Oscar Poker #19 is a discussion between myself, Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and Hollywood & Fine's Marshall Fine about the stunning Oscar-race turnaround of the past week. Here's a non-iTunes link. And here's a bonus link to the first half-hour of yesterday's Oscar Blogger podcast.

For whatever reason, watching this clip an hour ago just lifted me out of my King's Speech melancholia. I've been living with it for six days now. It's been like a chest cold only worse. Now, suddenly, I feel like there's oxygen in my system again. Go figure.

I don't like or visit ranker.com, but I have to say I liked Kristin Wong's "7 Greatest Bill Murray Stories Ever Told," partly because I've never heard two or three of them.

Every time I re-watch my Bluray of Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, which seems a bit more masterful each time, I feel a little bit worse about not being more enthusiastic when it first came out 40 months ago. I didn't put enough feeling into my riffs about it. Calling it "never boring," "a tense adult thriller about some unsettled and anxious people" and "as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be" didn't get it. I held back and over-qualified. And I'm sorry.

John Barry's Oscar-winning Out of Africa score was his masterpiece, I think. And this orchestral, overture-like version of Barry's Born Free theme is much more moving than the pop song that everyone knows. Something about the vastness of Africa obviously moved Barry, and this, I think, should be his legacy.

The editing is lumpy and clumsy, and there must be quite a few more scenes and lines of dialogue that could be compared. Has someone somewhere done a better job than this?

True Grit: 1969 vs 2010 from Amfidiusz on Vimeo.

Last night's Santa Barbara Film Festival Chris Nolan tribute was fine. Nolan was gracious and charming in his usual curt-but-frank sort of way, and moderator Pete Hammond asked lively and intelligent questions. And it was cool when Leonardo DiCaprio (wearing a super-short 1930s haircut for Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar, which starts shooting on 2.5) stepped out to present the Modern Master award.

Modern Master award recipient Christopher Nolan (l.), moderator Pete Hammond (r.) at Santa Barbara's Arlington theatre -- Sunday, 1.30, 8:40 pm.

The after-party happened at some ESPN tin-shack honky tonk-type joint on lower State Street. I'm...Read More

The King's Speech has won SAG's Best Ensemble award, thus triple-confirming the inevitable Best Picture win. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Actually they probably do know what they do and don't give a shit about the judgment of history.

In today's N.Y. Times, A.O. Scott has lamented with good reason "the peculiar and growing irrelevance of world cinema in American movie culture, which the Academy Awards help to perpetuate." Diminishing education standards have surely fed into this. American backwater types have long regarded foreign-language films as too challenging or not comforting enough, but I've been sensing gradually lessening interest levels even among urbans over the last 20 or 25 years.

"There are certainly examples from the last decade of subtitled films, Oscar-nominated or not, that have achieved some measure of popularity," Scott writes. "But these successes seem more and...Read More

No one cares about Henry Cavill being handed the big role in Zack Snyder's Superman: Man of Steel -- nobody. The film will sell tickets when it opens and the Comic-Con fools will do their usual-usual and not a bird will stir in the trees. I agree with Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet that Snyder's statement ("I am honored to be a part of [Superman's] return...I also join Warner Bros., Legendary and the producers in saying how excited we are" about this) indicates that hiring Cavill wasn't entirely his decision.

Last night's James Franco tribute at the Santa Barbara Film Festival started out badly due to Franco arriving on stage almost exactly an hour late, apparently due to an Oscar rehearsal session running late. But after he finally sat down with interviewer Leonard Maltin, Franco was so Zen and relaxed and articulate in a kind of shoulder-shrugging way that he wound up seeming like the coolest, most spiritually together guest this festival has ever hosted.

He just didn't try to "turn on the charm" or project or win anyone over. He...Read More

The Santa Barbara News-Press website is apparently too lame to link to its own front-page stories, so I'll just summarize a portion of Ted Mills' 1.30 article about yesterday's SBIFF screenwriters panel at the Lobero theatre. Mills mis-characterizes a question I asked of The King's Speech screenwriter David Seidler and mis-leads about the facts behind it, so I need to straighten this out.

Mills reports that my "stunner" of a question "asked Seidler to respond to charges from from Christopher Hitchens [in a 1.24 Slate article] that The King's Speech glorifies a monarch who...Read More

I'm of two minds about this afternoon's Irish Wake at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, otherwise known as the Santa Barbara Film Festival Blogger's Panel (4 to 5:30 pm, 1130 State Street). On one hand I'd like as many people as possible to come because it'll feel like a less miserable thing with friends offering hugs. On the other hand the only way to get through it might be to bring a quart of Jack Daniels and pass it around. Either way you don't want the panelists to outnumber the audience.

Because the only thing anyone...Read More

I'm thinking that the last time SNL presented this kind of prince-and-the-pauper, Real McCoy-meets-doppleganger thing was when John Belushi and Joe Cocker sang side by side. I've looked for the clip for over 20 minutes and can't find the clip anywhere. Anyone?

Here are some quotes I've read over the last 12 or 13 hours since the news broke that Tom Hooper has won the DGA award for best feature directing, and thus more or less confirming a forthcoming Best Picture Oscar win by The King's Speech.

(l. to r.) DGA nominees Tom Hooper, David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky, Chris Nolan and David Fincher at last night's event.

"Being in the room last night for the DGA Awards, I can tell you the audience was stunned over the Hooper win...Kathryn Bigelow (who read the winner) was visibly shocked...one of the other...Read More

Devotees of eternal cinematic Movie Godz justice are tonight contemplating the drinking of hemlock, the inhaling of lethal gas and leaping from high cliffs. For Tom Hooper, a highly talented, handsome, intelligent and quite likable fellow who directed a very commendable 1993 film called The King's Speech, has won the DGA award for feature film directing...and when I heard this news about 80 minutes ago, I folded. My face turned ashen gray and I died a little inside. Because I knew then and there that the Best Picture Oscar race was all but over. The King's Speech will almost certainly win and...Read More

Last night's Annette Bening tribute at the Santa Barbara Film Festival (i.e., a bestowing of the American Riviera Award at the Arlington theatre) was a pleasure -- good conversation between Bening and SBIFF festival chief Roger Durling, a toney film-clip reel that Durling had personally supervised in editing, a gracious award-presenting speech from Kevin Costner and a pace that moved right along.

An elegant after-party was held at the sprawling Montecito estate of SBIFF board of director honcho Jeff Barbakow and his wife Sharon. Anne Thompson, Dana Harris and I...Read More

A friend with a migraine is sleeping it off in my Santa Barbara hotel room, so I went down to a Starbucks at the corner of State and Cota to do some filing. I saw an empty table with a cup of latte-or-whatever sitting on top of it, but no one in either chair. I figured the person who'd ordered was in the bathroom. The general rule, of course, is that single customers can save a chair but not a whole table, which are frequently shared. So I sat down in one of the chairs and plugged in the computer, etc.

Knock-knock....Read More

Why stop with Egypt? Let the revolutionary wildfire spread across borders and continents and into conference rooms. Get rid of every greedy, corrupted and insensitive top dog in every country, city, corporation and poorly-managed Walmart. Cleanse the world of all snakes and dogs in one great tidal backwash. Obviously I'm joking, but why can't the fever just spread up and down the Nile and out into the Mediterranean and across the oceans? The idea is thrilling.

Yesterday morning the conventional wisdom was that either that (a) Mubarak, his family and associates leave...Read More

This is nearly a week old and covered with dust, but the universe isn't big enough for two icky-sticky downer movies about poor Linda Lovelace. I wasn't overjoyed about Matthew Wilder's Inferno (the former Lindsay Lohan project, now starring Malin Akerman) but I was willing to deal with it on some level. But a second competing version starring Kate Hudson as Linda and James Franco as Chuck Traynor is just impossible. There's just not enough psychic space for both. One of them has to go. In fact, kill them both. Wait a minute...

Brainstorm: Combine both casts for a single film...Read More

I could watch this kind of thing all day. The mirror work is so great. Received a few hours ago by Fox Searchlight's Nicolas Sera-Leyva...thanks.

My understanding of Charlie Sheen's sad and tedious situation is that eventually (five, ten years down the road) he'll understand where his life is going, wake up and change course, or eventually (five, ten years down the road) he'll be found dead. And no one will be the least bit surprised.

I'll never been able to understand how cocaine use goes along with enjoying the company of prostitutes. Because in my experience with this idiotic substance (I dabbled in the early '80s), it was clear early on that doing lines "interferes," so to speak. An old Robin Williams coke joke --...Read More

Because he's a heavy-cat artiste drawn to an "off" visual style, Filmmaker magazine's Jamie Stuart (i.e., the New York blizzard short-film guy) has shot interviews with Martha Marcy May Marlene costars Elizabeth Olsen and John Hawkes in a way that obscures their faces in amber-rosey shadows.

Remember that early scene in Reds when patrons of a Portland art gallery call Diane Keaton/Louise Bryant's photographs "blurry," and how Warren Beatty/John Reed makes the same remark when he visits her studio?

Susanne Bier's In A Better World, winner of the 2010 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Feature, was the last film I saw in Park City. Within a half hour I knew I'd be putting it at the top of my Best of Sundance list. This is an emotionally vivid, sharply written drama about forgiveness and revenge, and how their coexistence can cause conflict and distress. In this sense In A Better World is like a moralistic cousin of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

What's especially strong about Bier's film is that she...Read More

For me a great or very good ending is almost half the game. The rest is covered by (a) the famous Howard Hawks dictum about a good film needing "three great scenes and no bad ones," and (b) the HE rule that a lead character can't irritate or alienate or piss you off. But a great ending can persuade you to forgive a film for an awful lot of things.

It's understood that most Sundance films either don't get or are unable to subscribe to the great ending rule. And...Read More

I posted nearly 50 times during my eight-day Sundance stay -- riffs, photos, reviews, video clips, complaints, praisings, interviews -- and saw about 22 films, give or take. I was up at 6:30 or 7 am every day and usually quit around 1 am, and despite this I couldn't cover what I wanted to cover and deliver decent HE material.

No one-man-band can beat that festival. You can only go there, work your fingers to the bone, do your best and not nail it. Every year my Sundance experience is about a win-lose ratio of 40-60, if that. You're always missing...Read More

"Anyone who has worked at the N.Y. Times understands that it is a uniquely complicated organism...the hubris, the institutional arrogance, the rigidity, the arena of court politics," says TheWrap's Sharon Waxman. "[But still] a vital contribution to democratic society that we can hardly afford to lose."

And yet Andrew Rossi's Page One, she says, "gives a rather superficial assessment of what everybody really wants to know: Will the Times make it, or not? Can the newspaper of record change fast enough, dramatically enough, to...Read More

The standout factor, for me, isn't the violent conflict between young Egyptian militants and police in Cairo, or the economic factors driving the fury. It's that none of this would be happening if it hadn't been for the recent government overthrow in Tunisia. Political rage can ignite very suddenly. Why did many Eastern European socialist governments all topple within months of each other in 1989? All it takes is a flash of a match.

It's too bad in a sense because Hosni Mubarak, autocratic dictator that he is, has...Read More

This is very good, but the best repeated-slap of all (starting at 1:21) is self-administered. Anyone can slap anyone else, but when you whack yourself in a fit of self-loathing...watch out. Name the actress and the film. Hint: The self-slapper is being honored tonight at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

My personal favorite isn't included. That would be James Cagney's one-two-three slap of a bartender in William Wellman 's Public Enemy ('31) -- choreographed as carefullly as one of Cagney's dance steps in Yankee Doodle Dandy. First a backhand, then...Read More

Every year (late January/early February) I come home to the same creamy yellow room on the 2nd floor of the Hotel Santa Barbara, and my soul goes "aaahhh." Great wifi, nice rugs, ice buckets, nicely-situated, small little shitty flatscreen TV, wonderful white bathroom, really nice aroma, etc. And a really great complimentary breakfast in the lobby (fruit, cereal, coffee, croissants, bagels & cream cheese) every day from 7 to 10 am.

Hotel Santa Barbara, room #206 -- Thursday, 1.27, 8:44 pm.

I was consumed all today with flying and driving and shoring up advertising revenue. White rental...Read More

Three days ago the great political trends-and-numbers analyzer Nate Silver , the author-creator of FiveThirtyEight (now a N.Y. Times column) who was way, way in front of most of the political statistician crowd during the 2008 presidential election, began analyzing the Best Picture Oscar race for Melena Ryzik's Carpetbagger column.

This was a day before the Oscar nominations, of course, but Silver's view is basically that The Social Network will most likely win. The core of his reasoning is (a) that the Academy has been closely following the preferences of the BFCA/Critics Choice awards in recent years...Read More

Several thoughts, riffs and reviews about the 2011 Sundance Film Festival are in my head, but Park City Transportation will be here in 11 minutes. I only had six full days of movie-watching here (i.e., last Friday to last night), and I caught only about 22 or 23 films. I'll be in Los Angeles by 11 am or so. 90 minutes to disembark and rent the car, and then a two-hour drive up the coast to Santa Barbara with occasional stops (photography, seaside contemplation, whatever).

Scott Feinberg (Scottfeinberg.com), Pete Hammond (Deadline Hollywood), Steve Pond (The Wrap), Sasha Stone (Awards Daily), Anne Thompson (IndieWIRE), and yours truly will participate in a first-ever Blogger's Panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival next Sunday, 1.30m from 4 to 5:30 pm, at the Santa Barbara Museum.

Attendance by any festival-attending and/or Santa Barbara-residing HE readers would be greatly appreciated. There's nothing worse than when the panelists outnumber those in the audience. And if you come, please ask slightly challenging and/or rude questions.

Moderated by Peter Rainer, film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and KPCC/NPR host, the panel...Read More

My Rutger Hauer/Bloody Mary encounter this morning was cool, smooth and groovy. Hobo With A Shotgun, which I saw directly after, is a relentlessly low-rent Troma splatter film -- another '70s grindhouse flick in "quotes." (You don't mind the awful dialogue spoken by the bad guys, right? Of course you don't!) But the title and the whatever-you-want-to-make-it metaphor are brilliant, and Hauer, 66, is reaping the benefits. His scumbag-blasting bum is the most iconic role he's played since The Hitcher ('87), and before that Roy Batty in Blade Runner ('82).

Hobo With A Shotgun star Rutger Hauer...

A short while ago Film Experience's Nathaniel R. asked what would be the Best Picture lineup if there were only five slots. The knee-jerk answer is that The Social Network, The King's Speech, True Grit, Black Swan and The Fighter would be the nominees. Right?

I need to clarify something for those who don't read the comment threads, or didn't read them yesterday. I was criticized last night for failing to accurately read the significance of The King's Speech getting 12 nominations vs. The Social Network getting 8. I'm aware that The Social Network couldn't hope to compete in certain below-the-line realms (including Best Supporting Actress, production design, etc.) that The King's Speech, being a British period piece about the royals with a strong supporting female, would probably be recognized for.

So yeah, I got that. Take away those smaller categories and the nomination tallies for the...Read More

I was invited last week to sip Bloody Marys with Hobo With A Shotgun star Rutger Hauer. The twist is that the meeting & drinking will begin this morning starting at 9:30 or 10 am, and then, mildly lit, myself and others will head up to the Egyptian to see the film at 11:30 am. I never touch beer or wine until 9 pm or later and I never go near hard stuff, so this will be an experience.

I missed an 11:30 pm Hobo screening last weekend due to a venue...Read More

A few hours ago Sasha Stone, Scott Feinberg and I recorded a special Oscar Poker (#18) about this morning's Oscar nominations. I'd been in a funk all day about the 12 nominations handed to Tom Hooper's The King's Speech, and the meaning of that number. Our discussion was basically about raising the spirits of those who, like myself, felt grief-struck about the "wrong" film suddenly seeming to become (emphasis on the "s" word) the leading Best Picture contender.

To me (and to most of the world) the 12 TKS nominations indicated a return to...Read More

Park City's Yarrow Hotel bar, 14 or 15 minutes into Barack Obama's State of the Union speech.

Every last MCN Guru of Gold voter who changed his/her Best Picture prediction in favor of The Social Network over the last three or four weeks reversed course this morning after the Oscar nominations were announced, and now they're all King's Speech supporters again. (Except for Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, who abstained.) It was almost the same deal at Gold Derby's prediction chart except for five journalists who have, it would seem, at least a semblance of faith in previous perceptions and/or a backbone -- Cinematical's Erik Davis, Village Voice's Michael Musto, Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil, NextMovie's Kevin Polowy and myself.

From the wise and reputable Lewis Beale, via CNN.com: "Oscar has proven, once again, that it just doesn't get it. By 'it' I mean that the Academy voters seem to be stuck in some sort of time warp where solid, dependable, well-crafted, but utterly non-innovative films like The King's Speech get a bushel of nominations --12 in all, leading the pack -- while a cutting edge, brilliantly directed and written, this-is-what-life-is-about-today film like The Social Network is relegated to third place, behind True Grit, in the nominations total.

"By relegating The Social Network to also-ran status, the Academy is sending a very...Read More

Christopher Hitchens' 1.24 Slate piece about The King's Speech is not some rash smear job. It's a sensible and researched argument that deserves a read by every Oscar blogger and Academy member. He's a Brit who knows his British history -- he's Christopher effin' Hitchens -- and he's explaining quite simply and clearly that King George VI (a.k.a. "Bertie"), former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the Windsors all leaned toward appeasement at a crucial time in British history. So's what's with all the pride and glory at the end of The King's Speech?

"It is suggested [in The King's Speech] that,...Read More

Jacob Aron Estes' The Details, which I saw this morning, is about things going badly for a Seattle-residing doctor and family man (Tobey Maguire), in part due to his own poor decisions but also because of horrible pre-ordained luck -- fate or God or some overpowering force simply being against him. A similar theme drove the Coen brothers' A Serious Man -- God doesn't care, and He might even be messing with you because He's a perverse mofo possessed of a sick sense of humor.

Cosmic disfavor is clearly indicated...Read More

A Fandango poll is reporting that the biggest surprise, according to the majority (34%) of respondents, was the nomination of John Hawkes for Best Supporting Actor in Winter's Bone. There was also a "Top 10 Oscar Nomination Snubs of 2011" poll, and the results are as follows: (1) Christopher Nolan, Best Director, Inception (48%); (2) Tangled - Best Animated Feature (9%); (3) Mila Kunis -- Best Supporting Actress, Black Swan (8%); (4) Despicable Me - Best Animated Feature (6%); (5) Ryan Gosling -- Best Actor, Blue Valentine (6%); (6) Waiting for Superman - Best Documentary (5%); (7) Black Swan - Best Original Screenplay...Read More

"There are two interesting stats to keep in mind when considering the Best Picture race between The King's Speech with its 12 nominations, and The Social Network with its 8 nominations," writes columnist Scott Feinberg. "The last time that the Academy had 10 nominees prior to last year's awards was 1943. That year The Song of Bernadette, which had 12 nods, lost Best Picture to Casablanca, which had 8 nods. (Casablanca's ultimately won 3 Oscars compared to The Song of Bernadette's 4 Oscars.)

"Conversely, in 1942, Mrs. Miniver, which had 12 nods and is a film in which "everyone displays strength...Read More

In an interview with Moveline's Elvis Mitchell, 127 Hours star and Oscar telecast co-host James Franco says the following: "Look, Social Network is about new technology and how people are communicating now? Or it's supposed to be? They don't deal with any of that! It's a very classically structured movie and classically made movie. [People] just want the old. They want more of the old, boring stuff. People sitting around talking."

Obviously the 12 Oscar nominations gathered this morning by The King's Speech (and congrats to everyone concerned) suggests that the Spirit of 1993 is alive and well among Academy members. Usually any film with that many nominations tends to be considered the Best Picture frontrunner. But is it? Is The King's Speech a skilled surfer riding a perfect wave, or is it a boogie board coasting along on whitewash? Is there a way to spin this, or should I just face facts and give up?

I need to accept and...Read More

I don't care about listing Oscar nomination predictions. I've been feeling Phase One fatigue for three or four weeks now. I think I'm going to just let the Oscar nominations just happen tomorrow morning without laying claim to being a soothsayer. We all know which films will probably get Best Picture nominated, and so on, etc. I'd rather just react to the oversights and oddnesses.

Today's screenings, as noted, began with Andrew Rossi's Page One: A Year Inside The New York Times, which is tight, absorbing, amusing here and there, zeitgeisty, etc. And media columnist David Carr comes off as a kind of hip samurai poet-warrior.

I then detoured up to the Page One panel discussion at Bing Bar, and then I got a little hung up watching Susan Sarandon play ping-pong. It's now 7:38 pm and I've just come out of Drake Doremus' Like Crazy -- a nicely sculpted, finely seasoned, up-and-down young love story with intriguing, ultra-watchable performances from Anton Yelchin (who's beginning...Read More

The remarkable thing was that this guy, who'd hauled his 19th Century piano up from Salt Lake City, was able to keep his fingers limber enough to play as well as he did. Chopin, I think. The temp was in the mid 20s if not lower. Taken on Sunday, 1.23, 8:55 pm.

I was sitting in a fold-up chair at Park City's Bing Bar, editing and writing, and a ping-pong game began. I watched a bit, went back to writing, watched a bit more and finally took out the camera. And then a crowd materialized. And then other guys started shooting.

Andrew Rossi's Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times, a stirring and thoughtful doc that I finished seeing about two hours ago, has been acquired by Magnolia Magnet for theatrical and on-demand and othe platforms. Indiewire's Anne Thompson passed the news along during a Park City q & a with Rossi and N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr.

(l. to r.) N.Y. Times media reporter David Carr, Page One director Andrew Rossi, Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson at Bing on Main Street -- Monday, 1.24, 2:45 pm.

The Times pay wall, said Carr, will...Read More

Today the constantly agitating "CitizenKaned4Life" asked "what do you make of this whole Red State thing, Jeff? The internet's abuzz -- partially about the film, but mainly about Kevin Smith's self-financed distribution roadshow trek. I understand you're undoubtedly busy seeing films, but this all went down last night, and -- at least compared to other sites right now -- your web silence regarding your former employer is starting to become slightly deafening."

Anyone with the vision, cojones and marketing savvy to self-distribute their reportedly not-great film and make a decent profit has my respect. If Smith succeeds...Read More

Filmmaker magazine's Jamie Stuart (i.e., the New York blizzard short-film guy) talks with writer/director Tom McCarthy and actor Paul Giamatti to discuss their critically approved Win Win "and the difficulties of dramatizing virtuous people," the copy says. Here again is my 1.21 review.

With the great Ed Helms in the lead, Miguel Arteta's Cedar Rapids (Fox Searchlight, 2.11) may look like another raunchy, wild-ass Hangover-type deal in a midwestern setting. Well, it is somewhat, I guess, but it's a much better thing than The Hangover because it's a comedy about values , and it basically cares about people in a way you can really accept and settle in with.

(l. to. r) Whitlock, Reilly, Heche, Helms.

It's a commercial confection, sure, but it's about trust and corruption and naivete and mad sex in swimming pools, and about friends doing for each...Read More

But I dunno, y'know? I'd like to fall by for 15 or 20 minutes, at least. An acoustic set, I've been told. It all depends on how it shakes out, I guess. It's a treadmill and everything is accelerated, on a stop-watch.

I've seen these day-in-the-life-of-an-Oscar-contender videos before, and they're always about anticipation and nerves and personal assistants being "on" and excited and laughing uproariously at their employer's jokes. This one, focusing on likely Best Supporting Actress nominee Melissa Leo (The Fighter) just before the Golden Globes, seems a little less forced than the others. Leo is a firecracker, a killer, a comet.

I got shut out of this morning's 9 am Eccles screening of My Idiot Brother, which I also blew off last night. So I retired to the Yarrow hotel for a nice scrambled-egg breakfast, and then went upstairs to record Oscar Poker #17 with Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg, topic #1 being the PGA/King's Speech upset. It'll be up sometime tonight. And we all agreed to do a special Tuesday morning podcast following announcement of the Oscar nominations.

Just after failing to crash My Idiot Brother showing at the Eccles -- Sunday, 1.23, 9:05 am.

Eugene Jarecki's...Read More

Every time I see a radically under-dressed 20something guy running around Park City, where the temperature has mostly been in the 20s and early 30s, I get mildly irritated. I'm almost to the point of being pissed off. I'm talking about weather cold enough to theoretically kill you under prolonged circumstances, and young guys completely waving that off by wearing baggy shorts, sneakers without socks and T-shirts with some kind of flannel shirt or, in some instances, just T-shirts.

No generation or culture in the history of the planet earth has ever dressed this stupidly for cold weather. These guys are biological...Read More

Drake Doremus' Like Crazy, a press screening of which I blew off late yesterday afternoon to attend that cool Elizabeth Olsen dinner, sold to Paramount this morning for a reported $4 million. The price was reportedly driven up by bids from the Weinstein Company and Summit Entertainment, but Paramount ended up with worldwide rights.

My next shot at seeing Like Crazy will be late tomorrow afternoon (i.e., Monday) at the Prospector Square Cinema. I need a ticket, guys, if you can help.

Pic is about two kids riding a mad current of love, eros and separation anxiety. Jacob (Anton...Read More

I read yesterday's Sharon Waxman/Wrap story about Elizabeth Olsen being the big breakout star of Sundance 2011 just as I was heading to a sit-down dinner for Olsen and Martha Marcy May Marlene, her first starring role for which she's drawn high praise. In fact, I showed the story to Olsen on my iPhone during our chat.

Elizabeth Olsen, star of Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House -- Saturday, 1.22, 7:45 pm.

The younger sister of the infamous Olsen twins, Elizabeth (and not "Lizzie," as some are calling her in stories)...Read More

Anne Sewitsky's Happy Happy, set in a remote Norweigan village, is about an affair between an unfulfilled wife (Agnes Kittelsen) who works as a middle school teacher, and a married Dane (Henrik Rafaelsen) who, along with his wife, has recently become a neighbor. "Affairs never stay secret for long," writes Marshall Fine, "but Sewitsky has other layers to reveal about this story that deepen the laughs and, ultimately, also bring a note of melancholy to the comedy."

A publicist asked for a quote about Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur, which I saw late this afternoon. I haven't written a review, but here's what I gave her: "The most original adult love story I've seen in ages. Easily the biggest shock of the Sundance Film Festival so far. I didn't see this one coming -- it's a much stronger and more focused film than I expected from a smallish British drama about an older working-class guy with a temper problem. It curiously touches.

Tyrannosaur costars Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman, Eddie Marsan.

Tyrannosaur director-writer...

My mind is blown by The King's Speech having won the Producers Guild of America Best Picture of 2010 award. What happened to The Social Network? I don't have an explanation, but I suspect it was due to some kind of involuntary generational reflex or voting spasm. It makes no real aesthetic sense but they did it anyway. Here are a couple of guesses why.

One, the PGA voters skew older and defaulted to the old emotional-tear-ducts-mean-best-picture equation that people like Nicole Sperling have been talking about. Or two, the PGA voters decided to enliven the Best Picture race for perverse...Read More

Ian Palmer's Knuckle is a thoughtful, well-assembled, vaguely sickening doc about four (or is it five?) working-class Irish clans expressing their loathing for each other by staging bare-knuckle mano e mano fist fights over a period of 12 years, or roughly '97 to '09. It's sad and repellent, and yet you're gripped with anticipation every time a new fight is about to begin. What is that?

There's no real reason for these medieval-style bouts other than the clansmen being unable or unwilling to transcend this handed-down tradition, which goes back a couple of decades. Or their bestial instincts or economic frustration...whatever. The point...Read More

Today's screening slate starts with Ian Palmer's Knuckle at 1:30 pm, and then Bill Haney's The Last Mountain (a doc) at 5 pm, Jesse Peretz's My Idiot Brother at 6:15 pm, and finally Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double at 9:30 pm.

My biggest "miss" so far, or so I'm told, is Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene, a psychological thriller with, I'm hearing, a very srong performance by Elizabeth Olsen. (It screened last night against Win Win and you know the rest.) I was hearing "you should see it/definitely catch it" yesterday afternoon, but shit happens. My next shot is a Library screening on Monday night.

Lucy Olsen, Sarah Paulson in . Martha Marcy May Marlene

Marshall Fine writes that "it brings together two sisters, Martha (Olsen) and Lucy (Sarah Paulson) who haven't seen each other...Read More

This was literally the view from my seat during yesterday's Margin Call P & I screening at the Holiday Cinemas. If you sat normally, I mean. The architect actually designed this intentionally. After 90 minutes my aching butt and my legs couldn't take the strain of leaning forward so I left my seat and stretched out on the steps, hoping against hope that one of the Sundance volunteers wouldn't spot me and come up and say, "I'm sorry, sir, but Park City fire regulations don't allow," etc.

I took this while waiting inside the tent ouside the Holiday Cinemas to get into yesterday morning's screening of Margin Call. That's Variety's Justin Chang on the phone. Tons of journalists were waiting and waiting, and very few got in. Chang and I were rescued at the last minute by a friendly publicist who escorted us in, although the balcony seats we got were behind an unusually high safety barrier which required sitting on the edge of our seats and leaning forward.

The 20somethings who hang out in packs in front of Tatou and Harry O's each and every night during Sundance are, of course, party gah-gahs looking to catch a film or two but are mainly looking to get loaded, go Seth Rogen-crazy and maybe get lucky. Okay, "lucky"-ness can be life-transforming -- I get that. I don't care really, but I happened to walk by here last night and it hit me, "Wow...ground zero...I'll bet most of these guys liked The Green Hornet."

Tom McCarthy's Win Win (Fox Searchlight, 3.18), which screened last night at the Eccles, isn't quite as good as Little Miss Sunshine -- it's an 8.5 to Sunshine's 9 -- but it's a wise, perceptive and affecting little family-relations flick that works just fine. If only more films labelled "family-friendly" were as good as this. McCarthy is always grade-A, and this is more from the same well. Win Win is warm but not sappy, smartly written, very well acted and agreeable all the way.

Win Win star Paul Giamatti, director-screenwriter-producer Tom McCarthy at last night's after-party...

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann announced tonight his sudden departure from (and the total collapsing of) Countdown. Shocker. TheWrap is reporting that the underlying motive may have been to create a "new media empire." But the suddenness of the departure indicates some kind of dispute with MSNBC's Phil Griffin.

Olbermann is a brilliant and perceptive analyst, naturally funny and quippy, has a nose that is highly attuned and has never missed...Read More

About 11 hours ago I wrote that I was planning on seeing five films today. It's now 7:55 pm and three have been bagged -- Jim Kohlber's The Music Never Stopped, J. C. Chandor's Margin Call and Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney's Magic Trip. I have to be at the Eccles at 9:15 pm for a screening of Tom McCarthy's Win Win, and then I'll be cabbing to the Egyptian for an 11:30 pm showing of Jason Eisener's Hobo With A Shotgun.

I got stalled late this afternoon by a personal/business matter, and that killed my writing...Read More

Day #1 is always ambitious so the plan is to catch five films -- The Music Never Stopped at 9 am, Margin Call at 11:30 am, Alex Gibney's Magic Trip at 2 pm, Bobby Fischer Against The World at 7:30 and Tom McCarthy's Win Win at 9:30 pm. There's an option of catching Andrew MacLean's On The Ice at 8:45 pm but I don't know.

What defines a must-to-avoid "townie" restaurant in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival? The host has a suspicious, guard-at-the-gate attitude when you walk in and say you'd like to hang at the bar, as I did last night at 350 Main. No well-mannered restaurant host in Manhattan would adopt a look of faint alarm and a ready-to-rock tone and say "do you have a dinner reservation?"

I was about to say "no, but I've got 15 minutes to kill and thought I'd chill" but the hostess was a mixture of Faye Dunaway in Network and...Read More

I couldn't get into tonight's Egyptian screening of John Michael McDonaugh's The Guard, but I was allowed to take pictures of the post-screening q & a with McDonaugh and his cast -- Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham and Dominique McElligot. I ran into Harvey Weinstein, who said he "liked it...it's a very charming film." I talked to another guy who said the same thing. What does that mean?

Post-screening tweet from Entertainment Weekly's Anthony Breznican: "Drugs & gun-stealing, prostitute-patronizing, racist smart-ass Irish cop? The Guard has such...Read More

Deadline's Mike Fleming, filing from Park City, has checked with several major buyers and listed seven Sundance films "most often identified as priority acquisition targets":

(1) Jesse Peretz's My Idiot Brother, a comedy w/ Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer; (2) Dito Montiel's The Son of No One w/Channing Tatum, Al Pacino, Katie Holmes, Tracy Morgan, Ray Liotta, Juliette Binoche; (3) Jacob Aaron Estes' The Details w/Tobey Maguire, Elizabeth Banks, Laura Linney, Ray Liotta and Dennis Haysbert; (4) Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double w/Dominic Cooper; (5) JC Chandor's Margin Call w/Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany,...Read More

I wrote my ex-employer Kevin Smith this morning about getting into one of the two Sundance screenings of Red State. (Preferably the 8:30 am Library showing on 1.24.) No press screenings scheduled and we all know what this implies, but the only Smith film I've had any significant issues with was Jersey Girl. "I know what your policy is, but I'd love to be excepted from it," I wrote him. "Oh, and I ran into [Red State costar] Melissa Leo yesterday afternoon," I added. "She's happy."

The film's villains are red-state religious wackos. I'm sure they're going to get theirs by...Read More

Each and every day casual newsstand and online readers are deluged with hot smokin' bods. Actresses, models, female musicians, Olympic-level skiiers...they're all flashing big-time. And I think it's fair in such an atmosphere to insert a minor anatomical comment about....here it comes...navels. Or more particularly, the importance of innies. Nobody has an outie but flatties, for me, are a bit of a speed bump. Okay, more than that. Then again they're rare. You should be able to say stuff like this if you keep it simple and brief.

I've been attending Sundance Film Festival kick-off news conferences-starring-Robert Redford for several years now, and they're just not very newsworthy. There's nothing else to do today, I realize, but I'm still sitting here in the condo and I'm gonna pass this time...no offense. Let me put it differently: as a new-media experiment I'm going to watch it via video-streaming.

So far Ivan Reitman's No Strings Attached has a 50% Rottten Tomatoes rating -- flunk. This is underlined by a portion of Karina Longworth's L.A. Weekly/Village Voice review when she points out the irony of the film being about "introspective outsiders waging the good fight against Hollywood assholery" while leaving "a shtick stain that reeks of crass Hollywood conventionality."

Ashton Kutcher, Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached.

But the L.A.-residing Longworth is more culturally and generationally akin to Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman's characters than most other critics, and so her sympathetic remarks are worth considering.

College Humor's Natalie Portman extended-laugh video is cheap bullshit. It's viralling around so I may as well address it rather than ignore. Yes, she let go with a dorky laugh, but it's coming from a deep libidinal place (i.e., I'm loved and desired by a handsome guy, hah-hah!). In any event some women just laugh that way. I've been listening to packs of 20something females laugh iike this in Starbucks cafes and bars for years, and so what? You can create a repeat-loop video of anyone laughing and make them look doofusy.

I realize that Quentin Dupieux's Rubber (on demand 2.25, theatrical 4.1) has played at other festivals including Cannes 2010, but wouldn't it be great if it could show at Sundance or Slamdance? You can tell right away from this recently-posted trailer that Dupieux knows exactly what he's doing. And a journalist-roommate who caught it at last November's Stockholm Film Festival says it's "really good."

Right now the ratio of Green Hornet-type movies (corporate crap, death of the spirit, serious wounding of Seth Rogen) vs. Rubber-type movies (cleverness, originality, coolness) is about 20 to 1....Read More

What do American producers always do when an interesting, off-center character actor delivers some kind of strong, wake-up performance in a foreign-made or indie flick? Simple -- they sentence the poor guy to villain jail. He'll get cast in big movies for big pay, but whatever colors he might have on his palette that don't fit into standard movie-bad-guy behavior are ignored. Not each and every time but pretty damn often.

Michael Shannon, a cool and perceptive fellow, doesn't look or act like Tom Cruise or Armie Hammer and so he's obliged to play obsessives and nutbags. Christoph Waltz, a bright, worldly and...Read More

Anne Hathaway has been cast as Catwoman opposite Christian Bale and Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises. Terrific.

The Academy's Foreign Language Film Award committee has decided on a shortlist of six finalists and the exec committee has shortlisted three for a total of nine. The finalists are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful, Rachid Bouchareb's Hors la Loi (Outside the Law), Denis Villeneuve's Incendies, Susanne Bier's In a Better World, Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth, Tetsuya Nakashima's Confessions, Oliver Schmitz's Life Above All, Iclar Bollain's Even The Rain and Andreas Ohman's Simple Simon.

Unwarranted shaftings? Predictions? A voice is telling me that Incendies has the edge to win. Maybe.

Last night Salt Lake City was all but devoid of snow with the temperature nudging 40. But Park City was/is blanketed and in the mid 20s. Snow showers this morning, and happening again as we speak. An hour more on the column and then over to the Park City Marriott (a short walk) to pick up press badge, press materials, etc.

Mark Pellington's I Melt With You, which will have its first Sundance showing on Wednesday, 1.26, is about four 40ish pallies (Thomas Jane, Jeremy Piven, Christian McKay, Rob Lowe) "going down the rabbit hole of bacchanalian excess." Because they're hurting inside, of course. Drinking only makes things worse, guys. Get a clue.

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Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger, among the leading advocates of a King's Speech Best Picture win scenario, yesterday confessed that The Social Network's sweep of the Broadcast Film Critics and Golden Globes awards has given him pause and that "my No. 1 Best Picture pick is hanging by a thread."

The odd thing is Karger's statement that Speech's "trouncing" of The Social Network in terms of BAFTA nominations constitutes "conflicting signals." The Brits are obviously and genetically in the tank for The King's Speech (history, culture, tradition) so describing them as "a voting body that has significant overlap with the Academy" is...Read More

There's a Brooks Barnes 1.19 N.Y. Times story about six Dramatic Competition selections in Sundance 2011 "that were shaped in the Sundance Institute's workshops -- a record." But what got me is Barnes' description of one of these entries -- Elgin James' Little Birds, a darkish relationship story about two teenage girls -- as "buzzy."

This led to watching the video piece about James and the film, and his remark about how a friendship can get to "the point where you love someone and at the same time they're stealing your oxygen."

My sense...Read More

For some curious reason a few British newspapers have recently revisited an eight-year-old story about an indifference to the plight of European Jewry in the late '30s and early '40s on the part of King George VI, who is portrayed by Colin Firth in The King's Speech. The original reporting (by the Guardian's Ben Summerskill in an April '02 article) was accurate, but the purpose of the recent rehash by "Vulture's" Claude Brodesser Akner last November was apparently to smear the film. Icky, of course, but it was nonetheless legit of Scott Feinberg to report about this story (and...Read More

The big public Hobo screening happens at the Egyptian on Friday, 11:30 pm. The big private Hobo party starts at midnight and lasts until 3 am. There's talk about Rutger Hauer sipping Bloody Marys with selected press a few days later. The idea of this film unseen, I fear, is probably more potent that the reality of it, seen. Will it be said down the road that the trailer was the better distillation, as in less is more?

My Delta flight from JFK arrived at Salt City City airport at 7:40 pm. 100 minutes later I was checking into the Park Regency condos. The place felt stuffy and overheated so I let some nice frigid mountain air in -- did the trick. The wifi is pretty good so no mood pockets. Park City restaurants will probably stay open late tomorrow night or certainly by Thursday, but tonight they all shuttered at 10 pm. The nothingness is almost thrilling. "Ah-don't tell me / I've nothin' to do..."

Prospector near Kearns Blvd., Park City, Utah -- Tuesday, 1.18, 9:55...

A friend insists that Jennifer Lopez's handling of a recent Ellen DeGeneres hidden-camera prank is the most likable and funny she's been since Out of Sight.

I'm guessing that the Brian DePalma fan club isn't what it used to be. 30 years ago his admirers, led by Pauline Kael, were legion. I was one of the faithful after his early to mid '70s run ending with Carrie, but I began running hot and cold throughout the '80s and '90s, and didn't really get off the boat until Mission to Mars ('00) -- that, for me, was the final deal-breaker.

I know that my first stirrings of doubt in DePalma began with The Fury ('78) and then started to really take root...Read More

The Digital Bits has announced that Paramount Home Video will release a Bluray version of the longer, far superior "bootleg" cut of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous on 1.30.11. "Retail exclusive," they're saying. The impressionistic paint-dab cover is great -- I wonder who designed it? The only really high-level film Kate Hudson has ever been in, and one that arguably contains Billy Crudup's finest, or certainly most appealing, performance ever.

Extras include some of the same stuff available on the theatrical version DVD -- audio commentary from Crowe, a "Making of Almost Famous" featurette, an interview with...Read More

"One stumbling block to an ultimate Oscar win for The Social Network could be the film's lack of warmth and uplift," L.A. Times "Awards Tracker" columnist Nicole Sperling wrote yesterday morning. "It's a modern and edgy story, but there's relatively little emotional connection with the characters. The King's Speech, on the other hand, has audiences rooting for Colin Firth's King George VI and winds up on an emotional high note, a tone often embraced by academy voters."

If I were Sperling I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to trot this one out again. I know that it's gotten to the...Read More

Delta Airlines' domestic JFK terminal is a bird atrium. The place is filled with little gray-brown birds fluttering around and nesting on the large mother-ship hanging lamps and mooching french fries and lettuce shreds from Burger King customers. The word must be out in the Brooklyn-Queens bird community that the eating is good here, and that it's a lot easier than scrounging around for insects and worms and whatnot.

Update: For the second time in the last two hours a howling, soul-agitating, sonic-disturbance alarm has gone off inside the terminal. It sounds like the giant insects in Them! ('55) but with an electronic...Read More

So the general reaction is that Piers Morgan has to do more than just orally pleasure his guests? That's the consensus, I mean? Nobody wants a celebrity gladhander. Larry King was a relentless softballer, but occasionally he'd let go with a bluntly-phrased, politically-attuned, yes-or-no question. That barking, raspy voice of his made his questions seem tough, even if they weren't for the most part.

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired distribution rights in North America, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand to Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, an intense drama about an Ohio-residing nutbag dad (Michael Shannon, who else?) who's become convinced that some kind of apocalypse is imminent and that he needs to protect his family, etc. Jessica Chastain (playing Shannon's wife), Shea Whigham, Katy Mixon and Kathy Baker costar.

Michael Shannon in Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter.

The Tyler Davidson/Strange Matter Films productions is in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival. The Park City premiere is on Monday, 1.24....Read More

I tried to arrive at JFK's Delta Airlines terminal no later than 9:15 am to catch a 10:25 am flight. But the L and A trains did their usual-usual and I didn't make it to departure check-in until 9:30 am. Delta's policy is to refuse to check luggage that arrives less than an hour before departure, even if you're a minute late, so they wouldn't let me on the flight -- nice.

HE editorial headquarters for the next three or four hours. This is the only available outlet in the Burger King eating area. There's another one next to...

As expected, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech has gathered the most nominations from the British Academy of Film & Television. A fine film, of course + Brits seeing to their own + a brief respite for Speech-favoring Gurus like Dave Karger and Anne Thompson, etc. I was going to call this story "Comfort for Karger" but how comforting is it, really? Could the BAFTAs have done any differently and still faced themselves in the bathroom mirror?

Another expression of the group's native-favoring sensibility is a Best Supporting Actor nom for the late Pete Postlethwaite in...Read More

We waited for the Golden Globes to happen before recording our sixteenth discussion. We began with the Ricky Gervais issue (how pissed off are they?, "the one bright spot"), and acknowledged that there seem to be no surprises yet to come. It's all pretty much settled down at this point, and we've got six weeks until the Oscars.

"I don't know what to say to my fellow prognosticators about this kind of phenomenon [represented by The Social Network]," Sasha said early on. "You've got two, maybe three films fighting for second or third place." Me: "Some...Read More

"Today's secret slogan is 'Got MLK'"? -- Facebook message from cartoonist Chris Browne.

"I know you're a Social Network supporter," Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet wrote a few minutes ago, "but do you find it a good thing (for movies, for awards, etc.) when we have such an uninteresting, unanimous decision on one film and only one other film is really even being considered as a potential runner-up? Yeah, I know The Fighter stands as a third contender, but the talk is all about The Social Network with a whisper of King's Speech." Here's his article, written in the wake of the Golden Globes.

I don't know why I'm leaving tomorrow for Park City and Sundance 2011, but I am. I guess I wanted to really settle in and get everything squared away before it all starts. Whatever happens later this evening HE won't be transmitting from roughly 8 am tomorrow until I get to JFK around 9:30 am. When the plane leaves I'll really be dark until 4:30 pm or so. Wait...does Delta offer airborne wifi?

And I'll never get to see Ivan Reitman's "predictable, cutesy" No Strings Attached without paying for it. The Manhattan...

Ricky Gervais "will not be invited back to host the show next year, for sure," a member of the HFPA has told Popeater's Rob Shuter. "[And] for sure any movie he makes he can forget about getting nominated. He humiliated the organization last night and went too far with several celebrities whose representatives have already called to complain."

Ricky Gervais during last night's Golden Globes awards telecast.

That's the HFPA for you -- all about image and politics and scumbaggery. "Any" movie that Gervais makes "can forget about being nominated"? In other words, this person is saying...Read More

When I saw the initial teaser for Jonathan Liebesman's Battle: Los Angeles (Sony, 3.11) two months ago, I was feeling Skyline-d, District 9-ed, 2012-ed and Monster-ed out. It looked to me like just another shaky-cam disaster/alien-invasion movie in a military Cloverfield vein. 11.12 Quote: "What's my level of interest in seeing it on a scale of one to ten? About a seven, if that."

But now I'm feeling Oscar'ed out and pining for the start of Sundance, and that plus the usual mid-winter fatigue factor has...Read More

It was announced yesterday that Larysa Kondracki's The Whistleblower had won the Palm Springs Film Festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. I missed it at last September's Toronto Film Festival, and I hadn't heard any particulars until today. Conspiracy thriller, American cop in Bosnia, human trafficking. Rachel Weisz, Vanessa Redgrave, Monica Bellucci and David Strathairn.

It's not playing Sundance 2011, of course, but it will show later this month at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Greg Jacobs and John Siskel's Louder Than A Bomb, about...Read More

So every time Andrew Garfield's Peter Parker has to drop everything and become Spider-Man, he has to remember to take the web-shooter device with him. And God forbid if the device malfunctions, as they all do sooner or later. MTV's Josh Horowitz obtained confirmation last night from Spider-Man costar Emma Stone.

During his infrequent stints as the Golden Globe jokemeister/commentator, Ricky Gervais skirted the line between delightfully wicked and boorishly cruel. He went with the taboo-ignoring, see-how-far-you-can-go sensibility of a roast. Coarse, obviously, but he was only speaking to the way things are out there and the things we dare not say. And every so often we heard the crack of a slugger's bat.

The richest jokes are always flecked with brutality. And Gervais kept the energy up -- you have to give him that. But I wonder...Read More

"The general idea, naturally, would be to convey awe, delight and enthusiasm, and not, you know, come off like any kind of, you know, pooper. Opposite of that. Gotta be into it. But at the same time...how to say this?...you don't want to oversaturate by using the same term too often. Perhaps if you got out a note pad and...I dunno, wrote down as many enthusiasm exclamations as you can think of? Ones you're comfortable with, of course."

Golden Globe summary: After all the heavy campaigning and two awards ceremonies over the last couple of nights, it would feel more correct and fitting if the Oscars were to happen earlier than February 27th. Wouldn't it? Isn't it all pretty much over? Is there a sentiment shift yet to come? Doubt it. And yet we're looking at another six weeks. I don't want to screw up the Santa Barbara Film Festival timetable, but...well, the Academy needs a re-think. Really.

10:55 pm: The clapping, cheering and love for...Read More

The Golden Globes will begin in 15 minutes, and two happenings may or may not make them a semi-noteworthy event (or at least, you know, something to talk about tomorrow): (a) Ricky Gervais's opening monologue and (b) The King's Speech winning the Best Motion Picture, Drama...or not. That's it -- the whole show in a nutshell. Here are yesterday's Gold Derby predictions.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck did it, aided and abetted by Angelina Jolie. Florian was too mood-obsessed, too focused on style, too willing to flatter the big-star aura of Jolie and costar Johnny Depp. That's the conclusion from The Daily Beast's Nicole Laporte about why The Tourist was such a stinker.

Von Donnersmarck "was not interested [in] a generic thriller," an anonymous source tells LaPorte. "He was interested in making a movie that was about elegance and the glamour of stars. It was not supposed to be a hard-edged thriller. He wanted to make a style piece. That may have been...

Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik's immediate reaction to last weekend's Gabrielle Gifford shooting was that Tea Party rage had inflamed the atmosphere in Arizona and probably influenced unstable hinterland types like Jared Lee Loughner. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous," he said -- a reasonable view from my perspective. And yet the right's big-lie machine managed to discredit Dupnik's view within 48 hours.

Their...Read More

The always electric and captivating Susannah York, 72, died earlier today from cancer. I fell in love with her performance as Meg, the daughter of Paul Scofield's Sir Thomas More, in Fred Zinneman's A Man For All Seasons ('66), and was pretty much hooked from then on. One of her best scenes in that film begins around the 2:20 mark.

York's eyes were wonderful. Gleaming, teasing. They always knew. And then you add that delicious smile. She always conveyed adult intrigue, exceptional perception. At times a certain...Read More

At 3:30 am New York time Nikki Finke reported that Ron Howard's The Dilemma has, like, tanked. It did $6 million yesterday with a shot at $20 million by the end of the Martin Luther King holiday.

That's "shockingly soft," she says, if you compare to opening grosses of Vaughn's Four Christmases ($31 million) and Couples Retreat ($34 million) and James' Paul Blart: Mall Cop ($31 million) and Grown-Ups ($40 million).

Like I said on Thursday, it's the movie and not the guys. People are smelling what this film is putting out and it's not going down all that...Read More

Watching my Ishtar Bluray the other night led me to Peter Biskind's September 2010 Vanity Fair piece about the making of that misbegotten (but now forgiven in most quarters) 1987 film. And while I've read Biskind's Beatty autobiography and should have some memory of this, I came upon an anecdote that sank in because it contains -- I'm not exaggerating -- perhaps the most eloquent and half-touching rationale for promiscuity I've ever heard or considered. And conveyed in only four words.

Biskind got the story from Ishtar costar Dustin Hoffman.

"Despite his growing difficulties with...Read More

There are always little things that people do that faintly irritate others. So faintly that they barely register, and are certainly not worth mentioning in mixed company. To casually do so would suggest a petty and neurotic nature, and who wants that? But this is a Saturday morning and very little is going on. Remember Holden Caulfield sitting on that bus and noticing the way a guy is trying to hide that he's picking his nose? We all think this stuff.

I inwardly flinch (i.e., not so you'd notice) whenever I see a cluster of eight or ten people standing or walking together....Read More

What could happen at tomorrow night's Golden Globe telecast that would turn heads? A surprise win, I suppose, but it wouldn't matter much in the greater scheme. No one cares about the preferences of this utterly discredited bunch. It'll be okay if they give the Best Motion Picture, Drama award to The King's Speech, as some are predicting. Tom Hooper's film will enjoy a gratifying nationwide moment. And good on Annette Bening if, as expected, she wins the Best Actress, Comedy or Musical award for her performance in The Kids Are All Right.

The only things that will matter are (a)...Read More

Update: As expected, The Social Network, The Fighter The King's Speech (particularly Best Actor winner Colin Firth) and Black Swan's Natalie Portman were the big-time winners at tonight's Critics Choice Awards.

Network won for Best Picture, Best Director (David Fincher ) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin). Portman won for Best Actress. The Fighter 's Melissa Leo and Christian Bale won for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, and the cast won the Best Ensemble award. The Original Screenplay award went to David Seidler for The King's Speech.

Earlier:...Read More

Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network was made available a few hours ago on Sony's Social Network site.

The spiking of Cari Beauchamp's 5000-word Vanity Fair piece about the aggressive Hollywood reporting wars between Deadline's Nikki Finke, TheWrap's Sharon Waxman and The Hollywood Reporter's Janice Min was not, I'm told, a "space issue." Earlier today N.Y. Post media columnist Keith J. Kelly quoted "sources" saying that the story was killed "because it wasn't catty enough...they wanted a catfight story." He also ran an official Vanity Fair explanation that "with so many articles trying to get into the issue, it didn't make the cut."

Late this afternoon a person who had contact with Beauchamp during her research...Read More

Since last summer's Sad Keanu meme, Keanu Reeves has starred in Mark Mann's Generation Um..., spoken about wanting to make another Bill and Ted movie (middle-aged air guitar) and is moving forward on a 47 Ronin flick that sounds real. I've had this idea that The Day The Earth Stood Still hurt him, but that awful film grossed $230 million worldwide so it's not like Keanu's in "movie jail," so to speak.

"Clint Eastwood is without a doubt the fittest and most active octogenarian on New York's Park Avenue as he climbs spryly out of his black SUV and strides into the Regency Hotel, acknowledging the greetings of the staff with a friendly wave. 'He can't be 80,' someone whispers in amazement. 'No way.'" -- from a 1.14 Telegraph profile by John Hiscock.

There's like...uhm, a reason for that? For Clint looking as good as he does, I mean. It's called working out every day for two hours. That, I've been told, was his regimen during the making of Invictus in South Africa. (Okay,...Read More

The New Yorker cover, the first photo of Andrew Garfield in Sony's forthcoming Spider-Man film and the 1.13 announcement that Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was delaying its opening for the fifth time (the new debut is set for 3.15.11) all seemed to break at the same time.

Late last night Hot Blog commenter Scott Mendelson wrote that "Sony must be a little pissed at all the horrible press that Turn Off the Dark is getting. So no, I don't think it's a coincidence that they released the official still this week, since...Read More

I truly and honestly shrugged when I read last night's "bombshell" headline about former Golden Globe publicist Michael Russell charging the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with fraud and corupt practices as part a lawsuit seeking $2 million in lost salary and additional damages. Isn't "whores R us" the HFPA's lifelong mantra? Hasn't the town been snickering about these clowns for years? Ricky Gervais will kick this around in his opening monologue and...what else? Nothing.

This just-announced dramatic feature ACE (American Cinema Editors) nominees are Black Swan (Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E.), The Fighter (Pamela Martin), Inception (Lee Smith, A.C.E.), The King's Speech (Tariq Anwar) and The Social Network (Angus Wall, A.C.E. & Kirk Baxter).

The Best Edited Comedy or Musical noms went to Alice in Wonderland (Chris Lebenzon, A.C.E.), Easy A (Susan Littenberg), The Kids Are All Right (Jeffrey M. Werner), Made in Dagenham (Michael Parker), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss).

I'd really like to read a paragraph or two explaining how the cutting in Easy A, which I thought was...Read More

My Canadian-bought Ishtar Bluray arrived today. Watching it now, smiling, going with it, chuckling now and then. It's a comedy, yes, but you have to forget about it being one. Laugh or don't laugh, but either way it's Ishtar -- one of the best faintly funny farces ever made. About delusion, middle-aged failure, life without a net, the unbearable absence of talent, friendship, futility, pretty eyes, idiot shenanigans and dumb luck.

Ishtar is a bit like a biplane that lifts off a partly muddy runway, rises 30 or...Read More

Annapurna Pictures' Megan Ellison, 24 year-old daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, will provide sole financing for Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's untitled next film, which Variety describes as "the true story of a U.S. military black ops mission." Cameras will roll in early summer with Bigelow directing and Boal having written the script.

Their long-planned Triple Frontier project, a larger-budgeted, big-star action thriller for Paramount, will presumably go sometime in 2012.

Ellison's investment in True Grit bought her an exec producer credit. Annapurna will also reportedly finance and produce John Hillcoat's The Wettest County. a prohibition-era pic to star...Read More

I don't see how anyone can declare that the box-office performance of Ron Howard's The Dilemma will "deliver some clarity on the immediate future of the adult comedy," as Deadline's Michael Fleming wrote this morning. He doesn't mean that the film itself will sink or swim based on how good it is. He's saying that Average Joe expectations about whether or not to give this Vince Vaughn-Kevin James comedy a shot will amount to a kind of zeitgeist referendum on the vitality of comedies aimed at over-30s.

In other words, Fleming apparently believes that tens of...Read More

Movies that open at South by Southwest tend to be boilerplate fanboy flicks (Kickass, anything from Robert Rodriguez, etc.) looking for an exuberant reception from a baseball- and cowboy-hatted throng that's ready and willing to cheer any film with any kind of heat, if for no other reason than to celebrate Austin's center-of-the-worldness. Jodie Foster's The Beaver is a different kind of deal (i.e., a mildly creepy oddball comedy) but it'll still benefit from being exuberantly greeted, etc.

Following the 3.16 SXSW centerpiece premiere, Summit will open the Mel Gibson dramedy limited on 3.23 and wide on April 8th. In a statement...Read More

The cinematographer is Josh Owens. The left-to-right (and vice versa) tracking is what makes it work. Remove the caption copy and Vimeo's new embed codes (which play on iPhone and iPad) are incredibly compact -- less than two lines.

Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro has gathered quotes about the much-derided Golden Globes telecast, which will air this coming Sunday. "Rarely do meaninglessness and relevance, sham and suspense, smash up against one another with such flair as at the Golden Globe Awards," he begins. "They're a joke, truly -- the result of fewer than 100 international junketeers rewarding films and the studios that have plied them with freebies and celebrity access during the last year."

Quote #1: "As an influencer, no one can deny that the Globes is one of the truly big guns -- not just because 17 million people tuned...Read More

I'm secure enough to admit that before this morning I'd never laid eyes on Thomas Hart Benton's "Hollywood," which he painted in 1937. I'm fairly ignorant about the history of 20th Century art in this country. I'm a peon, really. The only thing I've read that's really stayed in my head is Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word, a brilliant dissection of the modern art movement from the 1920s to roughly 1974.

From Benton's Wiki page: "Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute...Read More

There's nothing "oh, wow"-ish about Criterion's Broadcast News Bluray (1.25), and that's perfectly fine. It makes James L. Brooks' 1987 classic look like it did in the best L.A. or N.Y. screening room prior to opening, or like a sharply focused, slightly grainy, scratch-free print. Needless to say it's a far better rendering than the 1999 Fox Home Video DVD.

There's just one problem. The effing firmware on my Sony Bluray player hasn't been updated since I bought the damn thing in the fall of '08, and so I can't watch...Read More

Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid (IFC Films, 1.21) is a remake of Kim Ki-young's 1960 Korean original. The consensus about the newbie at last May's Cannes Film Festival seemed to be that the older film is better. I've never seen the original so that left me out. Ki-young's film is said to be more Bunuelian with the housemaid acting in a devious and manipulative fashion. She's much more the victim in the version I saw.

In my 5.13 review I described Sang-soo's version as...Read More

Another King's Speech-supporting Guru has thrown in the towel and gone over to the Social Network side. I'm speaking of In Contention's Kris Tapley, who's been predicting for weeks that Tom Hooper's historical relationship drama would take the Best Picture Oscar. What changed his mind? Guild nominations, I'm supposing. Not just the DGA, WGA and PGA noms, but those from the ADG (Art Director's Guild) and particularly the CAS (Cinema Audio Society), which recently nominated TSN but not The King's Speech.

With The Hollywood Reporter's Tim Appelo and EW's Anthony...Read More

Creating and maintaining an elaborate deception is always stressful. And since this is the main activity in Ron Howard's The Dilemma (Universal, 1.14), sitting through it makes you feel whipped and shagged. It's a bear. And it's not especially funny. Okay, some at my screening were chortling from time to time, but at no time did anyone let go with quaking convulsive laughter. Which obviously suggests something about the engine under the hood.

It suggests that the spectacle of Vince Vaughn continually lying to the two most...Read More

"Wednesday night's event seemed less about Mr. Obama's presidency and more about the state of this country," N.Y. Times reporter Adam Nagourney wrote a couple of hours ago. "His calls during the campaign for an end to brutal partisanship appeared to carry little weight these past two years in Washington. There is no way to know if his similar call on Wednesday, under tragic circumstances, will have more traction."

"If I had one wish
One dream I knew would come true
I'd want to speak...Read More

Last week Scott Feinberg caught up with Greenberg star (as well as No Strings Attached, Arthur and Damsels in Distress costar/star/whatever) Greta Gerwig, whom I spoke to last month in a small Lower East Side restaurant. Feinberg did a real "interview"; I conducted more of a loose-shoe whatever-happens chit-chat pass-the-salt "hey, I like Phil Spector too" type of encounter.

Lynn Hirschberg's exclusive W story about David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has several photos of Rooney Mara in Lisbeth Salander mode. Clearly Fincher wanted his Lisbeth to look significantly different than Noomi Rapace's version. So he went with short, severe-looking bangs and bleached eyebrows. A little bit of an early '80s Klaus Nomi look.

Honestly? I'm not entirely sure how I feel about these differences. I liked Rapace's look, but I recognize that it would have seemed weird if Fincher had given Rooney an exact copycat appearance. Maybe I just...Read More

HE is taking exception to the Directors Guild of America having included Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's Restrepo among its 2010 nominees, but not Amir Bar Lev's far superior The Tillman Story. The DGA also nominated Last Train Home, Inside Job, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Waiting for Superman.

I wrote the following about Restrepo last June in a piece called "Afghanistan Bananastan":

"The kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism's sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts -- 'get...Read More

In a video message released this morning, the most despicable woman in this country's political realm said that "journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn." A believer in American "exceptionalism," Palin knows perfectly well that she's been inciting the reactionary ire of under-educated, lower-income rurals for over two years, and has done plenty to feed the hate fires.

"Caution is not part of Ms. Palin's political repertory," writes N.Y....Read More

The Green Hornet (Sony, 1.14) is a blend of superhero sludge and a buddy action comedy. Except the action has no juice -- you've seen the same duke-out, shoot-out, car-chase, demolition-derby stuff hundreds of times -- and it's not the least bit funny, largely because it won't stop hitting you with the same old routines. What you get is unimaginative, routinely-staged action. The appalling use of decades-old cliches. Boring and/or tediously-drawn characters. Painful GenX-wanker dialogue that feels half-trite and half-improvised. And not even faint amusement.

It's a co-creation of actor-producer-screenwriter Seth Rogen, co-writer Evan Goldberg, director Michel...Read More

I had a nice time, snapped a few shots and enjoyed the company of, I felt, some of the coolest and/or most interesting people on the planet at today's Social Network luncheon at the Four Seasons. The filmmakers, as you might expect, were in an amiable and settled mood. Not the least bit assuming or presumptuous but...well, you could certainly say comfortable.

True Grit's Hailee Steinfeld, Social Network's Andrew Garfield -- Tuesday, 1.11, 12:55 pm.

Sony Pictures honcho Amy Pascal.

Social Network producer Dana Brunetti, Jesse Eisenberg, producer Mike DeLuca -- Tuesday,...

I sat to the left of Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin at today's Four Seasons luncheon on behalf of Sorkin, David Fincher and Scott Rudin's film. Screenwriter Stephen Schiff was three seats away, director-screenwriter James Toback sat to his right, and Sony production executive Elizabeth Cantillon sat opposite. I don't know why I'm discussing table seatings.

And then it was time for Sony production chief Amy Pascal, who hosted the luncheon, to deliver remarks, and then for Sorkin to say a few words.

Before this happened we talked...Read More

At today's Social Network luncheon longtime 007 inheritor caretaker producer Barbara Broccoli (daughter of the late Albert "Cubby" Broccoli) was talking to Forbes contributor Bill McCuddy about the imminent announcement of her new James Bond film, which is actually a relaunch of that Sam Mendes version that stalled when MGM's finances went south. "Cool," McCuddy said, "I'd like to report that." No, no...too soon, she replied. Tomorrow. Ten minutes after hearing this story I get out the iPhone and Variety and The Wrap have it bannered.

Paramount Home Video will release a two-disc Bluray of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments on 3.29. This is hardly an important event from any kind of classic-film standpoint. Almost everything about Commandments is labored or hammy or campy. Much of it groans. But Commandments, shot almost entirely on sound stages, has the potential to look extra cool on Bluray. It's a large-format VistaVision '50s film, of course, shot on Kodak 5248. So I'm expecting something richly colored and highly detailed and....shiny?

I mentioned the "s" word because apparently there's a monk concern that Paramount's Bluray might appear...Read More

HE's 2011 Oscar Balloon is up and rolling. The serious addition and pruning process won't begin for another two or three months, but it can't hurt to have something to work with.

N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith is reporting that Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky zapped New York Press critic Armond White at last night's New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony. Which was no biggie. Aronofsky simply said in public what scores of filmmakers have been muttering for years. No love lost, what the eff?, etc.

In remarks before hading the award for Best Cinematography to Black Swan's
Matthew Libatique, Aronofsky said that when he heard he was being asked to present, "I thought I was giving Armond White the compassion award because if you don't have something you should get...Read More

I saw Borys Kit's 1.10 Hollywood Reporter story about Michelle Pfeiffer being cast in Alex Kurtzman's Welcome to People, his DreamWorks-funded directing debut that begins shooting next week. And I thought, "Okay...another film to add to the high-hopes list."

And then I went, "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute...Kurtzman as in Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the fisticuffs-and-fireballs screenwriting team? Described by the N.Y. Times three years ago as "the go-to screenwriters for mega-budget fare like Mission: Impossible III, The Island, Transformers," etc.? Good God.

I wouldn't call Kurtzman and Orci demonic but they're certainly tinged with brimstone and...Read More

Female contributor to Anthony Breznican-created Facebook thread about Giffords shooting, posted this evening (1.10): "There is only one to blame -- the shooter. Not either political party. It's a shame we have to turn this tragic loss into politics."

Jeffrey Wells: "Only righties say that!

The mug shot released today of Jared Lee Loughner, the 22 year-old assailant of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is without question the most...what's the adjective? Piercing, vivid...One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest-y? Call it the most expressive photographic portrait of an apparently deranged mind since the infamous shot of Charles Manson that appeared on a 12.18.69 LIFE magazine cover after Manson's arrest for the Tate-LaBianca murders.

(l.) mug shot of Jared Lee Loughner, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' attacker, released by the Pima County Sheriff's Office; (r.) infamous 1969 LIFE magazine cover pic of Charles Manson.

I've been attending and covering the New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony for the last two years (i.e., since I moved to New York), but this year someone other than HE publicist pally Jeff Hill handled the invites and I didn't hear squat from anyone about anything. Nor did I pester anyone (including NYFCC honcho Armond White) about attending so the hell with it. While the NYFCC soiree unfolds tonight, I'll be watching the all-media of The Green Hornet.

The King's Speech star Colin Firth and his DGA-nominated director Tom Hooper were toasted as an Academy and press luncheon earlier today. Nobody is more polite or gracious or easy to chit-chat with than these two. And let's repeat again that TKS is an exceptionally well-made film of its type, and that I respect it fully and have no dispute with it being a Best Picture contender. It is deserving, in part because it knows exactly how to deal its hand.

King's Speech star Colin Firth, director Tom Hooper at today's honorary luncheon, which

The co-hosts of the...Read More

True Grit co-directors Joel and Ethan Coen didn't make the list of five Best Director nominees from the Directors Guild of America, which broke a few minutes ago. David Fincher, Tom Hooper, Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan and David O. Russell are the DGA nominees, and if I have to tell you which films they directed then I don't know what.

Others who didn't make the cut include 127 Hours maestro Danny Boyle (the faintings did him in), The Kids Are All Right's Lisa Cholodenko (half expected) and Winter's Bone director Debra Granik...tough, but somebody had to get left off.

It's mildly interesting that The Alliance of Women Film Journalists has given its Best Film award to The Social Network despite early griping from some female critics that the David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin film pushed sexist stereotypes (which really didn't add up when you factored in the strength of character and acute intelligence of Rooney Mara and the two women who played the deposition attorneys...hell, even Eduardo's Asian girlfriend wasn't terribly problematic).

Where were they going to go? What other film could the AWFJ champion at this stage of the game and still look credible?

I still think using the term "EDA...Read More

The great Peter Yates, bringer of the legendary Bullitt car chase, died in London yesterday at age 82. He was a highly respected craftsman and genre guy who wasn't an auteur but really kicked ass as "Peter Yates" for about 15 years. And when he was good, he was as good as it got in his realm, which is to say intelligent urban crime movies about guys in tight spots, and always straight, plain and pared-down. He was an old-school, no b.s. professional.

Yates was lucky...Read More

Below is a Movie City News headline on the new wifi deal at Sundance 2011 which, according to the Wall Street Journal's Michelle Kung, will offer three levels of service: (a) generic free wifi available for all (which, let's face it, will probably be mildly shitty), (b) elite VIP wifi requiring a password, and (c) special Sundance staffer wifi with their own special login.

For Oscar Poker #15, Sasha and I welcomed columnist Scott Feinberg. It began with a general discussion of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the feral emotions that have been whipped into a lather by the rightwing media monster machine. And then we banked into a discussion of Social Network Oscar-pundit denial and an examination of this curious psychology and Feinberg's contention that "there is no generic Oscar-type movie anymore." Here's a non-iTunes link.

This is my final edit of the best films of 2011, as well as the most significant and/or the ones certainly worth seeing and perhaps more so, minus all the empty comic-book CG crap that will do little or nothing but bring spiritual poison and/or foolish repetition and distraction to the world. Okay, I've listed two cheap-ass CG entries -- Paul and Cowboys & Aliens -- but that's all. I've got three groupings here, alphabetical listings within each. This is the final post before putting up the new 2011 Oscar Balloon sometime Monday or Tuesday:

Major League (15):

1. The Descendants (d:...Read More

The Australian's Michael Bodey reports that while Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky was thinking about the ballet world, he caught a production of Swan Lake and, of course, realized one performer danced both the black and white swans. 'When I started to explore it, the ballet world actually does have a lot of gothic and horror elements, not just the world but the ballets themselves,' Aronofsky says. 'Look at all the great ballets, from Romeo and Juliet to Sleeping Beauty to Swan Lake. They're [all] these big kind of tragic stories."

)l. to r.) Black Swan costars...

"The reality is that there is no 'Oscar-type' movie anymore. It is no longer good enough to make a movie that simply checks off the boxes of things that pull at the heartstrings of voters -- period pieces, costume dramas, Holocaust movies, etc. The Academy has never been younger, hipper or more in-tune with critics than they have been over the past decade.

"Sure, some members are still living in the past and susceptible to pure and simple emotional manipulation -- they're the ones responsible for nominating something like The Blind Side (2009) every once in a blue moon -- but, at...Read More

Michael Moore's last tweet (posted about an hour ago) addresses standard American gun-loving myopia -- fine. But last night's comment was the real drillbit. FBI guys and SWAT teams would be all over that Detroit Muslim's home right now. Hell, yesterday afternoon.

For what it's worth, I feel that Hallie Berry did a fairly good...okay, a very good job of portraying a woman with multiple personalities in Frankie and Alice, which I saw in late December. But the film doesn't feel vital or urgent. It seems to have been made because Berry wanted to do it, and because they found the money. Decently directed by Geoffrey Sax, good enough as far as it goes, but a bit of a shrug.

Recently TheWrap's Oscar columnist Steve Pond wrote that he was very close to switching his Gurus of Gold Best Picture prediction in favor of The Social Network. The latest Gurus of Gold chart shows that Pond has switched to TSN. And it struck me that the recent turnarounds by Pond and Deadline's Pete Hammond were coming in like the juror turnarounds in Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men.

So this morning I wrote certain Gurus and Oscar pundits about this analogy, stating that
"we're...Read More

In the wake of yesterday's Arizona tragedy and the talk about Sarah Palin's hastily-scrubbed Take Back The 20 website having inflamed the nut fringe, HE reader "le corbeau" made a fair point in linking to this 12.13.04 Democratic Leadership Council page with a map targeting red states that were deemed possibly winnable by Democratic candidates in future elections. Each state is marked with a target icon similar to the imagery on Palin's map.

So yes, it's the same idea but -- key distinction! -- the Democrats used archery target icons while Palin used...Read More

Jane Fonda tweeted yesterday about the shooting of Rep. Giffords. This led me to her site and this 32 year-old photo of herself and Harvey Milk, another elected official shot by a right-leaning delusional, but who sadly wasn't as lucky as Giffords, who will most likely survive according to reports. And that whole episode just flooded back in. A Criterion Bluray/DVD of Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk, easily the saddest, most emotionally moving doc I've ever seen, is out on 3.22.

Compliments of Shane Morris, a.k.a. Cailfornia Cornbread. Watch all the way to the end.

I've watched two of the videos allegedly composed by Jared Lee Loughner, the 22 year-old right-wing nutter who shot Democratic Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 17 others five or six hours ago. Tea Party gun wackos are all over Arizona, but are you going to tell me that Sarah Palin's "Take Back The 20" website (which has since gone down) and its use of rifle-sight imagery to target Giffords wasn't an inflammatory factor?

After Giffords' office was attacked, she spoke to MSBNC about being the target of Sarah Palin's campaign that...Read More

I haven't seen Martin Scorsese's American Boy for over 30 years, but I remember it well because its subject, Steven Prince, was a world-class raconteur. Guys who can tell stories with just the right levels of smirk and emphasis are like jazz musicians, and are few and far between. I've known four or five of them in my life, and they've just got something that you can't help responding to.

In the above clip Prince, best known for playing the gun salesman in Taxi Driver, tells about...Read More

I suspect that HitFix's Drew McWeeny knows something when he says that Jason Eisener's Hobo With A Shotgun is "genuinely deranged" and "far bloodier and nastier" than a Troma film. I just want to add to what Steven Gaydos wrote about how Hobo might be (and certainly should be) a great social-vengeance metaphor about an angry disenfranchised guy blasting expensively-cut hair all over them walls. It should be, in short, double-billed with Inside Job.

Season of the Witch is down to an historic 1% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and it'll still make $11 or $12 million by Sunday night. Which is more than Fair Game has made since opening in early November. Blue Valentine is 20 times better than Season of the Witch and most of the Snookis and Guidos out there would rather die than pay to see it. All because they want to hang with their friends. And to them, Nic Cage, Ron Perlman, murky medieval landscapes and CG demons fall under that category.

Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit beat Little Fockers, earning...Read More

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, the 24 year-old film obsessive who will begin co-hosting Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies (along with Associated Press film critic Christy Lemire) on 1.21, has compiled some kind of "Annual Critics Survey" preferred films of 2010 list, as posted by Indiewire. All I can say is that I hope Iggy knows how to charm the camera and that he and Lemire get some chemistry going.

At The Movies co-host Ignatiy (a.k.a. "Iggy") Vishnevetsky.

I was amused from the start by the perversity of Ebert choosing a guy who's arguably dweebier than Richard Brody...Read More

What gets me isn't that The Kennedys, the eight-part miniseries, has been deep-sixed by The History Channel, etc. What gets me is how stunningly awful Greg Kinnear's JFK voice sounds. Listen to this putz at the 40-second mark, and especially when he says "is entitled to defy the caught of lahww." The chickenshit Vaughn Meader way he says "lahww" is dreadful. His voice is soft and sonny-boyish, not even slightly resembling the deeper pitch and timbre of the Real McCoy.

Listen to this clip...Read More

I realize that Joe Carnahan's The Grey has gotten some mention over the last day or two, but a producer friend told me about this a few days ago and I've decided it's a must-see. I scratched Carnahan off my list after The A-Team, but this is about a bunch of guys who crash-land in some desolate Alaskan tundra and struggle to avoid being eaten by wolves. They get picked off one by one, of course.

The movie will sink or swim based on the realism of the wolves. I'm telling Carnahan right now that if he...Read More

What is this strange, unholy fascination that respectable columnists and film critics have with Jason Eisener's Hobo With A Shotgun, which will have its blood-spattered debut at Sundance 2011? Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale expressed enthusiasm (along with yours truly) last September, and now the Toronto Star's Peter Howell has it at the top of his list of must-see 2011 films. It's the sound of the title, of course -- cool, funny and bloody idiotic. Plus the vengeance of the disenfranchised.

God knows how many others out there are chanting "Hobo With...Read More

An HE friend from Canada bought a copy of the Ishtar Bluray a day or two ago, and has generously offered to snag a copy for yours truly and send it along by mail. Sony Home Video's recent decision to delay the release date until May or thereabouts was very last-minute and obviously didn't prevent copies from being shipped.

Nobody knows if Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo, which begins filming this month, will work or not. But it it does it'll be an emotionally satisfying finale to a real-life, hard-knocks Hollywood drama about a gifted filmmaker who's riding high and then runs into a career ditch and has to struggle for years to make it back to the top, and loses his marriage along the way. Call it Cameron Crowe.

(l. to r.) We Bought A Zoo costars Scarlett Johansson, Matt Damon, director-cowriter Cameron Crowe

It has a better story than Jerry Maguire in some ways...Read More

I've never had a fat cat in my life, but the size of Mouse, my borderline obese two and a half year-old Siamese male, has become a problem. 25 minutes ago, I mean. He just jumped onto the top of the wooden cabinet above the sink, filled with plates and glasses with two suitcases sitting on top, and the cabinet couldn't take the weight and the whole thing just came CRASHING DOWN on the counter and the floor.

Mouse -- Friday, 1.7, 1:05 pm.

It sounded like a series of grenades going off, like the building itself...Read More

Snow all day today, tonight and into tomorrow. Nothing heavy, and yet New York City sanitation crews are still behind on the last snowfall. Ten-foot-tall mountains of garbage were sitting in various locales on the Lower East Side as I was roaming around last night. If I was Mayor Bloomberg I would have done more than demote sanitation chiefs who allegedly ordered a deliberate snowplow slowdown because they were angry about cutbacks. I would have gone all Luca Brasi on their asses.

I allowed in this morning's Season of the Witch review that the Rotten Tomatoes rating "might go up a tad when the kneejerk fanboys start weighing in." But they didn't. With no support from anyone, Dominic Sena's medieval calamity currently has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes ratings ever.

Ben Zuk's "Salute to Cinema" is just another flashy collage of scene slivers. Not a hint of content or feeling or theme interrupts the nonstop so-whattitude -- combustion, verve, sound and fury...roller-coaster! And it doesn't hold a candle to Matthew Seitz's recent assemblage. Pay a little less attention to the 4th of July sparkler aspects and a little more to what the films were actually about.

I got started late today because of a nightmare that woke me at 3:15 am. It was an okay flying dream (i.e., didn't feel like a nightmare at first) in which I was parachuting in a kind of sideways fashion, not dropping as much as coasting along three or four hundred feet above a half-suburban, half-wooded area. A run-of-the-mill metaphor for a high-wire act like writing a daily Hollywood column that's half movies and half mood-pocket. That plus the idea of being more at peace in the air than on the ground. No biggie.

I suddenly felt like I didn't want to coast...Read More

And it's called being interested in owning just one of these Bluray discs -- the darker one directed by that Kershner guy -- and ignoring the hell out of the other five. I could see Netflxing A New Hope, but Return of the Jedi has been erased from my memory. Don't even mention the prequels.

The screening selections at Roger Durling's Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.27 -- 2.6) are always well chosen, but the meat and the heat are always the tributes and panels. Because these events are always so smoothly produced and frankly kind of Deja Vu-like, some of us are hoping to again sample some of the delightful chaos that punctuated last year's James Cameron tribute.

Here's the final big-name roster: (a) Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) receiving The American Riviera Award, and interviewed by Durling on Friday, 1.28 at the Arlington Theatre; (b) James Franco...Read More

Yesterday British critic-journalist Tom Shone, writing on his "Taking Barack To The Movies" site, reports that Matt Damon has told him that (a) Terrence Malick suggested the ending of Good Will Hunting to Damon and GWH co-screenwriter Ben Affleck during a dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts way back when, and that (b) they knew the notoriously reclusive director due to Malick being "best friends with Affleck's godfather," who isn't named in the piece.

The godfather connection obviously suggests why Affleck ended up in Malick's The Burial, the Oklahoma-shot drama with Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko and Rachel Weisz that's currently...Read More

Two days ago my opinion of Dominic Sena was basically favorable for having directed one of my favorite guilty-pleasure flicks of all time, Gone in Sixty Seconds. Though released in 2000, I think of that Jerry Bruckheimer fast-car movie as a '90s thing because it closed out the glory period when Bruckheimer was cranking out high-octane, smartly-written Chateaubriand guy movies hand over fist. I would have that time again.

I also half-respect the effort that Sena put into Kalifornia, a 1993 Brad Pitt serial...Read More

"I will fight these bastards every night at 6 o'clock because I know what they want to do. They want to take down American workers, outsource jobs, destroy the American dream, concentrate wealth to the top and control minorities. That's what they're about." -- Ed Schultz, The Ed Show.

As some guy said, "Pretty damn offensive to kids born out of wedlock."

So basically Robert De Niro's opinion will carry a certain weight four months hence when the Cannes Film Festival jury decides whether or not to hand the Palme d'Or to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. That's what it boils down to, I think. (Unless, of course, it doesn't play in competition.) Or whether to tactfully sidestep the Malick altogether and hand it to Pedro Almodovar's The Skin That I Inhabit or Lars Von Trier's Melancholia or some other form of winged bird.

I have to write that guy who's bought the Old Town apartment I've been staying in for the...Read More

That Michael Cieply-Brooks Barnes N.Y. Times piece about True Grit (dated 1.14, in the 1.5 print edition) that I managed to ignore essentially cast Joel and Ethan Coen's western as this year's The Blind Side. Their not-unfamiliar idea was that a film that had done so well with the Middle-American paying public ($91.5 million as of 1.4) has earned -- required -- special attention among Academy voters, especially given the 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Big money, across-the-board praise, a home run.

Okay, more like a triple. Three paragraphs near the end of the story mention...Read More

I could swoop down upon this item like a Japanese Zero on 12.7.41, but why? To what end? Vulture's Kyle Buchanan says it well enough.

Those YouTube clips from a 1971 Dick Cavett Show featuring Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks and Frank Capra that blogger Dennis Cozzalio posted earlier today were posted last August by UNC Chapel Hill screenwriting instructor Scott Myers. They're terrific. I was may as well join the crowd.

Wouldn't it be great if the big-time 1930s directors and stars had sat down for some kind of annual, informal, semi-throughtful chit-chat sessions with a renowned critic of the day, and if someone had caught these sessions on...Read More

The first 2011 Gurus of Gold chart is up, and if Tim Appelo, Peter Howell, Dave Karger, Mark Olsen, Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson want to hang tough and still vote their belief in The King's Speech winning the Best Picture Oscar, I say fine, whatever, live and let live, comme ci comme ca, it's a free country, etc.

The website for David Sington's The Flaw, which will play at Sundance, describes this 82-minute doc as "the definitive account of the roots of the biggest economic crisis to hit the world since the 1930s. Forsaking easy explanations of greedy bankers and incompetent regulators, [it] examines how America and the UK came to be gripped by the crazy belief that everyone could be rich and property prices would rise forever."

How Inside Job-bed out are you? Are you rarin' to go there again? I...Read More

The yokels at Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures who announced a plan last March to make a new Godzilla film have found a director -- Gareth Edwards, the young British guy who wrote and directed Monsters. A hip flavor-of-the-month guy...naturally.

WB production chief Jeff Robinov strides into a conference room and announces to a large gathering of creatives, "We're revitalizing ourselves with another fucking Godzilla. Done to death, I know, but not like this. We strip it down. Make it visceral and real.

"But a new Godzilla needs a new Godzilla director. A fresh...Read More

A special non-firewalled Variety feature called "Cinematographers on cinematographers" includes a testimonial to Hoyt Van Hoytema's shooting of The Fighter by Raging Bull's legendary Michael Chapman.

The Ishtar Bluray no-show, I'm informed, is a delayed release action, and not the abrupt yanking that Blu-ray.com reported. Badass Digest's Moises Chiullan has e-mailed (and Sony Video spokesperson Fritz Friedman has just confirmed) that a substitute release date will soon be announced. Update: A top-level source says he's heard the Bluray will now come out in May.

The Bluray.com postings is "needlessly sensationalist and inaccurate," Chiullan contends, "since it wasn't abruptly pulled. No screeners went out, nothing. They informed people who requested screeners that the date got pushed back a few weeks ago....Read More

Last night Julia Roberts hosted a screening of Biutiful at CAA's Century City offices (and not at her home, as a Huffington Post rewrite person has written) on behalf of Best Actor contender Javier Bardem. During the after-event she spoke to Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger, who's one of the columnists (along with myself and TheWrap's Steve Pond) carrying the Bardem torch.

Biutiful star Javier Bardem posing with Julia Roberts during an Eat Pray Love event last summer.

Karger: "What is it about Javier's performance in Biutiful that you're so passionate about?"

Roberts: "He's...Read More

Whatever office Alec Baldwin decides to run for (and it would help if he could say which office he's thinking about), I'm a supporter. He's brilliant, emotional, rash, incisive, combative. Baldwin can obviously nicey-nice his way through anything (he's an old hand), but it's the intemperate side that makes him special.

Whatever issue President Obama will sidestep or finesse or soft-pedal, Baldwin will fume and just blurt it out, explaining his position with facts...Read More

Nicest dream-vibe video of 2011 (father & daughter version).

The new Roger Ebert-approved At The Movies is launching on 1.21 with Associated Press critic Christy Lemire and Mubi.com contributor Ignatiy Vishnevetsky co-hosting. Elvis Mitchell had been announced as Lemire's co-host but something didn't work out and his departure was announced by Roger and co-producer Chaz Ebert on 12.14.

At The Movies co-host Ignatiy Vishnevetsky.

Vishnevetsky is a real-deal, 24 year-old wunderkind who's bright and enterprising (he co-founded cine-FILE.info) and then some. He's some kind of anti-Ben Lyons, off-the-planet and full of his own fuel, but honest about being headstrong and cool by my standards. (The...Read More

Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop "is a terrific piece of work, involving and evolving at the same time," says director-screenwriter Rod Lurie (Straw Dogs). "But is it a documentary? I left it with the distinct impression that much of it was a put on -- a sly joke was staged and pre-planned.

"I'm no expert on this, but it struck me that the movie itself is a hoax -- Banksy's ultimate performance art. If that's the case then would mean it's scripted, so is it disqualified from the documentary category? Or should it be? Would Banksy laugh his ass off...Read More

With the Writers Guild of America having disqualified Another Year, Biutiful, Blue Valentine, The King's Speech, The Ghost Writer, Toy Story 3, Winter's Bone and The Way Back, their just-announced nominations seem a bit diminished in stature. Many of the winners have to be wondering if they made the cut only because eight heavy-hitters weren't competing, so in some cases you have to take these noms with a grain of salt. It's a little like wining a Best Actor Oscar after two of the nominees have suddenly died from the Black Plague.

We're all presuming that Inception...Read More

The Social Network is a specially seasoned grade-A ribboned steak served in a top-ranked Cambridge restaurant. Or maybe it's just a plate of roast herbal chicken served in a nice, inexpensive Cambridge cafeteria, filling and nutritious. Black Swan is a breakfast of grapefruit and one lightly-boiled egg. The King's Speech is a well-prepared meal of roast duck and rice pudding served at Rules on a Tuesday night. Winter's Bone is an organic vegetable salad, except the person eating it is unshaven and only showers twice weekly and is wearing a flannel shirt and has a bad smoker's cough. The Town is...Read More

Well, so much for the Winter's Bone Best Picture surge. This morning the Producers Guild announced their ten nominations for the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures, and there were three mild surprises.

One, the shafting of Winter's Bone, a presumed indicator of reduced steam as far as a Best Picture Oscar nom is concerned. Two, the nomination of 127 Hours, which has been declining over the last three or four weeks, almost to the point that some were predicting it might not make the cut. And three, the nomination of The...Read More

This redband trailer for Ivan Reitman's No Strings Attached (Paramount, 1.21) is funnier than the green one because of the blue material. (The only bad parts are the head-crashes-onto-the-dinner-plate bit -- pure Reitman! -- and the "yeah, I'm definitely gay" line.) It reminds me it once was an admired Blacklist script by Liz Meriwether called Fuckbuddies. A voice is telling me it's no Norbit.

Academy voters are basically sheep -- a herd. The shepherd just has to show control and point the way, and unless his/her suggestion is nonsensical and/or unwise almost all of the sheep will follow. The shepherd (i.e., Paramount marketing) has made it clear that True Grit's Hailee Steinfeld is a Best Supporting Actress contender. That's because her fiercely intelligent performance can't overpower a basic human tendency to regard 14 year-olds as entertaining but marginal figures. The only choice, obviously, is the Best Supporting Actress route. It doesn't matter how large or central her role is -- she's 14.

...

First came this, and then this (around the 1:40 mark) and now this.

Anne Francis, an actress of the '50s and '60s who knew all about mascara and pizazz, passed on yesterday at an assisted living facility in Santa Barbara. Forbidden Planet, Blackboard Jungle, The Hired Gun, The Crowded Sky, etc. But who ever saw The Girl of the Night ('60)? One of her sassiest, most come-hither supporting performances was in John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock ('55).

Dennis Lim's dismissive little dissertation about the campy nature of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan ("Is it anti-camp? Post-camp? Failed camp?") expresses so completely what I despise about the ingrown toenail culture of too-cool-for-school film critics. It was posted on Slate on 12.29, but I only read it yesterday.

Aronofsky has made a ballet film with a ballet-performance and ballet-production attitude -- gasping, highly theatrical, consumed, emotionally grandiose, contorted, half-hysterical -- and with a clearly stated intention to echo the story of "Swan Lake." What is there to misunderstand? It's not calculus. Everything in the film is plain as day and yet...Read More

From Christopher Rosen's 1.3.11 Movieline piece, "Say What? Assessing the Vocal Ticks from True Grit":

Vimeo is hosting a report from London's ITV on Jamie Stuart's Idiot With A Tripod. Stuart has also launched a special Idiot page on his Mutiny Company site. The Oscar producers should hire Stuart to capture the preparation for the big show (meetings, rehearsals) and the concurrent boola-boola around Los Angeles, and then run his video on the AMPAS site as a year-round promotional thing.

New York Blizzard - ITV Daybreak VT from dantv on Vimeo.

My French Film Festival (January 14th through 29th) is a low-cost online film festival of ten French-produced films that haven't a prayer of getting theatrical play in the States. Such a festival could play at MOMA or the Film Society of Lincoln Center, of course, but filmgoers aren't nearly as queer for French films as they were in the '60s and '70s so online makes sense, and it's brassy to offer these films not just to New Yorkers but the world.

The festival...Read More

Our little weekly podcast is now three and a half months old! New Year's reflections (including the fact that I hate New Year's Eve), True Grit inspections, Black Swan 's wack factor (and the $47 million gross so far), and a pop-quiz review of some of the films expected to be the hottest Oscar contenders of 2011. Here's a non-iTunes link.

Several Wrap staffers have compiled a list of of 11 hot attractions/events in 2011. With the exception of Terrence Malick's The Tree of LIfe , the films they've chosen to highlight are enough to make anyone jump out of a 17th-floor window -- Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, fucking Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Hangover 2, Green Lantern, Captain America: The First Avenger, Transformers 3, Cowboys & Aliens, the latest X-Men and the last Harry Potter flick. Oh, and they're really excited about Snyder's Superman movie, and the coming double dose of Steven Spielberg -- Tintin and War Horse.

On 12.27 the Online Film Critics Society announced that Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan had gathered seven nominations, or more than any other contender. This hinted at the possibility of Swan also winning OFCS awards above and beyond the expected Natalie Portman win for Best Actress. Perhaps a Best Director win for Darren Aronofsky? Or a Best Picture trophy? I for one was ready and eager for something different to happen...please.

But today's announcement of the winners delivered the same old usual-usual -- The Social Network as Best Film, TSN's David Fincher for Best Director, The King's Speech...Read More

It ain't the revenues as much as the number of bodies passing through the turnstiles. And the reality, as reported by USA Today's Scott Bowles, is that 2010 wasn't a very good year in this respect. 1.35 billion tickets were sold -- the smallest tally in 14 years, or since 1.33 billion were sold in 1996. The headline over Bowles' story calls 2010 "dismal," in fact.

The average 1996 ticket price in the U.S. was $4.42. The average 2010 ticket price was $7.85. 2010 attendance fell 5.4% below 2009 levels, which was the largest drop since attendance fell 8.1% in 2005, Bowles...Read More

Pugnacious Pete Postlethwaite, 64, died yesterday. He was a bright and thoughtful fellow, and a first-rate character actor. Peppy, those penetrating eyes, a deep snappy voice, working-class manner, wiry frame. Postlethwiate was a smoker and had been dealing with testicular cancer since the '90s. A too-early departure despite that. Hugs and condolences to his family and friends.

I could never quite lick the pronunciation of his last name, but I think you were supposed to ignore the t's and the h and say "possulwaite," or something like that. And I always had trouble remembering if the second...Read More

Hey, Guillermo -- this 1991 Alka Seltzer commercial has been sitting on YouTube since last May 3rd. What's the history of it? How did you get the job? How many takes? Did you shoot any others? I'm kind of wondering why nobody passed it around or posted it before Anne Thompson put it up a few hours ago.

It feels so great that the holiday is only a few hours from being over and that regular life will begin again tomorrow morning. Well, within a couple of days. It'll take that long for people to get their engines going again (it always does), but the great shutdown of 2010 is no more.

In an interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub, The Social Network/The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director David Fincher has said that the latter film, due in December 2011, will be strictly set in the year and the technological realm of 2003, or "pre-iPhone." That's because author Stieg Larsson was "probably thinking" of a 2003 world when he wrote the "Girl" books, Fincher says.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo star Daniel Craig, director David Fincher during filming in Sweden.

"What year does [the story] take place in?," Fincher says. "Well, Larson's books are delivered in 2004, so he's...Read More

Wells to Manhattan-based, Sundance-bound publicists: I don't have to tell you that the next two weeks offer excellent opportunities to pre-screen whatever films you have playing at Sundance 2011. Producers usually don't want their films seen on this basis, I realize, but the facts are that (a) Sundance journalists are always trying to get into the same 25 or 30 buzz films and (b) most of the others always seem to be scrambling for attention, some more than others. For 65% of the allegedly hot films up there it's "move it or lose it."

I for one would love to be able to...Read More

Gregg Araki's films (including his latest) are never about finding employment or learning a craft or driving a cab or creating art or taking care of a child or nursing a sick dog. They're always about attractive young urbans with cool haircuts and slim, well-toned bodies doing lots and lots of boning -- straight, gay, polymorphously whathaveyou.

In other words, things haven't changed that much since The Doom Generation ('95). Indeed, Kaboom (which will play at Sundance later this month) "picks up where Araki's 'Teenage...Read More

I'm trying to cobble together an "abandonment theory" about movie-watching. It's basically about a syndrome in which you enjoy and admire the hell out of a film when it first comes out but then you start to go cold on it once the "wrong" people (i.e., unwashed megaplex hordes) start embracing it big-time. This hasn't happened with any regularity, and in fact has occured hardly at all. But it has happened once in a blue moon.

The most recent incident didn't concern a film but a piece of music -- Peter Tchaikovsky's "Piano Concerto No. 1." Black Swan inspired me to buy a...Read More

In yesterday's "Ladykillers" piece I bypassed Meryl Streep/Julia Roberts as potential Best Actress contenders in John Wells' film version of August: Osage County. That's due to the strong likelihood of this Harvey Weinstein/Jean Doumanian co-production being a 2012 release. But what would happen if the Osage County team got the lead out and opened their film 11 months hence?

Meryl Streep vs. Julia Roberts in August: Osage County could become one of the greatest within-the-same-film female acting battles of all time.

I'll tell you what happens: Streep wins the 2011 Best Actress Oscar in a walk. But...Read More

If you want to be freewheeling and scattershot about it, here's a list of potentially award-worthy actress performances in 2011 films, pruned down somewhat from a list sent in by HE reader danbmcg. It's actually not all that scattershot. I'll eat my recently purchased Urban Outfitters winter jacket if a good 60% or 70% of these performances don't at least get talked up as Oscar-worthy.

(l.) Meryl Streep, (r.) Margaret Thatcher.

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady. Already one of the most anticipated female performances in 2011 with Streep portraying British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during...Read More

Vulture's Kyle Buchanan: "There has been a lot of chatter about whether you should be competing for the Best Actress Oscar or Best Supporting Actress. Was that decision yours?"

Another Year's Lesley Manville: "It wasn't, really. Sony has now quite categorically put me in the Best Actress category. That might be an error -- I don't know -- but it's their call. I'm a novice at this, so I wouldn't dictate it, really. I don't know. It seems to have been a good year for women."

Buchanan: "And thus, it's a very crowded category."

Manville: "I sort of try to think beyond that,...Read More

Movie-wise, the first three months of any year are always rough-going. The second and third month, actually, because January, bad as it is commercially, is always covered by the Sundance Film Festival. And yet last February and March each offered a film that ended up on some 2010 ten-best lists: Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer on 2.19 and Noah Baumbach's Greenberg nearly 30 days later.

Not this year apparently, to go by appearances and guesstimates. Which January, February or March openings will at least...Read More

I finally caught up with Martin Scorsese's Public Speaking. Fran Lebowitz's luterary output has been sparse sparse over the last couple of decades, but she knows. "Simply making people laugh is the lowest form of humor"? This is the other kind.

Last March I posted shots of old-time Times Square marquees ("Big Ass Marquees," "More Marquees") from the '50s and '60s. Here are some new discoveries. The color pic of the Astor's display for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound is an eye-popper. If only the others had this kind of luminosity. You can almost see Michael Corleone and his girlfriend Kay trying to nudge their way through the main doors.

Spellbound, a movie that has not gained esteem with the passing of time, opened on 12.28.45.

"Along with the almost-complete disappearance of palace-sized movie theatres with balconies over...Read More

For those worshippers of numerology and calendars who don't subscribe to the notion of constant renewal and 24/7 refresh, this confirms last night's reboot. Let's make the best of it. I'm game.