeply, if at all. But you'll laugh here and there, and have a moderately good time.

"What you can totally count on and take to the bank is that every last element in...Read More

One of the best-cut trailers of the year. Congrats to Mark Woollen of Mark Woollen & Associates.

"Jeez, why so down on Jackass 3D?," a journalist friend wrote last night. "I love those Jackass movies, and obviously so do millions of other folks. They're the modern version of the Three Stooges, and I laughed as hard at Jackass II as I did at Borat. We all know stupidity sells, especially self-aware stupidity, so why is Jackass any more deplorable than Meet the Fockers or the 40 Year Old Virgin or, dare I say it, Woody Allen films like Sleeper or Take the Money and Run?

"I think there's too much of an elitist 'holier than thou' attitude among critics...Read More

I've only begin to dip into Lionsgate's Apocalypse Now Bluray, but so far it's glorious. The only problem (and this is entirely the fault of my system) is that the bassy explosion sounds are overwhelming the speakers on my 42" plasma. (Dynamic range and all that.) I'll never forget my first exposure to the magnificent sub-woofer vibration -- like some great rumbling earthquake -- that came out of the Ziegfeld speakers when I first saw AN in 1979.

This is my favorite still from the film. The...Read More

The most frequently cited contender for the just-announced 2010 Gotham Independent Film Awards is Debra Granik's Winters Bone, which was nominated for Best Feature, Breakthrough Actor (Jennifer Lawrence) and Best Ensemble Performance. Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right and Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture received two nominations each.

The 20th annual Gotham Awards' ceremony will be held on Monday, 11.29 at Cipriani Wall Street. Besides the awards presentations Robert Duvall, Hilary Swank, Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky and Focus Features CEO James Schamus will each be presented with a career tribute.

Best Feature nominees are...Read More

Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls is being promoted today with an online art gallery display designed by Lionsgate marketing director Tim Palen. The idea is to digitally animate eight portraits of Colored Girls actresses by making their eyes, lips and heads move as we hear dialogue from one of their scenes. This is way beyond the realm of Clutch Cargo, but the minimal-movement aesthetic triggered this association.

An actual real-world version of same will show in Manhattan's Lehman Maupin Gallery (540 West 26th Street) from 10.24 through 10.27.

Palen's "Living Portraits," which he...

I was surprised to discover that the 1.66 to 1 crop used in the new Criterion Bluray of Paths of Glory feels relatively satisfying. All I can finally say is that it looks "right," as if 1.66 to 1 was the idea all along. And I sat down with this disc ready to dislike what I might see and totally prepared to complain. But it doesn't look bad. None of the framings seem cramped or confined.

This is a significant admission for me as I've been a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio purist all my life....Read More

"We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls," Maureen Dowd wrote in a 10.17 N.Y. Times column, calling them "grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.

"These women -- Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine -- have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they're mistreating the help or belittling the president's manhood, making snide comments about a rival's hair or ripping an opponent for spending money...Read More

A critic friend told me this morning that he had the same reaction to Chris Morris's Four Lions (Alamo Drafthouse, 11.5) that I did -- astonishing concept (a suicide terrorist comedy), quite funny at times, but he couldn't understand a fair portion of the dialogue due to the British working-class accents. They might as well be speaking Farsi.

"It was funny, or at least the parts I could understand," he wrote. "Apparently they're not putting subtitles on it, which is unfortunate because those accents were so thick and the sound so muddy as to be virtually indecipherable...Read More

As some may have seen, there was a two-minute piece on David O. Russell's The Fighter that ran during Sunday night's Mad Men finale. Here are link #1 and link #2 to the 1080 encodes.

Chewing over the four categories and the competitors as they now stand -- Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Listeners take note: our discussion lasts over an hour, and all to the good. Is it posted to iTunes yet? I don't know.

Jeff and Michael Zimbalist's The Two Escobars, which I finally saw last Thursday at the Tribeca Cinemas, tells an incredibly sad and tragic story. But it's mainly a phenomenal sports documentary because it's so much more than just a doc about guys kicking a ball around a field.

Director Jason Reitman, a major supporter of the film who moderated the post-screening discussion, feels that The Two Escobars the equal of One Day in September and When We Were Kings, and while I'm no sports fanatic I can...Read More

The fourth Oscar Poker podcast, which Sasha Stone and I finished recording about two and a half hours ago, focused on the strongest acting nominees. It should be posted to iTunes sometime this evening.

The only thing we disagreed on was a bizarre idea initially floated (or so Sasha recalled) by Indiewire's Anne Thompson about Natalie Portman's brilliant Black Swan performance. Thompson has intimated that Portman's performance might be a problem with some women because her ballet-dancer character doesn't convey enough in the way strong or courageous positivism. By this standard a Best Actress nominee has less chance of winning if she...Read More

An HE reader named "Webster" wrote the following this morning: "I saw James L. Brooks' How Do You Know at a screening in Orange County last week. (No end credits at the screening -- still being massaged.) What I saw started a little slow, but really picks up steam midway through and ends strong. In a five-slot race I wouldn't give it much chance at a Best Picture nomination, but with 10 slots...who knows?

"The guy who delivers the goods is Paul Rudd. This will raise his profile to the A-list. This is a guaranteed Best Supporting Actor nomination." Really, Webster? Good...Read More

Jett didn't want to know about watching a five hour and 30-minute film, but after being urged to see Carlos over and over (even Todd McCarthy told him to re-think his reluctance during a New York Film Festival party) I managed to drag him to the IFC Center last night for a 7 pm screening. Director Olivier Assayas spoke with us briefly in the lobby, and then delivered some opening remarks before the crowd.

Carlos director Olivier Assayas at Manhattan's IFC Center prior to 7 pm show -- Saturday, 10.16, 6:50 pm.

The truth? We caught...Read More

Criterion's recent confirmation that they'll release a Bluray/DVD of James L. Brooks' Broadcast News in January 2011 suddenly reminded that I haven't felt any How Do You Know intrigue in a while. I mean, the trailer is okay (although it does make the film seem a little thin and sitcommy) and it's coming out on 12.17 but it's just kinda lying there. I'm not hearing a drumbeat that says "hey, we've got something really awards-season special here."

Will the Broadcast News Bluray, arriving with a...Read More

I've always wanted to send a camera into space. I actually tried something like this with an 8mm movie camera and a bunch of helium balloons tied together when I was eleven or twelve. (The experiment failed.) Brooklyn's Luke Geissbuhler and his son Max recently sent a styrofoam-encased iPhone 4.0 about 19 miles into space with a weather balloon. He just turned on the video camera and let it fly.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

The balloon eventually burst and the iPhone, which fell at speeds over 100 miles an hour, parachute-landed...Read More

Gus Van Sant's Restless is apparently about "a terminally ill teenage girl (Mia Wasikowska) who falls for a boy (Henry Hopper) who likes to attend funerals and their encounters with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot (Chin Han) from WWII." Some IMDB guy wrote last April that it's "absolutely phenomenal...without a doubt it's Van Sant's best since Elephant."

So what about AMPAS concerns that the Oscar Awards have been usurped and/or happen too late in the game, and everyone's complaint that all the year's best films are always back-loaded into the last three or four months of the year. I just thought of an idea that could not only solve this situation but turn the whole situation into a win-win.

Have two Oscar awards shows every year -- a Phase One Oscar telecast in early to mid October, say, that would honor films released from January 1st through August 31st (that's...Read More

NYC entertainment journalist driving down to Washington, D.C. on Saturday, 10.30, for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's "send all Tea Party righties to green re-education camps" rally. I wouldn't mind sharing car rental costs. Plus I'm thinking about crashing somewhere in D.C. for the night. I don't want to drive all the way back the same day, and I don't need/want a slick hotel. I'm just looking for a bed and good wifi and a shower -- that's it. But the room has to be located somewhere cool. Georgetown would be nice, but what do I know?

Hey, is there any...Read More

You will bow to Paramount's Jackass 3D -- i.e., the $21.8 million it earned yesterday and the $53 million it'll probably take in by Sunday night. And you will suffer along with Summit's second-place Red, which took in an estimated $7.3 million Friday and is looking at $20 million by tomorrow night. And some of you will pay to see the third-place The Social Network, which dropped only 32% yesterday. And others will flock to Disney's Secretariat, which dropped only 29 % for a fourth-place finish.

This video of Transformers 3 star Shia LaBeouf splashing hot coffee on a corpulent paparazzo was on all the sites until yesterday afternoon, when it was taken down. But now, for the time being, it's viewable again. Paraparazzi are scum. This is the coolest thing LaBoeuf has ever done, onscreen or off. Yes, it would have been a tiny bit cooler if he hadn't run after dousing the guy.

Diseased cynicism secretes out of Red like the flu, like poison. Anyone who says this bullshit comic-book actioner thing is "funny" is suffering from total corrosion of the soul. Nothing paycheck movies of this type sap and impurify our precious spiritual fluids. They're a scourge and a pestilence. I really and truly mean that.

It's fine with me that Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and the others got paid for appearing in this thing, but there's no reason why anyone with even...Read More

"I've watched the five-and-a-half-hour Carlos twice now, and am completely convinced that it's a great film, in serial caps, as it were; and looking at Assayas' other work, I'm growing in my conviction that Assayas isn't just one of the most vital filmmakers working today, but that he's one for the books, as the saying goes -- a major figure in his country's cinema, and world cinema." -- Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny in a 10.13 posting.

"It isn't that Mr. Assayas doesn't have strong opinions,...Read More

Sincere gratitude to the Movieline crew for having posted high-quality scans of old Movieline articles from the '90s, including my own "Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood" article, which ran in March 1992 or thereabouts.

Believe it or not, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a six-day tribute to Cannon Films from 11.19 to 11.24. What's next -- a black-tie tribute at Alice Tully Hall to Elie Samaha? From the online program guide: "Israel's answer to Simpson and Bruckheimer, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and their production and distribution company, Cannon Films, bestrode the 1980s with gleeful exploitation-movie schlock and quality auteur cinema from Godard, Cassavetes, Mailer and Ruiz."

The idea, I'm guessing, is to stay away from the films of Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris, Albert Pyun and Charles Bronson and crap...Read More

The chronology: (a) President Obama met with the Waiting for Superman team (including the kids) on Monday, (b) I posted a photo the next morning, (c) the White House website posted this video late Tuesday afternoon, and (d) Paramount publicity sent the link around late yesterday afternoon. That's how it went down.

The video shows that Paramount honcho Brad Grey and Waiting for Superman director Davis Guggenheim were also (naturally) part of the group.

London-based photographer Dafydd Jones took this shot of Paul Newman, Natasha Richardson and Lauren Bacall on a Hudson River boat-cruise party to celebrate the launch of Tina Brown's Talk magazine on 9.2.99. To me this photo says that every day above ground is cause for celebration.

Last night I became the very last entertainment journalist/columnist in the world to see Exit Through The Gift Shop. My guilt is lifted...finally! And no more harassment from distributor John Sloss about my dereliction. It's a half-humorous, half-depressing, altogether fascinating film about the lowering of aesthetic standards in the art world. It's very "alive" and attuned to 21st Century art-celebrity currents, and in my head has shot to the front of the pack in the Best Feature Doc competition.

It's absolutely essential viewing for anyone who...Read More

Former Time staffer and James Cameron biographer Rebecca Keegan and recently departed Entertainment Weekly writer/blogger Nicole Sperling are now official L.A. Times entertainment reporters and Oscar season pulse-takers. The idea is to fill the spaces left by the semi-departed Tom O'Neil (who recently reclaimed Gold Derby) and Pete Hammond (now with Deadline).

Two professional white guys who recently saw Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls hold differing opinions. One says "there's no way this movie is getting a Best Picture nomination...there are two or three really good performances but Perry just didn't succeed at translating the play into a good film." The other claims "it's the real deal -- maybe too conceptually out there for safe, old, mainstream white Academy tastes, but the performances range from good (Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine) to great (Phylicia Rashad, Thandie Newton) to pretty much masterful (Kimberly Elise, Macy Gray)."

I'm not so sure about the opinion of viewer #2 as...Read More

Over the last three-plus decades I've felt soothed and stirred by the performances of French actress Nathalie Baye, and particularly by her angelic pixie smile. I've also succumbed many times to the curious way her little-bird vibe has manifested into erotic intrigue. So I was delighted to lunch with her today at a tres elegant restaurant inside the Helmsley Park Lane on Central Park South. I'm a rabbit running late and way behind the clock, so I'll pass along the particulars tomorrow.

Nathalie Baye at Garden Cafe inside Helmsley Park Lane hotel -- Friday, 10.15, 1:25 pm.

Marshall Fine has really gone over the falls in a barrel -- he likes Conviction and is panning Olivier Assayas' Carlos. But before responding, let's carefully examine his reasoning.

Fine's objection to Carlos "is that in presenting a terrorist as an action hero, it glorifies terrorism as a legitimate path of political action. Would people be singing the praises of this film if it was equally well-made, just as thrilling and exciting -- but was the story of Mohamed Atta? A terrorist is a terrorist. Murder is murder.

"A self-styled freedom fighter for the Palestinian cause (though he himself...Read More

Vince Vaughn's 10.14 statement about the "gay electric cars" joke in that now-reedited trailer for Ron Howard's The Dilemma was a little too grim and butt-plugged. We wanted to hear that guy in The Wedding Crashers do a free-associating riff and lay it down in a kind of motor-mouth style. Instead Vaughn sounded constipated. He was saying what his people told him to say rather than what he really thinks.

"Let me add my voice of support to the people outraged by the bullying and persecution of people for their differences, whatever those differences may be," Vaughn's statement reads. "Comedy...Read More

Somewhere around the two-minute mark this starts to get hilarious.

Yesterday Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale posted a Best Picture Oscar chart. The leading ten, he says, are (starting from the top) The Social Network, The King's Speech, Black Swan,127 Hours, True Grit, The Kids Are All Right, Inception, Toy Story 3, The Fighter and For Colored Girls.

Look -- I thought I explained a while back that Tyler Perry is too mediocre a filmmaker for anyone to even imagine that he might get lucky with For Colored Girls on the strength of it being based on a respected mid '70s B'way play. He's a niche director...Read More

Why would Brooks Barnes run a recent N.Y. Times story about HBO's forthcoming Phil Spector biopic with Al Pacino without mentioning the obvious inspiration? I'm speaking, of course, about Vikram Jayanti's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which opened at Manhattan's Film Forum last June and received lots of publicity and praise during a brief run.

Pacino and screenwriter David Mamet and producer Barry Levinson can say they just decided to make a movie about Spector out of the blue because they know all about his murder case and love his music and so on, but how...Read More

Next Wednesday I finally get to see Andrew Jarecki's All Good Things, a bad-marriage-leads-to-murder drama "inspired" by the history of rich-guy Robert Durst (Ryan Gosling) and the probably-foul-play-related disappearance of his wife Kathie (Kirsten Dunst) in 1982. My interest is based solely on my admiration for Jarecki's Capturing The Friedmans, the 2004 doc that was also about creepy weird stuff inside the home of a New York-area family.

All Good Things was originally skedded to open via the Weinstein Co. in the summer of '09....Read More

Under some protest I saw The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest at last weekend's Hamptons Film festival, and the same thought I had while watching The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo returned. Noomi Rapace's shark-eye performance as Lisbeth Salander is a bit of a drag. It's the easiest thing in the world to be impassive and show no emotion, and that's all she does in both films. She gets all frozen and still and blank-faced, and holds onto this like a gila monster.

I'm mentioning this...Read More

As I wrote in a 9.30 piece called "Betty Ann Brockovich", Tony Goldwyn's Conviction (Fox Searchlight, 10.15) is on the rote and humdrum side. It's one of those come-from-behind stories about a working class woman (Hilary Swank) with a fairly demanding life who achieves the seemingly impossible task of....zzzzzzz. Sorry. Where I was I?

I love how Marshall Fine tries to turn it all around and give Conviction points for being plain and unpretentious and using "straightforward storytelling."

"There's no equivocation here -- you know who you're supposed to be rooting for right from the beginning....Read More

It was revealed last weekend that Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, which I warmed to after catching a slightly shortened version at the Hamptons Film Festival, had been hit with an NC-17 rating. This morning the pic's distributor Harvey Weinstein (i.e., Weinstein Co. co-honcho) said in a statement that "we are taking every possible step to contest the MPAA's decision...we hope they will see that our appeal is reasonable, and the film, which is an honest and personal portrait of a relationship, would be significantly harmed by such a rating."

Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams in Derek...

I'm a double Scorpio with Libra rising, and because of this I've been looked at askance all of my adult life. Mostly by women I've known or run into at parties. I've also been reading astrological analyses of Scorpios all my life, and it is their opinion, boiled down, that Scorpios are killers -- just evil conniving rage-hounds with big stingers.

I wouldn't want to go anywhere near a Scorpio based on these descriptions. And yet I've known Scorpios all my life and have come to like or enjoy or admire or care for quite a few of them. They're good, worthy,...Read More

Olivier Assayas's Carlos (IFC Films, 10.15) is "five and a half hours of border-hopping, bombings, botched attacks, a brutal but bungled hijacking, and many, many short scenes in which bearded men and beautiful, impassive women sit in small rooms and strategize how best to advance the Palestinian cause and defeat the imperialist capitalist world order.

"You might opt to see Assayas's condensed [150-minute] version [but] I say go for the whole shebang. Shot by shot, scene by scene, it's a fluid and enthralling piece of work. I wasn't bored for a millisecond." -- from a...

There's nothing to be gained from another Chris Nolan Batman film, and that goes double when it comes to Tom Hardy (Bronson) playing the villain. Because Hardy's schtick (i.e., intense shaved-head machismo) is just too obvious and big-foot primitive to steal the cool-villain crown from Heath Ledger's Joker. And even if Hardy does pull something off it'll still be the same old superhero vs. super-villain crap. In the realm of fresh-water storytelling and magical potions of imagination, a reboot of a big fat corporate franchise is like toxic waste in the water table. What is Nolan thinking? Does he want to move...Read More

DreamWorks' just-announced decision to move Steven Spielberg's War Horse from 8.12.11 to 12.28.11 indicates that the film has "awards potential," says Indiewire's Anne Thompson. She also quotes DreamWorks topper Stacey Snider saying that War Horse "feels like a holiday movie,...[Spielberg] feels great about it, [and] we feel great about it."

Awards potential? I'm not going to say anything, but please read what I wrote about War Horse on 5.4.10 and tell me if you think this film appears likely to make the awards cut, given the manipulative sentimentality that you always get with Spielberg at the helm, especially with John Williams doing...Read More

Shlomi Eldar's Precious Life has won the Best Documentary Ophir award at the 2010 Israeli Film Academy's award ceremony in Jerusalem. The doc, about joint efforts to remedy a young Palestinian boy's bone-marrow issue, played Telluride and Toronto (among many other festivals) and will air on HBO next year. A disc of this has been sitting on my shelf for a little more than a month...damn. I really have to watch it soon.

I have issues with Made in Dagenham (Sony Classics, 11.19) and Barney's Version (Sony Classics, 12.17), but let's not go there now. The point is that Rosamund Pike easily gives the most arresting performance in both, and has earned full consideration for Best Supporting Actress honors as a result. Really. The evidence is abundant that 2010 is her breakout year.

Rosamund Pike in Made in Dagenham (l.) and Barney's Version (r.).

Pike, whose performance as Dominic Cooper's slightly ditzy girlfriend in Lone Scherfig's An Education had an undercurrent of self-deprecating wit, plays...Read More

Forbes columnist Bill McCuddy and his wife, who have a home in the Hamptons, were driving behind me last weekend and noticed that my tail lights were out. "Do you have a compact car with New Jersey plates?," he asked in an e-mail sent last night. "My wife saw someone with his/her rear lights not working pulling into Enclave Inn" -- where I was staying -- "and came thisclose to pulling in after and telling them. Sorry. And next time call me to bail you out."

The story I ran earlier this evening about AMC's Movietickets.com having reported that Steven Soderbergh's Haywire (formerly Knockout) would be getting a one-week booking at Manhattan's AMC Empire starting on Friday, 10.15 wasn't wrong from my end -- the listing was there -- but AMC screwed up. They profusely apologized, I'm told, and deleted the entry earlier this evening.

I deleted my post a little after 10 pm, which is when I emerged from a showing of Barney's Version at the Broadway Screening Room.

Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin responded earlier today to a criticism voiced by a female reader of "By Ken Levine" -- criticism which basically echoed general dissatisfaction among women that Sorkin's female characters are too bimbo-ish and groupie-like.

Sorkin starts out by saying "I get it...it's not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about...women are both prizes and equals."

But his strongest point, I feel, is that there are three mature, together, super-sharp female...Read More

Morgan Spurlock's Committed, an interview anthology show featuring directors who had flms at the Toronto Film Festival, wll debut on AMC. Question #1: TIFF ended over 20 days ago -- in today's ADD Twitter world doesn't the airing of this seem a little slow? Question #2: Where's Spurlock, and who's the nerdy-looking guy with the tie and the glasses interviewing everyone?