I heard Black Swan at tonight's Zeigeld premiere screening like never before. The big-screen speakers blasted and trumpeted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, lifting me up and over and out...fuhgedaboutit. It was my third viewing of Black Swan, and I was blown away yet again...over the falls. This film is a masterwork, a symphony, and 97% of the ticket-buying audience will never appreciate how great it can sound and feel because they'll be seeing it at some shitty-ass megaplex with the sound turned down so the theatre owner can save on maintenance.

Black Swan star and dead-certain Best Actress nominee...

Scott Feinberg has just posted a 45-minute interview "with one of the more colorful characters in this year's awards race, Social Network costar and Best Supporting Actor contender Justin Timberlake. It's one of his first, if not his first, long-form interview this awards season, and I learned a lot from it about Justin and his performance."

They do a piece about falling down and they don't include Vivien Leigh's radish scene in Gone With The Wind? The look on that boxer's face when he gets up doesn't exactly say "I'm ready to fight again!" It says, "Whoa, I gotta fight that guy again?...shit." I'm glad for General Motors employees who still have jobs and are feeding their families, but I see that GM logo and something goes cold inside. Top-dog GM executives can rot in hell, no offense.

It's been one of those frenetic mornings. A lot of calling about something I've decided not to run for the time being. Tapping out some rough reactions to True Grit. Some back and forth about the Sundance '11 condo. And preparing for the two big events of the day -- a Kids Are All Right schmooze thing in Chelsea, and then the big Black Swan premiere and after-party tonight. The long and the short is that I have to do a time-out for two or three hours.

Michael Mann has so far made one serious failure, and that was (and is) The Keep. I saw it once 27 years ago, and that was sufficient. And yet some, I realize, feel it's a little better than that. Not that anyone's had much of a chance to give it another viewing. The Keep isn't available on DVD or Bluray, but it's now available through Netflix Streaming.

Congrats to Winter's Bone director Debra Granik and distributor Roadside Attractions for nabbing two Gotham Awards last night. The grimly realistic Ozarkian drama that launched Jennifer Lawrence took the Best Feature and Best Ensemble Performance trophies. And cheers to the three big honorary award recipients -- Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky (looking very dapper with his Preston Sturges moustache), Get Low star Robert Duvall and Conviction star Hilary Swank.

Taken from balcony behind the stage as honorary award-winner Robert Duvall was delivering remarks. Notice Black Swan star Natalie Portman (excellent evening dress!) and her director Darren Aronofsky sitting...

Irvin Kershner "seemed amused when I told him that, when I first saw Loving back when I was in college, I really didn't care much for it because I couldn't relate to its melancholy story about a guy who was beginning to worry that he'd taken a wrong turn somewhere in his career - and, worse, in his life - and worried whether it was already too late to turn back," Moving Picture Blog's Joe Leydon wrote yesterday.

"But when I watched the movie again 15...Read More

Am I allowed to say...? Naah, forget it. I was going to say while I found Leslie Neilsen's original Airplane performance amusing, I never laughed. At most I chuckled. Chortled? Neilsen obviously hasd that deadpan-manner thing down pat. Tens of millions (including Keith Olbermann) loved him for that. It made him into a comic legend in the realm of...well, his own. But let's not go overboard.

For me "funny" Neilsen was a...Read More

A Peggy Siegal luncheon was held today at the Four Seasons for The Fighter, and particularly for director David O. Russell, star-producer Mark Wahlberg and costar Melissa Leo. After the food and schmooze Russell and I spoke for a half-hour -- here's the mp3. Russell is my kind of whip-smart guy -- highly perceptive, well-read, an adult, a father, and whimsical but in no way combustible or hair-trigger. His shorter hair, I think, signifies a new resolve never to be on YouTube ever again.

Yes, that's...Read More

If it turns out to be true, James Franco's Oscar co-hosting gig will probably kill his shot at being a Best Actor nominee for his performance in 127 Hours. Just as Tom Hanks once said "there's no crying in baseball!," you can also say "the Oscar telecast host can't win the Best Actor Oscar! You can't straddle lanes like that...no! If he's the co-host, fine. And he's a Best Actor nominee, fine. But you can't do both."

Nikki Finke is reporting that she "just learned that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has asked James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host the Academy Awards, and it 'looks like' both young stars have accepted the offer.

"There is always the chance that one or both of them might back out because of prior commitments and other concerns," Finke adds, "But my sources say the host announcement could be made as soon as this week."

Excuse me and due respect, but this is close to ridiculous. These guys would be great for hosting...Read More

TheWrap's Steve Pond has passed along positive tweet impressions of Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit, which screened to a select few last week in Los Angeles and also Saturday night here in New York.

I was told two things yesterday about True Grit. One, that it's a surprisingly emotional film (i.e., surprisingly for the Coen brothers, that is). And two, that while Jeff Bridges's Rooster Cogburn performance is crackling and robust, Matt Damon "almost steals the show"in the Glenn Campbell role, and that he's suddenly looking like a possible Best Supporting Actor nominee.

The great Irvin Kershner, director of The Empire Strikes Back but more importantly of Loving, the 1970 George Segal-Eva Marie Saint Westport ennui dramedy, had died at age 87.

Kersh was a feisty guy, fun to talk to, full of piss and vinegar, no day at the beach. I loved his brief little performance in The Last Temptation of Christ ("...but we want it!"). And yes, let's acknowledge that he deserves eternal credit for defying George "it doesn't have to be that good" Lucas on...

The Fighter had another triumphant Manhattan showing last night, and at a good theatre for a change -- i.e., Lincoln Center's Walter Reade as opposed to the always-crappy-sounding Lincoln Square. After the lights came up star-producer Mark Wahlberg, director David O. Russell and Best Supporting Actress contender Melissa Leo sat for a q & a. Strong applause greeted the closing credits. New Yorker critic David Denby was there. Smart crowd, pretty middle-aged women, etc. It was the place to be.

The sound is indistinct on these iPhone clips...Read More

Yesterday's Oscar Poker was just Sasha, Phil Contrino and myself. We got into early True Grit talk, the award-worthiness of Shutter Island, general box-office tallies, Black Swan, spoilers, the diminishing theatre presence in the heartland, and the current leading candidates for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Here's an independent, non-iTunes link.

The Pursuitist is reporting that Naked Gun guy Leslie Nielsen, 84, has died in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The website was reportedly notified of Nielsen's passing by his nephew, Doug Nielsen of Richmond, Virginia. Nielsen passed due to "complications from pneumonia." Nielsen's comic signature was a classic deadpan response to whatever foolery was put before him.

Neilsen's comic breakthrough was in Airplane (1980), particularly when he said, "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley." His delivery always said "I'm letting you, the audience, know I'm being...Read More

Richard Levine's Every Day (Image, January 2011) flew under my radar when it played at last spring's Tribeca Film Festival. I heard nothing. IFC.com's Stephen Saito marginally approved with reservations. I'm only paying attention now because the trailer has popped up. I'm telling myself that any adult-flavored drama that isn't based on a comic book has to be, on some level, a good thing. But I'm not sensing anything new here.

In an 8.21.10 riff about Criterion's America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, I said that "the only keepers" are Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. But these three look and sound terrific on Bluray, like pristine celluloid prints straight out of the lab, and are fully worth the price. Prime shelf space, to have and to hold.

Particularly Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, a true American classic that tens of thousands of under-30 film buffs probably haven't seen.

I...Read More

Earlier today Awards Daily's Ryan Adams posted two new King's Speech posters -- an English-language version (possibly the new Weinstein-approved one-sheet) and a Spanish-language poster. Both are superior to that really crappy one that a few columnists ripped to shreds earlier this month. The Spanish poster, I feel, is easily the most attractive of the three. But it has, of course, a glaring sideburn problem.

I presume I don't have to remind anyone that hairstyles among the male British royals have always been ultra-conservative, and...Read More

It supposedly dates you if you admit to playing stickball as a kid. I don't know why. It just means that when you were nine or ten or eleven you pitched some kind of rubber ball at a batter who stood in front of a concrete wall that had a batter's box drawn in chalk, and sometimes with another guy (i.e., the pitcher's teammate) fielding occasional flyballs and grounders. I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering if anyone else ever had a dispute over what my friends and I used to call the "splatter effect."

When the batter didn't swing there were always...Read More

Initial reactions to Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit will be posted here and there on Wednesday, 12.1, around 1 pm. I can't say exactly when or where, but the Scott Rudin-produced western is starting to be shown. I'm told there was a restricted screening (i.e., no Poland, Tapley or Hammond) that happened last Tuesday. (Gasp!) Attendees were sworn to secrecy, etc.

This is an old refrain, but everyone needs to start treating the Oscar telecast as merely the end of the road -- a moderately exciting, amusing, occasionally touching, usually harmless, sometimes irksome, sometimes gratifying ceremony in which certain heavy-predicted favorites have their night in the sun. And that's all it is -- just a televised finale. We all know it's not the destination that counts as much as the quality of the journey, so act accordingly.

So people need to invest a bit more in the season as a whole, and at the risk of alienating Oscar advertisers, start talking more about...Read More

Marriages between filmmakers are tinderboxes. They're never long for this world, especially if the husband is a director-screenwriter-producer and the wife is an actress, and double especially when they make films together. Jointly-created films are like children, and if the film fails to ignite commercially and/or boost the career of the wife, the parents will start to blame themselves. Most talented actresses are intensely ambitious and no day at the beach to begin with, and this will only intensify if you put them in a movie that doesn't take off or make them seem as mesmerizing or pistol-hot or Meryl Streep-ish as...Read More

For years I've been lamenting the "CinemaScope mumps" distortion syndrome -- that face-broadening, weight-adding effect that resulted from the use of anamorphic CinemaScope lenses from '53 through '59 or '60. It would be heaven if someone could figure a way to horizontally compress these films so that it would all look right. There's a fundamental feeling of being cheated out of the correct proportions that were captured but not represented by those effing Bausch & Lomb Scope lenses.

William Holden's face was never this wide, even after he'd gotten much older after decades of drinking.

I hate...Read More

Everyone was tweeting last night about the Munk debate in Toronto between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens over the contribution of religion to the world's ills and/or comforts. I myself was driving back from Gulalala to San Francisco, and am now searching around for an online digital replay. Before the debate Hitchens sat down with Toronto Globe & Mail's editorial board editor John Geiger for a general discussion about same. Here is segment #1, segment #2 and segment #3.

First a persuasive dismissive review from the New Yorker's Anthony Lane, and now a follow-up from N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. Tell me how this doesn't translate into some level of difficulty for The King's Speech. And, unlike Lane, Dargis doesn't even tumble for Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush's performances -- she likes Guy Pearce's King Edward VIII instead.

"Like many entertainments of this pop-historical type, The King's Speech wears history lightly no matter how heavy the crown," she says, adding that Firth and Rush are "solid" but "too decent [and] too banal, and the film [is] too...Read More

"Great meals fade upon reflection -- everything else gains," a great hustler of the past once said. But has Inception gained? I know it upticked between viewing #1 (which frustrated due to shitty sound at a non-IMAX showing at Manhattan's Lincoln Square) and viewing #2 (a very high-quality IMAX screening at San Francisco's Metreon with knockout sound). But since then Inception has kind of settled down and levelled out. It's one of the most thrilling mind-fuck movies of all time, but I'm just not that into seeing it again on Bluray. Go figure.

Okay, I'm half...Read More

TheWrap's Steve Pond has not only written one of the most depressing Oscar-season columns I've read over the past several weeks, but one of the most infuriating. The simple acknowledging of idiot-wind opinions held by those legendary "older conservative Academy members" gives them a kind of legitimacy, and that they don't deserve this. Oh, and only 200 people showing up to see 127 Hours is merely another example of arm-carve anxiety. Everyone knows it's out there. I brought my 127 Hours screener to my Thanksgiving sleep-over house in Gualala, and nobody even asked about it, much less popped it into the DVD...

This morning I was admiring the catchy eyesore appeal of Bones Roadhouse in downtown Gualala. The flames in the sign tell you they're into charbroiled beef -- very distinctive, guys. Not mention the "great ocean views." And the loud brownish rust color of the exterior accented by those Indian red window frames is startling. This is the downside of American free enterprise -- i.e., people with atrocious taste being allowed to not only design their own storefronts but pollute the aesthetic atmosphere of the nearby area.

Remnant of typical home in Gualala...

A friend asked why I've been ranting about the failure of Collider's Steve Weintraub to step up to the plate and post whatever favorable opinions he may have about William Monahan's London Boulevard, which has opened in London and gotten creamed by most critics. Weintraub has stated he hasn't posted a review because Monahan showed him the film as a friend and not as a critic. I think that's a moot point once a film opens theatrically.

"How about when one of your director pallies shows you something early and tells you not to write about it?," the friend asked....Read More

Post-chemo, ailing Michael Douglas appears to be in the pink. A few weeks ago the supermarket tabs ran photos that made him look a little ghoulish. But in this two-day-old photo, taken at Orlando's Epcot center, he looks healthy and gleaming. The fact that cancer causes weight loss obviously isn't a "good" thing, but there's no denying that Douglas looks better in this family photograph than he has in a long time.

Thanks to Awards Daily's Sasha Stone for the pass-along.

If you're gonna do a Sylvester Stallone imitation, you have to stay away from yelling "Adrienne!" That's for chumps. Serious Stallone mimics tend to use (a) his signature line from First Blood -- i.e., "They drew first blood, not me" and (b) the opening line from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven," which alludes to Stallone's long-simmering intention to direct or star in a Poe biopic.

All you have to do is try and simulate Stallone's reedy baritone voice, his New York-ish accent, the vaguely sneering tone and his slight speech impediment. He has problems with t's and especially r's....Read More

One thing I'm extremely thankful for is the apparently probable Presidential campaign of Sarah Palin, and the fact that at least one semi-reasonable guy (i.e., Bob Cesca) believes she could actually be elected by way of a sociopolitical perfect storm. The likelihood of her actually running against Obama is zero, of course, but dreaming about this makes me feel so warm and comfortable. A female Greg Stillson for President! Nobody appreciates the irony as much as David Cronenberg and Stephen King.

I'd read several reviews and some excerpts from Keith Richards and James Fox's "Life," but I didn't settle into the book until two days ago. I don't trust book reviewers -- I think they tend to gush, like movie critics, over anything that's half-decent. So I was genuinely surprised and relieved when it turned out that "Life" actually is an exceptionally honest and well-written showbiz tale, and a bit more.

Rock musicians aren't supposed to be this lean, well-phrased and generally articulate. My suspicion is that Richards didn't "write" a fucking word of this thing...Read More

The "years of waiting and months of preparation" thing plus learning the moves like a pro with the anorexic ballet-dancer bod is what seals the Best Actress deal for Natalie Portman. What she did is analogous to Robert De Niro's commitment to playing muscular and fat Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Once this settles in among the rank-and-file, it's over.

Time Out's Dave Calhoun has sliced and diced William Monahan's London Boulevard, which opens in London this weekend. The London-based crime drama needs a stateside supporter but Collider's Steve Weintraub, who has seen and liked it (according to Weintraub's 11.17 Monahan interview), is strangely silent. A man stands by his friends.

"Monahan draws on this big-name cast and employs superior talent behind the camera such as cinematographer Chris Menges, " Calhoun says, "but still manages to serve up a tired, lifeless film which fails to realise either the style or sexiness it craves and...Read More

I regret to say that having finally seen Peter Weir's The Way Back, I now understand why it took so long to find a distributor. It's a high-level outdoor survival drama in a long, gloomy, sloggy vein. It has a rote and rudimentary quality that, for me, places it apart from everything in the Weir canon. The man who made it knew what he was doing, but it was a bad idea or a bum steer or something.

It's not in the realm of Gallipoli or Picnic at...Read More

Work stopped yesterday afternoon. That's why I left New York City yesterday morning, before the deluge. Anyone flying anywhere today or tonight is asking for it. CNN just showed a motion map of all the flights happening today. Hundreds (thousands?) of flying blue dots. Forget it. And for what? In-laws and room-temperature gravy and yams and sweet potatoes and lots of TV watching, and mostly football. Bah, humbug.

If only Drew McWeeny was around to show me how to find joy in all this.

I'll be watching mostly Academy screeners and a couple of films from the Elia Kazan box set, particularly...Read More

Sure, pat-downs are invasive and sometimes angering. Obviously. We knew people would probably respond as they have. And that agent should have let that woman keep her nipple rings. But get used to it. Whine all you want -- we're doing this. We have two choices, as we see it. One, the TSA eases up and some Islamic wacko slips through and something happens and the TSA gets roasted by the media and the top guy gets fired. Or two, bureaucratic molestations continue and flyers seethe and maybe the wacko doesn't slip through. We have the power, you don't, sorry but...Read More

I've now seen Black Swan three times. Once at the Toronto Film Festival; twice via the Fox Searchlight screener. It doesn't get old. I could watch it another couple of times, easy. I could barely get through one viewing of Never Let Me Go or, for that matter, Bruno. And it's wonderful, finally, to be able to hear each and every line of dialogue. Because the sound renderings on my 42" Panasonic plasma have Toronto's Scotiabank plex beat all to hell.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that visual swing. Indiewire's Anne Thompson needed to gently illuminate the left side of the face of Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg with a small table lamp. If she was lucky she might've achieved an early '70s Vittorio Storaro quality. I realize they were chatting at the notoriously dark Musso and Frank, but they've got all kinds of little lamps in there. It's a pre-war place, been there since 1919.

I'm picking up little signals from my insect antennae that suggest things are shifting in the awards race. Things always shift, of course. Nothing is static. And I'm not saying I have better information that anyone else -- far from it. But over the last 7 to 10 days little tingly intuitions have been telling me that (a) The Fighter is about to break out big-time, (b) The Social Network is in a kind of level holding pattern -- it hasn't dropped or gained but people keep saying it's too temperamentally cool and there's no one to root for (bullshit...root for the smart...Read More

All along I've been a sincere admirer of Tom Hooper's The King's Speech as far as it goes. I regret to say that I've failed to fully define the meaning of those last five words in this context. Or at least, I haven't defined it as well as New Yorker critic Anthony Lane has. Lane admires Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush's performances; he in fact calls them the film's saving graces. But I defy any champion of The King's Speech to read this 11.29 review and tell me it hasn't affected their view of the film.

The Marrakech Film Festival (12.3 to 12.11), which I'll be attending 75% of, is looking pretty damn good in terms of interview opportunities. I've been offered a shot at speaking with John Malkovich (jury chairman), Sigourney Weaver (doc jury chairman), possibly Martin Scorsese, Gael Garcia Bernal, Francis Coppola, Susan Sarandon, Eva Mendes, Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Harvey Keitel, James Caan, Charlotte Rampling and Alan Parker. A formidable group by any measure.

Cher's comeback is stillborn, apparently, and Christine Aquilera's film career is also dead on the tracks. "It's been a while since I've seen a stinker as obvious as Burlesque," Marshall Fine posted this morning. "As a colleague and I noted afterward, it made us long for something as coherent and restrained as Showgirls. Or Glitter. Not that there's all that much difference.

"Burlesque is Showgirls without the redemptively gratuitous sex and nudity. Or 42nd Street without the originality," he adds. "The script is free of...Read More

It was reported yesterday (but detected only a few hours ago by yours truly) that director George Hickenlooper accidentally offed himself "due to...mixing alcohol and painkillers," according to an 11.22 story on Denver's KDVR.com. An email received early this morning attributed his passing to "an overdose of ethanol and oxymorphone" killed him; a subsequent message claimed he died "of an overdose of alcohol mixed with a pain killer called Opana, which is a variation of Oxycontin."

A 3.12.09 N.Y. Press story described Opana as "a powerful painkiller that went on the market less than two years ago [and]...Read More

Any film starring Matthew McConaughey is wearing a huge sign around its neck saying "watch it, caveat emptor, proceed at your own risk," etc. That doesn't mean The Lincoln Lawyer (Lionsgate, 3.18.11) is a problem, but how can you not feel wary? Marisa Tomei, John Leguizamo costarring. The director is Brad Furman, whose only previous feature is The Take ('07), which no one saw.

I've finally read John H. Richardson's Esquire interview with The Fighter costar Christian Bale, and it's a real q & a wrestling match. Bale and Richardson argue, defy and challenge each other, shove and laugh and then argue some more. Bale hates the movie promotion-interview game, longs for a kind of invisibility, tries to switch roles and interview Richardson, etc. It reminded me of one of those New Journalism celebrity interviews that Esquire ran of the '60s and '70s. It's good stuff.

My favorite part comes when Bale confesses to not liking musicals or romantic comedies....Read More

"You sure missed quite a show yesterday at Ronni Chasen's funeral," a friend wrote this morning. "Every hypocrite in Hollywood was there, claiming to have been her dearest pal. And check this pic of someone who didn't get a seat at Ronni's service, and who ended up standing around the edge but at least got his mug in this L.A. Times photo since photographers weren't allowed any closer to the event and were forced to shoot the standees."

The caption for this L.A. Times photo, which accompanies Nicole Sperling's account of yesterday's service, reads as follows:...

At today's Los Angeles reception for the late Ronni Chasen, "Some were disturbed to see The Wrap's Sharon Waxman, in her trademark blunt style, grilling folks, notebook in hand, about Chasen's murder," writes Indiewire's Anne Thompson. "Finally, this cross-section of the film community not only mourned the loss of a friend but of a way of working, a civilized discourse, and the arrival of a more tabloid sensibility in Hollywood coverage, especially of Chasen's violent death."

Today's Oscar Poker discussion felt a little sloppy, a little in and out as we recorded it, but it sounds okay now. A debate about The King's Speech and how "the older audience" is more comfortable with this film, a brief discussion of the Ronni Chasen tragedy, the business rules of the Oscar season, etc. Hollywood & Fine's Marshall Fine took part, as did regular box-office stalwart Phil Contrino of boxoffice.com. Here's an independent, non-iTunes link.

While driving to Philadelphia last night I tweeted the following: "No matter what else happens, 2010 will always be the year that saw the demise of Michael Cera. No, they can't take that away from me." Just a mild little in-between tweet on the New Jersey Turnpike. No! Not mild! In response to this HitFix's Drew McWeeny tweeted, "You are cancer in human form, you know that? Pure misery, sent outwards in miserable waves. Does anything give you joy?"

In short, McWeeny is apparently a Cera fan or an Edgar Wright/Scott Pilgrim vs. The World fan or perhaps feels a slight generational...Read More

It was revealed earlier today that Swedish-born, Canadian-raised Malin Akerman, 32, has stepped into Lindsay Lohan's Linda Lovelace role in Matthew Wilder's Inferno. Wilder revealed a few days ago he'd all but bailed on Lohan due to delays in her drug-rehab program. Pic will begin shooting in February. Muse Productions' Chris Hanley and Jordan Gertner will produce.

Mailn Akerman

Why play a role that will be mostly about sleazy humiliation and subjugation? Because Akerman has been kicking around for a while and has played almost nothing but girlfriends. Her role as Silk Spectre in Watchmen...Read More

By honoring Rabbit Hole producer-star Nicole Kidman with a Cinema Vanguard Award at the 2011 Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.27 to 2.6), Roger Durling is saying the Best Actress Oscar race is now a three-way competition -- Kidman vs. Natalie Portman vs. Annette Bening. I can buy into that. Becca Corbett, the grief-stricken wife in Rabbit Hole, is Kidman's best role since her Oscar-winning Virginia Wolff in The Hours, which was eight years ago. And is arguably her most touching.

Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross speaking to Deadline's Pete Hammond: "The theory is pretty simple for us...It's thrilling that there is a separate category for animation and that allows animated movies to be recognized but for some reason an animated film has never gotten Best Picture and I always wondered was there not an appetite? We decided this year we have the biggest and best reviewed film of the year. If not this year, and not this movie, when?"

HE answer: Never, that's when. It's not going to happen so forget it, Rich. Animation is its own realm, and a beautiful and...Read More

I've tried to follow the example of Cary Grant in my life, and the effort that has gone into this has served me well. Always try to be gracious and gentlemanly. Stay as trim as you can. Be a cheapskate. Try to eat less. Enjoy good wine but stay away from the booze. LSD is good for the soul. Don't go bald.

You must have good wifi everywhere, at all times, forever. Even after death.

It's a good thing to own a baseball mitt, and to have a catch with someone on a big green lawn every so often. Preferably when the light...Read More

Disney doesn't want under-30s seeing the original Tron for fear of killing enthusiasm for Joseph Kosinki's TRON: Legacy, hence the decision not to put it out on Bluray as a promotion for the new model. Too rickety and old-fogeyish. How long will this clip last on YouTube then?

I tried to explain yesterday why I believe the great Lesley Manville can't hope to prevail in the Best Actress category, but that she'll rule or certainly be a leading contender within the Best Supporting Actress realm.

I know this sounds obsessive, but I'm asking other conversation-starters to kick this around once more (as Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet did on 10.27) in hopes of inciting an Academy groundswell that might result in a nomination that will do Manville and Mike Leigh's Another Year the...Read More

These are two of the Buzz Bee illustrations found on Badassdigest.com. I don't know if there are others besides these two, but obviously they have different skin tints. The thumbs-up bee on the left looks like he's being held up and is begging the thief not to shoot him. The thumbs-down bee looks nauseous for a reason other than having just seen a bad film. Plus his antennae bulbs are three times bigger than those belonging to the thumbs-up bee.

Yesterday Badassdigest.com's Devin Faraci assessed the junket buzz on TRON: Legacy, which was shown on Thursday night (and probably again last night): "The people who saw it were heavily embargoed, but they're also mostly fanboys and, frankly, easy lays for this movie, so I expected to see lots of folks on Twitter just skirting the embargo. But there was silence. Utter silence. Never a good sign.

"I did some asking around and while there are folks who are very positive on the film, most of what I heard back was 'looks great, everything else is terrible.' The script, I have heard, is...Read More

"In 2007, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States made 23.5 percent of all income -- more than the bottom 50 percent. Not enough! The percentage of income going to the top 1 percent nearly tripled since the mid-1970s. Not enough! Eighty percent of all new income earned from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent. Not enough! The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Not enough! The Wall Street executives with their obscene compensation packages now earn more than they did before we bailed them out. Not enough!...Read More

Tony Scott's Unstoppable "fell 49% this weekend...what happened?," I asked a friend this morning. His answer: "No movie was able to weather the Harry Potter storm -- it's as simple as that."

Really? So whatever the Unstoppable word-of-mouth, it's moot because of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1? How does that work exactly?

Moviegoer #1: "So how was Unstoppable?" Moviegoer #2: "Good, real good. Lotta fun. You should see it." Moviegoer #1: "Yeah, I'd like to." Moviegoer #2: "Huh?" Moviegoer #1: "I have to see Harry Potter this weekend and I only see one movie each week, if that....Read More

What if you blended the zen-repetition theme of Groundhog Day with a formula thriller about terrorism, high-tech surveillance, surreal software ("a computer program that enables you to cross over into another man's identity in the last eight minutes of his life") and the like? This seems to be the essence of Duncan Jones' Source Code. The trailer, however, is telling us that the film has problems.

One, I explained last summer that guys bolting upright all anxious and bug-eyed and going "whuh!" is a cliche that...Read More

After speaking to "reliable sources" within the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation, Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil is reporting that certain HFPA members "absolutely love" Red. This, of course, only underlines what serfs some of them are. Red is tedious comic-book crap. O'Neil believes it will "bag noms for best comedy/musical picture, actor (Bruce Willis) and maybe even supporting actor (John Malkovich as a conspiracy-minded LSD tripper) and supporting actress (Helen Mirren as a machine-gun-toting Rambo)"...God!

After many years of pathetic hemming and hawing and slip-sliding away from one of the most difficult, fraught-with-peril challenges of his career, which basically comes down to a case of artistic cowardice, Steven Spielberg has finally committed to direct Tony Kushner's Lincoln.

Spielberg's Lincoln will not, however, be portrayed by poor Liam Neeson, who was humiliated by Spielberg's refusal to commit to the Lincoln project for years on end (going back to '05), and who finally bailed last summer. The 16th president will be played instead by Daniel Day Lewis, and that,...Read More

I understand that there's a certain grandiosity built into the production design and shooting style of the Harry Potter films. I understand that they're not dogma movies. Nonetheless the acting is one the most fundamentally alienating aspects. Not once and not ever are you allowed, much less encouraged, to actually believe in anything that Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint say or do. Because they're always "acting," and you're never allowed to forget that.

What Daniel, Emma and Rupert do is react to fantastical CG and wind machines and flying objects with wide-eyed excitement and/or alarm, and what you need to do...Read More

The shot/cover on the left is my hands-down favorite.

The Lesley Manville issue has been covered two or three times on HE (the last time on 10.27), so there's no need for overkill. But I spoke a bit with Manville last night at a Sony Pictures Classics gathering on Madison, and she was her usual lovable, attentive, half-smiling, faintly forlorn, straight-shooting, sweetly smiling self, and my heart just goes out to her. She's the best.

I just hope Manville's achy-heart performance in Another Year wins the Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle or the L.A. Film Critics Association or...you know, like that....Read More

The JFK assassination argument has swung back and forth over the last 47 years, but now conspiracy theorists -- seemingly set back in recent years by Warren Commission-endorsing books by Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi -- are getting a Hollywood credibility boost from Leonardo DiCaprio. His intention, I mean, to produce and star in a mob-conspiracy flick that'll be out in 2013 -- the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's murder.

The film will be called Legacy of Secrecy, and will be based on a respectably reviewed 2009 book called "Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK...Read More

I'm not saying the just-revealed True Grit one-sheet is on the level of that much-derided King's Speech poster that appeared a couple of weeks back, but it does seem like a bit of a problem in a somewhat similar way.

Like the fake assembly of Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright in the King's Speech poster, the Grit job is a digital grouping of the four leads (i.e., they didn't pose together), and the only one who looks right is Matt Damon's greasy-buckskin gunslinger (i.e., the Glenn Campbell role).

Halle Steinfeld seems...Read More

There's something in an 11.18 Hollywood Reporter story by Daniel Miller about the state of the investigation into Ronni Chasen's murder that feels more than a bit surreal. It says that Beverly Hills police are going on a "working theory" that Chasen's shooting death was "not the result of road rage or a carjacking gone awry" but "was planned in advance."

Planned? Isn't that what a hit is? The assailant who fired bullets through Chasen's passenger door window, they're saying, was following a plan that had been decided upon at some undetermined point earlier in the...Read More

Why is it that every single guy I see these days has a two-week bristle beard? Everyone, that is, with any apparent reaching-for-style (or reaching-for-fashion) sense who's under, say, 45 (i.e., not too gray or just a little salt-and-peppery) or who's starring or co-starring in a movie. I didn't care or even think about this for the last year or two, and now it's beginning to really bother me. Now when I see some guy at a party or a screening with a two-week bristle beard I have to suppress an urge to give him some shit about it. Because bristle beards, I...Read More

The following conversation actually happened about three hours ago. I didn't record it, but this is a fairly precise recollection. It was between myself and a Manhattan p.r. guy who knows everyone and everything and has been around the track dozens of times.

Graph stolen from latest Movieline race-assessment chart, which is primarily informed by handicapping commentary from Stu Van Airsdale.

Hollywood Elsewhere: I think the inevitability of Annette Bening thing is over. For now, at least. It could come back but right now all I feel -- and I admit this is coming out of the recent...Read More

Marshall Fine has suggested "one final marketing idea" for the Harry Potter franchise, to wit: "Once Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 runs the course of all its platforms (theatrical, pay-per-view, DVD, TV), Warner Bros. should release both films on YouTube along with some rudimentary editing software - and hold an editing contest for everyday moviegoers.

The idea, of course, would be to "see who can best reduce the overlong segments of the two-part film into one coherent final movie. Then put that one out in theaters and all the other platforms. And include it in the inevitable completist's box...Read More

I turned the sound down after a minute or so, and then turned it off at the two-minute mark. What an awful sound. I'm not sure why I'm even posting this, but Film Drunk's Oliver Noble has a strong tolerance.

This is a very minor clip from Banksy's Exit From The Gift Shop, which has just made the cut as one of the 15 short-listed. The doc is mainly about Thierry Guetta, a free-spirited Frenchman based in Los Angeles, and his obsession with becoming a street artist in the vein of Banksy and/or Shepard Fairey. And so they release a clip of an altercation between Fairey and the fuzz near the Hollywood sign?

Congrats to the 15 feature-length docs that have been short-listed by the Academy: (1) Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, d: Alex Gibney; Enemies of the People, d: Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath; (3) Exit through the Gift Shop, d: Banksy; (4) Gasland, d: Josh Fox; (5) Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, d: Michele Hoze, Peter Raymont; (6) Inside Job, d: Charles Ferguson; (7) The Lottery, d: Madeleine Sackler; (8) Precious Life, d: Shlomi Eldar; (9) Quest for Honor, d: Mary Ann Smothers Bruni; (10) Restrepo, d: Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger; (11) This Way of Life, d: Thomas...Read More

Late last night's Collider's Steve Weintraub posted a high-calorie, extremely nutritious q & a with London Boulevard director-writer William Monahan. The weird part is that Weintraub has seen the crime drama but declines to post a sidebar review despite the fact that it's opening in London eight days from now, on Friday, 11.26.

Weintraub says "it's a great first film," "it's going to surprise people," and that Monahan has proven "he knows how to tell a story visually, and can definitely shoot action...this will not be his...Read More

Everyone presumably remembers Joe Queenan's 7.28 Wall Street Journal piece that called 2010 the suckiest movie year ever. No surprise hits, no out-of-nowhere dark horses, and no cunningly hyped film "that either exhumes a noted actor from the grave or greases the skids so some solid journeyman can ascend to the ranks of the Oscar Winners of yore."

Here it is three and half months later and Queenan looks like a shoot-from-the-hipper with egg on his face. If anything 2010 is feeling more and more like an avalanche of riches -- The Social Network, Black Swan, Inside Job, The King's Speech,...Read More

On Tuesday, 11.16 Radar Online quoted Inferno director Matthew Wilder as saying he's basically ready to pull the plug on Lindsay Lohan portraying Linda Lovelace. "Although [Lindsay] is still our number one choice, we do have a Plan B if she cannot film Inferno," he said, alluding to possible longer-than-anticipated court-ordered rehab requirements. "[Because] we have had a great response from other people who really want the part too."

In other words, Wilder has probably chosen Lohan's replacement.

So that's it -- Lohan will have to rejuvenate her acting career in some slightly less humiliating way. As A.V. Club's Sean...Read More

I was led to Jonathan Levy's hip-hop Yakuza trailer (posted roughly seven months ago) after writing Tuesday's "Japan-phobia" piece. It doesn't blow you away, but Levy at least reminded why Sydney Pollack's 1974 Japan-set crime thriller is one of the best of its kind. Plenty of swords and robes and flesh-slicings, but with a tone of existential cool. You have to use restraint and watch the fetishy stuff when visiting Japan.

The Yakuza Trailer from Jonathan Levy on Vimeo.

This other Levy trailer, a celebration of Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, isn't so hot....Read More

You're damn right I ordered The Outfit today. I had to after belly-aching for the last five or six years that it wasn't available on DVD. The Movie Godz are, I think, probably fairly satisfied with this. No special delivery so that means seven to ten days, I'm guessing.

On 10.23.73 Roger Ebert called it "a classy action picture, very well directed and acted, about a gangster's revenge on the mob for the death of his brother. An outline of the plot would make it sound pretty routine, but what makes the picture superior is its...Read More

What I need to make myself feel whole and fulfilled and to take away that awful feeling of stalled emptiness is a Rat Pack coffee-table book that will set me back $650 bills. Edited by Tony Nourmand, written by Shawn Levy and art direction/design by Graham Marsh, this is the ultimate Rat Pack nostalgia cruise for the man-child in your life who has everything but not quite, and who owns a pair of black suede pumps and drinks martinis and owns a DVD of Doug Liman's Swingers and all that.

Levy, whose regular gig is critic for...Read More

Clearly, many millions have some kind of primal need to put royalty on a pedestal and then show obeisance before that power and that mythology. Women are the most susceptible, it seems. (Particularly those who watch "Dancing With The Stars" and read www.popeater.com.) "Kneeling before power" is built into our genes. It's mostly satisfied by the worship of certain celebrities, but now England's royal family is competing for attention with "the new Diana" -- i.e., Kate Middleton -- engaged to marry Prince William, the heir to the heir of the British throne. Poor guy -- 28 years old and...

Obviously a huge hit waiting to happen, but half of the trailer is awfully dark...no? Ford is obviously playing more than a walk-on part. Good for him. He needs the juice. I would honestly like to buy and own and wear one of those blue-light alien wristband things that Daniel Craig is wearing.

I don't sympathize with yawners either. Especially the ones that make no attempt to muffle it. It's rude. But honestly? I've had yawning attacks myself. Sometimes expressions of boredom or impatience come out without a person meaning to clearly express them. They just happen. I've been accused of loudly exhaling during meetings, and I didn't even know I was doing that.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment design guy: "So what about the Ishtar Bluray jacket art? I've roughed out some ideas."

SPHE marketing director: "No ideas. Boilerplate. Use the art from the VHS. Tweak it or re-do the titles, but we're not spending nickel one on re-design."

Design guy: "The VHS art...? But we've got all this material."

Marketing director: "We don't care. It's a loss leader. Just re-do the lettering. Fuck it."

Design guy: "What about a critic quote?"

Marketing director: "Use the Mike Clark one from 23 years ago."

Design guy: "Have you read the Richard...Read More

The Social Network as directed by Wes Anderson, Michael Bay, Quentin Tarantino and Frank Capra. The Anderson-esque rendering of Erica Albright's break-up moment is perfect. The Bay riff is...well, okay. The Tarantino thing should have been worked on a bit more. The Capra is pretty good. We all get the basic idea, I think.

"The ring!" Same formula, same spandex, same CG, same "whoo-hoo!," same old crap. When 21st Century film historians write about the superhero genre of the aughts, they will not be kind to the ComicCon culture. The apologists for these films will pay and pay. They will make Neville Chamberlain look like Alexander the Great. Movies like this are a plague upon our house. They sap and impurify our precious spiritual fluids.

What a tragedy that David Gordon Green, who looked like the new Terrence Malick back in the days of George Washington, has devolved into a manifestation of late-career Mel Brooks. Green's last, Pineapple Express, was clever and liberating -- a near-perfect surprise. Your Highness is a low-rent mulching of A Knight's Tale, The Princess Bride, The Year One and A History of the World, Part 1 by way of 2010 throwaway humor, and smeared with the fart-joke sensibility of the bloated Danny McBride.

This morning Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough ridiculed a speculative piece by the Huffington Post's Howard Fineman. It said that "well-placed sources" are saying that Scarborough and New York Mayor Michael Boomberg "have begun trying to figure out whether they could be an independent presidential ticket in 2012 [and] have talked about running together, with Bloomberg in the top spot." I listened to Scarborough deny it all from various angles, and he wasn't low-key about it -- he was borderline angry.

But the instant I read Fineman's article I could hear a little gear...Read More

N.Y. Times media reporter David Carr and others have joked that the forthcoming merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek should be called Newsbeast. But don't laugh -- the sound of it works. I'm actually a bit surprised that searches still aren't finding any professional-looking Newsbeast logos. What else are they gonna call it?

"Tina Brown's Daily Beast reportedly loses $10 million a year, and in 2009 Newsweek lost $28 million ," the N.Y. Observer's Nick Summers (a former Newsweek staffer) writes in a just-posted article. "The premise that together the two will somehow make money...Read More

I caught John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole (Lionsgate, 12.17) for the second time this evening. It hasn't diminished a bit since I last saw it at the Toronto Film Festival; if anything, it's gained. It's a sad, honest and fully engaged thing, and never the least bit boring. It has no weak scenes -- each is gamey, steady and true, and adds another layer to a whole that becomes more and more intriguing as it goes along. Really -- this is not Oscar bloggie blather.

Every...Read More

Unlike myself, a friend has found the time to finish a 6.23.10 draft of Natalie Portman and Laura Moses' BYO, which I was sent yesterday. L.A. Times reporter Stephen Zeitchik recently described it as a "raunchy, female-themed Superbad comedy." But "it doesn't have any serious Jonah Hill-like vulgarity," my colleague says. "Just lots of Michael Cera snarkiness and McLovin dopey-ness."

The two main characters are Lucy and "Al" (short for Alice) -- Lucy is the wild sex fiend and Al is the more or less level-headed one. There's a scene on page five in which Lucy...Read More

Longtime Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen was found shot to death in her car early this morning with -- I can't believe I'm reading this -- multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, according to TheWrap's Brent Lang. Beverly Hills police "would not confirm that the victim was Chasen, but did tell TheWrap that a woman was found in her car early Tuesday with multiple gunshot wounds to the chest," Lang wrote.

Chasen "had apparently crashed her car into a lightpole around 12:28 a.m. near Sunset and Whittier. Beverly Hills police said that there were no suspects, no...Read More

"The King's Speech looks like a perfect Oscar movie, but it's not any more. I'm not confident in that. Even though it plays much funnier and lighter and not so stuffy as you might think, It doesn't seem like a movie of the moment, whereas The Social Network does." -- TheWrap columnist Steve Pond speaking to Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil.