Let no one doubt that Hollywood Elsewhere is an influential, shaker-upper column. Not just in terms of influencing the conversation about Oscar nominees and the Best Picture race. But also in terms of getting people fired. Or one guy, at least. Which doesn't feel very good if the facts are what they seem. Call me chagrined and somewhat appalled.

I learned a few hours ago that Ivan Infante, a screenwriter and maker of short films who's been the most friendly and recognizable face at West L.A.'s Laser Blazer for nine years, was canned last Wednesday by owner...Read More

Barack Obama has bent over backwards to Republican swine over the debt reduction fight, and right now he looks weak as hell to me. He's the "adult in the room," yes, but how I wish he had the courage to be more than just reasonable and mild-mannered. I think of Obama these days and right away I get irritated. He's a moderate conservative, and I thought I was voting for a guy who would try to be much, much more.

It would be so great if a serious liberal could challenge Obama in the primaries and give him trouble and speak the...Read More

LexG drove out to the deepest West Valley the other day to confront Lars Von Trier's Melancholia ((Magnolia, 11.11) during its ultra-low-profile, Academy-qualifying L.A. engagement. I sat on his review for two or three days but here it finally is. He somehow manages to actually write about the film without going into his "woe is me, I needs me some white wimmin' and if I don't get what I need I'm gonna kill myself" routine. Very commendable.

Alexander Skarsgard, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia.

"Functioning as almost a companion piece to his more outrageous Antichrist, Lars von Trier's Melancholia...Read More

About 13 months ago I posted an observation about a tendency of younger women to project thin little pipsqueak voices and use mallspeak accents and phrasings in order to sound average and blend into the crowd. I flashed back to this a few nights ago as I listened to Cowboys & Aliens star Olivia Wilde talk to Jimmy Kimmel. She's beautiful but her voice has no particular flavor and distinction.

Wilde is supposed to be a star in the making but she sounds like a checkout girl. Her voice is almost stunning in its...Read More

The bloggerati have been salivating all day over the apparently distinct possibility that the under-performing, flopping-around-like-a-flounder-on-the-sand Cowboys & Aliens will come in second for the weekend behind the horribly vile, reprehensible, apocalypse-summoning Smurfs. I've been too settled and soothed in Santa Barbara to care, but I know that David Poland's Cowboys & Aliens pan is good stuff.

Sunday morning update: Variety's Andrew Stewart is reporting that reps for Smurfs and Cowboys & Aliens are both estimating $36.2 million for the weekend, "leaving no room for a clear winner until [actuals] are released on Monday."

Earlier: "According...Read More

Either somebody at Movie City News didn't get the memo, or David Poland decided to ease up on Islamic Jihad just this once. For the first time in many years Movie City News today linked to a story of mine on Hollywood Elsewhere. It's been a longstanding policy of Poland's to ferociously ignore anything I write. My policy, on the other hand, has always been to link to a Poland riff or post an excerpt whenever he writes something cool or nervy (like when he zings Nikki Finke).

I'm a fair-minded Anglo-Saxon Protestant -- I don't do...Read More

I drove up to Santa Barbara this morning to attend a screening of Mike Cahill and Brit Marling's Another Earth, which opened on 7.22 to mostly positive reviews. I wrote on 7.19 that while "it's partly a sci-fi fantasy about the approach of a second earth, it's mainly about loss and recovery and redemption" and as such is one of the year's most intriguing indies, particularly for its emotional, skillfully under-written quality.

At today's lawn luncheon following 11 am Santa Barbara screening of Another Earth -- (l. to r.) costar William...

It's conceivable that Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 11.18) might play the New York Film Festival following its Venice Film Festival debut, but it definitely won't play the Toronto Film Festival. Deadline's Pete Hammond reminded me this morning that he reported this four days ago (on 7.26) in his piece about Oscar-season shufflings. My bad -- I focused that day only on Paramount's decision not to put Jason Reitman's Young Adult into any of the fall festivals.

On the other hand Hammond buried his revelation about Tinker, Tailor in the fourth paragraph of his story, so I'm...Read More

Last night Politikien's Nils Thoren ran comments from Danish director Lars Von Trier about reports that the now-shuttered Facebook page belonging to Anders Behring Breivik, the 32 year-old rightwing terrorist responsible for the recent Oslo bombing and the 69 murders on the Norweigan island of Utoya, listed Von Trier's Dogville ('03) as Breivik's third-favorite film.

(l.) Melancholia and Dogville director Lars von Trier; (r.) Danish People's Party figurehead Pia Merete Kjaersgaard.

Von Trier is of course no more responsible for Breivik's carnage than Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger was responsible for Mark...Read More

In Contention's Guy Lodge believes right now that The Artist, The Descendants, The Ides of March, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Tree of Life and War Horse are the most likely 2011 Best Picture nominees. Yes, six.

Nobody knows anything but I say "no" to The Artist (too French) and The Tree of Life (too Malicky). My Best Picture guesstimates: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (highly affecting emotional current), The Descendants (quality death-in-a-family film), The Iron Lady (obligatory British-ruling-class entry), Moneyball (professional baseball meets Social Network-like approach), War Horse (poor sad traumatized horse), We Bought A Zoo (another family film) and possibly...Read More

"The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren't complicated," writes N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman in a 7.28 posting. "Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation.

"And Democrats -- who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether -- have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

"As I said, it's not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can't bring themselves...Read More

Manhattan-based HE reader Chris attended last night's GenArts screening of 30 Minutes or Less (Sony, 8.12) and came away mildly pleased, calling it a "fun comedy worth checking out." But costar Danny McBride, he says, "proves once again that less is more with him...he has some funny moments, but also had many parts that fell flat and were met with near-silence."

Pic is "loosely based on an unusual bank robbery which occurred on August 28, 2003 in Erie, Pennsylvania," says the Wiki page, "in which pizza delivery man Brian Wells was killed when a bomb...Read More

Due respect but I feel it's a mistake to repeat the same clips in a trailer, even if the idea is to (a) show, (b) reverse-shift and then (c) return and repeat. The same clips of Kate Bosworth are shown twice in the recently posted official trailer for Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs. I'm especially bothered by one at the 28 second and 1:58 mark in which Bosworth talks about "men with guns," etc. I don't mean to rag but it doesn't work.

Captured at 28-second mark of new Straw Dogs trailer.

...

Could the World War 2 dogfight sequences in this trailer for George Lucas's Red Tail (1.20.12) look any more fake? What a non-pleasure it'll be to wallow in visual values and terms that have nothing to do with 1940s verisimilitude and everything to do with Lucas wanting to slick this thing up as much as possible.

Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard are the costars.

Lucas has been struggling with this sucker since filming began in March 2009 and reshoots happened in March 2010. Obviously it's a troubled and ungenuine enterprise. Failure of...Read More

Yes, guys who stare or noticably glance at women's breasts in social or business situations are being gauche. It's tedious and tiresome so who wouldn't agree with the point of this video? Nobody. But it's not funny. Not clever enough. Just lies there.

Surely women are okay with quick darting glances from time to time. That's only normal, right? Or is glancing of any kind considered gauche? I've noticed women admiring my broad shoulders from time to...

Over the last few months we've seen or learned of four thoughtful dramas with the word "Better" or "Life" in the title, and two with the exact same title. Chris Weitz's A Better Life, a drama about a Mexican immigrant's struggle to survive misfortune, has been playing since late June. And Cedric Kahn's A Better Life, a French-produced drama about economic hardship, will play at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival.

Also playing at Toronto will be Ann Hui's A Simple Life, which also deals with cultural and economic hardships and adjustments. And then there was Susanne Bier's In A...Read More

So the New York Film Festival's crack team (Scott Foundas, Rose Kuo, Todd McCarthy, etc.) has landed Roman Polanski's Carnage for their opening-night attraction. Meaning there will be no Carnage at the Toronto Film Festival due to NYFF exclusivity terms, although it'll have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September.

Carnage costars Cristoph Waltz, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster with director Roman Polanski.

I'm going to need to catch the NYFF press screening of Carnage post-Toronto, which will be sometime between 9.18 and 9.25...right? Or do I have...Read More

"All strong directors are sons of bitches," John Ford allegedly said to screenwriter Nunnally Johnson sometime in the late '40s or early '50s. His point was that Johnson, in Ford's view, was too much of a nice, thoughtful, fair-minded guy to cut it as a director. Directors basically can't be mellow or gentle or accommodating. They need to be tough, pugnacious and manipulative mo'fos in order to get what they want. And if they're too deferential, they won't last.

(l.) Wes Anderson; (r.) John Ford.

I was reminded yesterday what a tough mo'fo Wes...Read More

A thoroughly adolescent, borderline-retarded thought flashed through my head a while ago, to wit: I'd be far more interested in seeing Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim if it was re-titled Pacific Rim Job. A joke for sixth-graders, okay, but I felt an agreeable surge when it hit me. Yes! Better title! But why?

In fact my reasons for entertaining this dopey-sounding thought are entirely reasonable.

One, a consensus is building in the blogosphere that Joe Cornish's Attack The Block has exposed the utter worthlessness of spending mountains of money on CG monsters by reminding us that it's the victims of the...Read More

I'm guessing that Crazy, Stupid, Love and Cowboys & Aliens will sell the most tickets this weekend, but the two best openers -- easily, hands down -- are from County Galway, Ireland and the Morden neighborhood in southern London. I'm speaking of John Michael McDonagh's The Guard, which I've praised two or three times in recent weeks, and Joe Cornish's Attack The Block (Screen Gems), which I finally saw this evening.

Attack The Block obviously cost a small fraction of the $100 million that Cowboys & Aliens spent on itself, and yes, the furry...Read More

It's fairly common knowledge that the key movers and shakers in turning Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson's Bottle Rocket ('96) into a "go" feature were the late Polly Platt, producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and concert promoter and Woodstock '69 maestro Michael Lang. In the wake of Platt's death, I thought I'd re-tell the story one more time for the record. I discussed it with Carson today, and heard from Anderson online. Lang didn't get back.

(l. to r.) The late Polly Platt, Wes Anderson, L.M. Kit Carson, Michael Lang.

I fell asleep for some reason. (Because of three hours sleep last night?) Then I woke up and realized I'd forgotten to post this.

This could be semi-passable. Or good, even. My insect antennae are sensing Eddie Murphy's funniest performance since Bowfinger, or at least the potential of that. Maybe. It's also nice to see that Gabby Sidibe has scored a post-Precious gig.

Dan McCarthy's abstract, sepia-toned one-sheet for Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur (Strand Releasing, November) tells you it's some kind of austere art film. It's obviously striking but it conveys nothing of the tone of compassion and forgiveness that slips into the narrative during Act 2 and especially Act 3. The suggestion is mainly that someone or something ferocious will bite someone's head off. And that's only about a quarter...okay, a third of the whole pie.

Meanwhile Strand continues to not post a YouTube trailer, despite assurances passed along to this columnist on 6.15 (or about five weeks ago) that a...Read More

Intuitive currents made it clear a long time ago that I'll probably be getting my hate-on for Gary Ross's The Hunger Games (Lionsgate, 3.23). This will obviously change if it's any good, but somehow and some way I just "know" this film is trouble. A primitive, walloping Rollerball-meets-Girlfight youth-market flick -- that's what I'm seeing in my thought dreams. Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) could make it come out right...maybe. But any movie based on a book classified as "young adult science fiction" -- that in itself is a stopper.

I also suspect that any movie that...Read More

The Ides of March is an adaptation of Farragut North, a good play about political operatives that I saw performed a couple of years ago at the Geffen with Chris Pine and Chris Noth. Ryan Gosling and Phillip Seymour Hoffman play these parts, respectively, in the film. George Clooney's presidential candidate was created for the film.

Are there any official 2011 Venice Film Festival titles that weren't covered in Nick Vivarelli's 7.25 Variety piece? Just asking. The Ides Of March, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Wuthering Heights, Texas Killing Fields, A Dangerous Method, Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day On Earth, Killer Joe, The Exchange, Shame, Carnage, Dark Horse, etc.

AICN's Capone and a few other goonies recently met with Harrison Ford in Montana to discuss Cowboys & Aliens, and the following exchange was part of it:

Q: "There's a lot of talk about nostalgia and bringing a sense of nostalgia to movies currently for an audience. Jon [Favreau] mentioned earlier that they had envisioned a scene where Daniel Craig's character jumps on one of the alien spacecrafts as sort of a similar moment to that Vick Armstrong stunt in [an Indiana Jones film] where he jumps on the tank. I was wondering if there is also...Read More

The death of Polly Platt from Lou Gehrig's Disease (a truly horrible way to go) was announced today. I knew and liked Platt, and I'm truly sorry that's she gone. She was a whip-sharp, very perceptive producer and production designer who flourished in the '70s, '80s and '90s. In her prime she was a master at working this town. She knew everyone and everything. Her mind was incandescent.

I had a pretty good relationship with her in the '90s when I wrote for Entertainment Weekly, People and the L.A. Times. She helped me with various "this...Read More

I thought there might be a decent riff-and-comment thread in discussing not-very-good films with great-sounding titles. His Kind of Woman, for me, is a total home run title -- sexy, romantic, sly, knowing. But it just lies there as a film. I saw it for the first time about two or three years ago and I couldn't believe how mediocre it was. So I figured there must be several others in this vein.

Then I thought it over and remembered that movie titles are so blunt and utilitarian these days (and in fact have been so...Read More

The earlier plan was for Alexander Payne's The Descendants (Fox Searchlight) to open on 12.16. The current plan, announced this afternoon, is to open on 11.23. Is this about the momentum factor between the early September festivals and the theatrical opening? The Fox Searchlight guys are unveiling The Descendants at Telluride-Toronto. I've read the Descendants script and am presuming good reviews will happen. With a Thanksgiving opening the FS team will have to keep the ball in the air for eleven weeks, as opposed to 14 and a half weeks with a 12.16 opening.

Alain Corneau's Love Crime (Sundance Selects, 9.2) is an icy, brittle thriller about a corporate power war between a 40something super-exec (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a 30something up-and-comer (Ludivine Sagnier). I'm not spilling details but I do find it strange that a perpetrator of a crime would decide to interrupt his/her career by going to prison, knowing full well that evidence has been planted that will eventually exonerate him/her. Why go through that?

This is about 17 years old, but it would still fit nicely into the forthcoming Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking movie.

Top Gun meets an aquatic Independence Day. And a guy gets blown backwards by an explosion! How can Liam "paycheck" Neeson keeping making shite like this? I can't stand this. Kill me now. Please.

I got more enjoyment out of David Letterman's Elizabeth Taylor jokes during Harrison Ford's 7.21 visit than I did from any one moment in Cowboys & Aliens (Universal, 7.29). I'm just being honest. Letterman told the joke twice and it worked both times. Jon Favreau and DreamWorks and Imagine and a platoon of screenwriters and the Universal guys invested a couple of years and $100 million to make this thing, and what did they make? Basically a big, noisy, ComicCon alien-invasion film with an agreeable sprinkling of old-west characters and atmosphere.

Yes, a lot...Read More

So the Ides of March poster is a wide-angle thing with the left and right versions all hazy and out-of-focus? That's not right. One-sheets have to conform to the usual 27" x 41" aspect ratio, or a single, stand-up, vertical-favoring image. George Clooney 's political drama plays at the Venice Film Festival on 8.31 and opens on 10.14.

I've been figuring all along that Jason Reitman's Young Adult would play Telluride-Toronto, just like Reitman's Juno and Up In The Air did. But tonight Deadline's Pete Hammond reported that he's "confirmed" that's Young Adult "won't be riding the fest circuit."

Charlize Theron, star of the gun-shy Young Adult.

That sounds rather odd. The word on Young Adult, which is based on an obliquely autobiographical script by Diablo Cody, is that it's tough but strong with Charlize Theron playing a somewhat abrasive, emotionally unstable writer. ESPN's Bill Simmons saw Young Adult a while back...Read More

Here's the teaser for Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam 20, presumably a hagiography kiss-ass doc about Pearl Jam's history and legacy. It'll play at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival...I know that much. With an avalanche of award-calibre films playing TIFF, this is the kind of thing you see if you can fit it in...maybe. But preferably before or after the festival.

Pic will reportedly "open" on 9.20.11 "in select theaters for one night only in celebration of Pearl Jam's 20th anniversary with full run beginning on 9.23 in key markets," blah blah.

I realize that the idea of Geoffrey Rush playing Rupert Murdoch in the inevitable phone-hacking-scandal movie (however and whenever it gets made) has been kicked around on this and that site. How could there be any choice but Rush? The face, voice, scrappy Australian accent, the right age, etc. It could be Rush's signature role a la George C. Scott-as-General Patton.

"Gentlemen, you have just seen me do a disgusting thing...but you'll always remember what I just did. If no one remembers your brand, you're not going to sell any soap." I've seen The Hucksters exactly once, and honestly? I don't remember a thing about the plot or any lines spoken by Clark Gable or Deborah Kerr or Ava Gardner...nothing. But I've never forgotten that glob of spit.

HE reader Matthew Morretini claims that "the last four paragraphs of this N.Y. Times obit for actor Tom Aldredge are priceless." He's right.

This Steve Carell "Funny or Die" bit isn't that far off the mark. It's well known in Hollywood circles (and I've said it more than once in this column) that movie stars frequently have disproportionately large heads.

"I've spoken to a fair number of big-name actors and can testify that this is frequently the case," I wrote four years ago. "Mel Gibson has a big head; ditto Kirk Douglas and Kevin Costner. (I once wrote that...Read More

I'm presuming that the new one-sheet for Our Idiot Brother (Weinstein Co., 8.26) has intentionally downsized Paul Rudd so he looks like a ten-year-old? I'm questioning the Photoshopping because Rudd doesn't seem to be that much smaller -- just somewhat. (Elizabeth Banks is Amazon-sized compared to him.) It's a moderately clever idea but the Weinstein marketers should have made him the size of a five-year-old and removed all ambiguity.

The most conspicuous absences among the 2011 Toronto Film Festival's just-announced gala and special presentation slate are Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Roman Polanski's Carnage. Both are set to play at the partially overlapping Venice Film Festival. Deadline's Mike Fleming has heard Tinker may be the opening-night debut at the subsequent New York Film Festival, which would explain that particular situation. Hey, Scott and Todd...any truth to that?

More TIFF titles and programs are set to be announced so this is just the opening salvo. (I'm presuming that Martin Scorsese's 208-minute George Harrison doc will be announced down the path; ditto...Read More

Comedies aren't funny unless they contain at least some of the respect for genuine human experience that dramas do. Sorry to be a scold, but comedy writers need to represent the way it actually is out there. If they don't do that and just make up exaggerated farcical crap, intelligent audiences can't and won't recognize anything they've written as life-like, and therefore won't laugh.

A failure to do this on the part of top-dollar cyborg-screenwriter Dan Fogelman is the main reason why Glenn Ficarra and John Fuqua's Crazy, Stupid, Love (Warner Bros., 7.29) is one of...Read More

Some people have been making cheap cracks about my "air and ether" remark earlier today about being able to read delicate radio signals and atmospheric data about where actors and filmmakers are coming from and what they're facing and thinking and sorting through with their partners and agents. "It's in the air, in the ether," I wrote. "You just have to know how to feel or read it."

I meant that when you've gathered enough experience and learned how to fine-tune your insect antennae and olfactory glands and you can't write a column like this while running around with a note pad like...Read More

New Yorker critic David Denby sharply disagrees with Peter Debruge's recent Variety rave of Crazy Stupid Love, which has its all-media screening tonight at the Arclight. I'm telling you right now tonight may be a defining moment for Debruge. If I decide he's a little too far off the mark on this film, his trustworthiness will have to be reconsidered.

Illustration by The New Yorker's Robert Risko.

Denby's main beef is that it doesn't seem to matter that much if Steve Carrell's Cal and Julianne Moore's Emily decide to cancel their planned divorce or not. Denby...Read More

Remember my 7.16 story about Ami Canaan Mann's Texas Killing Fields, an Anchor Bay crime drama that has no website or trailer and is looking "a little wobbly? Well, Variety's Nick Vivarelli is reporting that it'll play in competition at the 2011 Venice Film Festival (8.31 through 9.10), which means it'll also probably play Toronto.

From low-rent Anchor Bay limbo to Venice Lido lah-lah -- that's a pretty good rebound. Congrats to producer Michael Mann or whomever arranged this one.

The official Venice Film Festival lineup will be unveiled Thursday, but Vivarelli says
the following are apparently locked: William...Read More

The gist of Scott Feinberg's 7.25 piece ("The Art of Dying Young') about the death of Amy Winehouse is that it's not such a terrible thing to check out early if your legend is going downhill anyway. Biological shutdowns will always be traumatic to friends, fans and loved ones, but it's arguably worse, Feinberg is saying, to hang on past your peak point.

But how do you know when you've peaked? Answer: Nobody ever does. Everyone goes through life saying, "I'll find a way to turn things around...after all, tomorrow is another day."

"Most [performing survivors] overstay their welcome," says Feinberg,...Read More

During the L.A. Film Festival I spoke to John Michael McDonagh, the witty and easy-rolling director-writer of The Guard (Sony Classics, 7.29). And now I can't find the effing transcript. But you don't actually need to speak with McDonagh (although he's pleasure to chat with and I'd love to raise a glass with him some day) because The Guard says it all.

McDonagh (the brother of playwright and In Bruges screenwriter Martin McDonagh) is operating here in a sort of Quentin Tarantino-ish realm. The difference is mainly one of regional idioms. Tarantino is a...Read More

In Contention's Guy Lodge has taken issue with yesterday's riff about Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming 3D version of The Great Gatsby, which alluded to one or two concerns about what Luhrmann might do to F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, and how costar Carey Mulligan, as I put it, is probably "too diplomatic to voice fears along these lines."

(l.) Carey Mulligan during a video interview last weekend at ComicCon; (r.) Great Gatsby director Baz Luhrmann.

"I love how you've completely fabricated this certainty that Carey Mulligan is secretly on your side in all of...Read More

God, the green is such a relief after staring at that horrible orange Haywire poster for the last three hours! It's like a nice misty rainshower on my eyeballs. Why don't they just say "September" instead of "Fall"? Bennett Miller's biz-minded baseball drama opens on 9.23. Why be opaque about it?

I love the smell of moist earth and grass when I sit along (or close to) the first or third-base line in a major-league stadium.

I've explained two or three times that orange is a bad color to use in ads, movie posters and/or DVD/Bluray covers. I mentioned this in a recent riff about a British Touch of Evil Bluray. And I wrote last August that "any emphatic use of orange feels a bit oppressive" because "it's a safety color when you're hunting or working construction or standing on a busy traffic road in the evening, but it's also a control color -- a symbol used to enforce rules and segregate prisoners and make people stay within boundaries."

Orange doesn't say...Read More

I for one am tremulous with concern about what Baz Luhrman is going to do with (and to) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby when he begins shooting it in 3D later this year. Carey Mulligan is too diplomatic to voice fears along these lines, but she surely knows that Baz would sooner slit his throat than simply "film the book".

My guess is that Luhrman's conjuring of 1920s Long Island will be as authentic as his recreation of "belle epoque" Paris in Moulin Rouge, or maybe Zack Snyder's ancient Greece in 300.

The upside is that no matter...Read More

Yesterday evening N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply wrote about catching up with Werner Herzog, of all people, at ComicCon. The legendary 68 year-old filmmaker "was absorbing the Breughel-like atmospherics" while taking a break from a death-row documentary that he's making with Erik Nelson.

Photo by Awards Daily's Sasha Stone.

Also taken by Ms. Stone.

For my money, CNN's Dr. Drew Pinsky has delivered the likeliest explanation of why Amy Winehouse is dead. "Opiate addiction takes months to years of treatment," he explained yesterday. "And one of the most serous risks in my experience of that recovery for celebrities and particularly musicians is that they return to their career, they return to the road far too prematurely, and it's absolutely predictable what will happen.

"People look at these stories and go, 'Oh, addiction treatment doesn't work.' The crazy thing about addiction is that part of the disease...Read More

The Observer's Tim Adams has written an excellent piece about comment-thread big-mouths that partially focuses on LexG. The article also looks at the anonymity factor, which I feel is vital for good frank chatter. Yes, HE's very own LexG is shaking the rafters in England. (Adams twice asked for his email address, which I passed along. As there are no LexG quotes in the piece, it's possible that he blew Adams off...just like he couldn't be reached for a recent Oscar Poker podcast.)

"Some trolls have become nearly as famous as the blogs to which they...Read More

Both Variety's Peter Debruge and The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt seem to agree that Jon Favreau's Cowboys & Aliens (Universal, 7.29), which screened last night at ComicCon, has wisely emphasized classic-old-west aspects and solid character-driven writing over flash-in-the-pan alien FX, and is therefore no Wild Wild West.

Snap of crowd at last night's screening taken by Cowboys & Aliens producer Ron Howard.

This doesn't entirely square with a view by TheWrap's Tim Kenneally that Cowboys & Aliens is "an action flick from head to tentacle" -- a "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral meets...Read More

Yesterday evening I briefly visited an open-air MOCA reception at West Hollywood's Pacific Design Center for Miranda July, director of The Future (Razor/Match, 7.29). and particularly her outdoor sculpture exhibit, "Eleven Heavy Things." (Now through 10.23.) That's July posing within one of her front-lawn sculptures with that grinning middle-aged guy with the glasses.

I spoke to Beginners director Mike Mills, July's husband, whom I'd met at a recent Santa Barbara reception, but not to July, whose upcoming film I still haven't seen, in part due to my own instinctual, possibly unjustified fear of...Read More

I've never gotten over vague feelings of shame that arose from a minor incident that happened in a McGraw-Hill building bathroom in 1981. Maybe if I finally admit what happened I can get past it somehow.

I'd been hired to work as a freelance writer for a new outfit called Product Information Network (P.I.N.) by a very kind and extremely bright guy named George Finnegan , a friend of my father's who lived near our home in Wilton, Connecticut. It saved my life, this job, as I was skirting on the edge of poverty when Finnegan brought me on. I was so grateful...Read More

HE's Michael Merlob has filed the following from ComicCon about Francis Coppola's Twixt preview-and-discussion panel: "Coppola descended on Comic Con in what was the most enjoyably disastrous panel in recent memory. There with composer/musician Dan Deacon and star Val Kilmer, Coppola made for a lovably fuddy-duddy host as he introduced the first-ever promo footage from his new gothic horror film Twixt.

"The Twixt footage suggests an unhinged student film. With Kilmer playing a low rent horror author who becomes embroiled in a small town mystery while on a signing tour, the footage felt underwhelming. We all know what...Read More

The Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit is reporting that Harrison Ford has attached himself to Black Hats, a 1920s-era action film in which he would play an aging Wyatt Earp pooling forces with Bat Masterson against a young Al Capone and his New York henchmen.

(l.) Harrison Ford; (r.) Wyatt Earp near the end of his life in the 1920s.

Pic would be an adaptation of a Max Allan Collins novel with a screenplay by Kurt Johnstad (cowriter of 300 and 300: The Battle of Artemisia).

Kit's synopsis, condensed: "An older...Read More

Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino is projecting that Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive (FilmDistrict, 9.16) will open with $13 million and top out domestically at $42 million. Or, in other words, final earnings may be about about half of the $86 million that Fast Five took in its first weekend. They're both fast-car movies, and that's where they separate.

Drive will open in far fewer theatres, yes, and Fast Five is the latest version of a longstanding franchise brand that everyone likes or cheaply enjoys, etc. Of course, Fast Five isn't one-third the...Read More

To go by a description provided by TheWrap's Tim Molloy, It would appear that yesterday's unfortunate ComicCon altercation between Rhys Ifans (Amazing Spider-Man, Greenberg) and security people was Ifans' fault all the way. He reportedly acted boorishly and belligerently, and that's no way to be in mixed company.

That said, some security people walk around with a stick-up-their-ass attitude (which I've personally witnessed time and again) and some are just too stupid to realize that you don't fuck with movie actors or people in their entourage. Especially if they've had a few.

"It's not worth it, Mr. Gittes," Chinatown's Noah Cross...Read More

Did I not just explain how gray cross-training shoes "look like a form of leprosy" and that "there's just something about this shoe color that grates on the soul and immediately lowers the value of the stock of the person wearing them"? I posted this only six days ago.

Taken during yesterday's Tintin promotional festivity at ComicCon.

Los Angelenos interested in catching Lars von Trier's Melancholia before its 11.11.11 domestic release date should scoot out to Laemmle's Fallbrook 7 between today and next Thursday, 7.28. The gloomy apocalyptic drama began quietly playing yesterday on a one-afternoon-screening-per-day basis, and will remain there for six more days.

After a brief singing career at the top (roughly '06 to '08) that was pushed along by a powerful Motown voice mixed with beaucoup pain, and a life continuously marked by reports of drug abuse, Amy Winehouse is dead. Her body was reportedly found a few hours ago in London. The presumption, given Winehouse's self-abusing tendencies, is that she bought it.

Yes, it's possible that Winehouse was walking outside and a tree fell on her and then she was carried into her apartment by passersby. Or that she was hit by a car. So let's hold...Read More

This is Drive, all right. Mood, aroma, atmosphere...all of it. Just shorter.

This trailer for next year's special presentation of Kevin Brownlow's restoration of Abel Gance's Napoleon, unseen at this swanky level of presentation for over three decades, is slow to start. The show will play with a live orchestra (i.e., the Oakland East Bay Symphony) at Oakland's Paramount theatre on March 24, 25, 31 and April 1, 2012.

Brownlow has added footage since the original showings at the 1979 Telluride Film Festival and then at the Radio City Music Hall in January 1981 (which I attended). The 1927 classic will screen at a slower projection rate to simulate...Read More

Hollywood Marketing Rule #1: Trailers for Steven Soderbergh movies never have Don LaFontaine-styled narration...ever.

It would be snarky to categorize Sarah's Key (Weinstein Co., 7.22, NY and LA), an intelligent and delicately handled melodrama about a journalist's exploration of a Jewish family's incredibly tragic history, as a "holocaust soap opera." It does, however, feel like this when the personal saga of the 40ish journalist (Kristin Scott Thomas) is focused upon. Mainly a thread about her being pregnant and wanting the baby and her boyfriend not wanting "to be an old dad," etc.

I didn't dislike these portions and I do understand the strategy (inspired, I gather, by Tatiana de Rosnay's Read More

If I'd been inside Hall H ten minutes ago, I would have never tweeted "Peter Jackson is in the house for Tintin!," as Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson did a few minutes ago. They've lost their aloof and scrutinizing composure down there, the hip bloggers have. Read their tweets aloud and you have to use a falsetto voice. Peter! Peter Jackson! And there's Steven...Steven Spielberg! Eeeeeeee!

For the sixth or seventh idiotic time, male vampires are supernatural beings made of dead (i.e. no longer living) tissue. It follows that they're not only incapable of fertilizing female eggs and/or creating a child, but incapable of having orgasms during vampire-human sex because they're dead, and that even if they could experience some kind of simulated, super-vampire orgasm it would be just be for theatrical show (i.e., to make the female partner feel wanted and/or appreciated).

Certain stories have certain rules, and you can't just throw them out because you feel like it. If you're going...Read More

Yesterday Harvard University honcho Lawrence Summers recounted the April 2004 episode depicted in The Social Network in which Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss visited his office to complain about a violation of Harvard's student-ethics code by Mark Zuckerberg, etc.

Summers' money quote was essentially that male Harvard students dress in jackets and ties for one of two reasons -- i.e., they're looking for a job or they're assholes. Summers quickly came to the conclusion that Cameron and Tyler fit the latter category.

Today the Winklevii posted an open letter to Harvard University president Faust....Read More

This moment of compassion and generosity at Phoenix's Chase Field was posted yesterday. Young kid shrieks and frets over failure to catch ball, a slightly older kid snags it instead...and hands it to the upset kid. A Captain America moment, or something like that. All but unthinkable in an adult context.

These aren't deleted scenes -- they're deleted snippets, pickups, inserts and throwaways. And all of them worthless. This is another reason why George Lucas is the most loathed and despised franchise mogul of all time. I'll never retrieve the 57 seconds I devoted to watching this cheap reel, and as far as I'm concerned Lucasfilm has stolen them from me.

These clips will be included in the big Star Wars Bluray package coming out in September. If you weren't such a shameless huckster, Lucas, you'd let guys like me buy episodes #4 and #5 (A New...Read More

If Peter Debruge's positive Variety review can be believed, Crazy Stupid Love (7.29) is a much better movie than what that dumbed-down trailer has been selling for several weeks. Congrats to Warner Bros. marketing for nearly persuading some of us that this allegedly endearing ensemble comedy, directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris), might faintly suck.

"In a time before raunchy, R-rated laffers competed for the how-low-can-you-go prize, the demand for mature, grown-up romantic comedies resulted in pics as wise and wonderfully character-driven as Crazy, Stupid, Love," Debruge Read More

The Captain America naysayers on Rotten Tomatoes have been shoved back and out-flanked. Joe Johnston's film was hovering at 60%-or-lower yesterday, but the positive rating is now at 71% with a few more reviews to come. Are the neg-heads scattering and running for tall grass? I don't want to gloat.

"By finding an ingenious way to streamline a now-familiar genre -- and by providing a means to fill up your muggy summer afternoon watching hordes of evil soldiers gettin' their arsche handed to them by a true-blue Sentinel of Liberty -- Captain America: The First Avenger does his country proud."...Read More

Fortune has posted a video of Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg chatting with Fortune's Andy Serwer to discuss 3D technology and why 2011 movies have so far, in Katzenberg's opinion, blown chunks. JKatz actually asks for a show of hands to confirm or deny "if the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you've experienced in the last five years of your life."

"For sure the 3D bloom came," Katznberg says...Read More

For whatever reason it's only just hit me that Martin Scorsese's Letter to Elia, a profoundly personal exploration of not only Elia Kazan's life and career but the influence his films have had upon Scorsese almost his entire life, is playing for free on pbs.org. If you haven't seen it and you regard yourself as any kind of Movie Catholic, you must watch it as soon as you can. Who knows? Maybe they'll take it down tomorrow or next week.

I'd like to catch the ComicCon Cowboys & Aliens screening (which my Universal p.r. pally wasn't able to get me into), but otherwise it feels just fine not being in San Diego as we speak. Possible compensation: A livestream feed from the Entertainment Weekly guys and NowLive. A little Dave Karger and Anthony Breznican is part of the deal, apparently.

Very impressive sit-up and leg-lift regimen. Seriously. You have to figure some Ford rep said to the milk guys, "Okay, but a torso shot. The moustache is white. People will see it. No closeup required."

Warner Bros, will be showing Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (9.9) in IMAX, according to the new one-sheet. That's cool. That's the version I want to see.

"Is Captain America, as some have suggested, a symbol of American proto-fascism or a Tea Party hero before the fact?," asks New York's Andrew O'Hehir. "One answer to that question is to say that it's a stupid question to ask about a comic-book hero and another, given the overall left-libertarian leanings of the Marvel universe, is to say no.

"I'm not sure either answer is adequate in the long run, but this origin story effectively ducks the question, by pointing out that Captain America was a weapon created in a moment of global emergency. He's unquestionably an argument for American exceptionalism,...Read More

Suddenly departed MSNBC guy Cenk Uygur explained tonight on his Young Turks show why he believes MSNBC honchos didn't invite him to stick around. One reported reason is that Al Sharpton (who may take over Uygur's former 6 pm slot) recently drew somewhat higher ratings. Uygur doesn't touch the Sharpton factor but to me his interpretation of MSNBC's management mentality sounds perceptive.

"[MSNBC] didn't want to challenge power," he explains. "The problem with the mainstream media is they're desperate for access, they don't challenge the government, they don't challenge power. And it's one...Read More

I learned this morning that Bradley Cooper isn't the only youngish Hollywood hotshot who's fluent in French.

I've been popping in and out of West L.A.'s Laser Blazer since the early '90s, first to buy laser discs and then DVDs and Blurays. And these days the store (located at 10587 West Pico Blvd, two blocks east of Overland) is a remnant of what it once was. Business is down, the mood is down, excess inventory is being sent back to distributors and the air conditioning is on the fritz, and in fact hasn't been repaired for several weeks. And it's hot outside.

I'm sorry to see an old friend wither and die. I wish...Read More

Roughly three months hence Eureka Video will release a Bluray of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) with six different versions of the film, which really amounts to three versions presented in both 1.37 and 1.85 aspect ratios. One, the 96-minute 1958 theatrical version. Two, the 1958 preview version that runs 108 minutes. And three, the 1998 reconstructed version, running 112 minutes, that was put together by Walter Murch, Bob O'Neil and Bill Varney.

Two aspect ratios for each version...so hardcore, so film-nerdy. But the orange backdrop is, for me, a problem. To advertise a...Read More

I've just written the following in a comment thread: "Nobody believes in a righteous, true-blue America any more. Certainly not in the way everyone did during World War II. 'America the Beautiful' has been over, patriotically-speaking, since the mid '60s. What Captain America does, curiously, to dream a little dream about what it was to be a true believer during World War II, and to be a kind of goody two-shoes type of guy who wants to serve and salute and defeat the bullies, etc.

"Maybe that's the door or window that allowed me to get into this, or that let Captain...Read More

In the view of the sometimes very wise Kris Tapley, Captain America is "the best Marvel film since Iron Man, and perhaps better. It conjures the most endearing character of the build thus far, a well-defined leader who will certainly leave audiences ready to follow him into Marvel's next ambitious project."

And from MCN's David Poland: "I kinda love the sepia-spirited movie that Joe Johnston made out of Captain America. Few films are perfect, but the ones that can keep you in even at moments they threaten to pull you out are almost as rare." And costar Hayley Atwell --...Read More

The boldness of going right back to high school with a re-imagined Peter Parker (in the person of Andrew Garfield) figuring out who and what he is and ignoring the first three Spider-Man movies is moderately entertaining in itself. And to be free of the jowly, suit-wearing Republican known as Sam Raimi! It's as if a rainshower has fallen in the forest and everything is moist and new again. And those POV shots aren't half bad.

An 11 am screening of Sarah's Key prevents me from getting into Captain America until sometime this afternoon, but Drew McWeeny's HitFix review says most of what I would have said and some other stuff I wouldn't have written because I'm not enough of a geek.

"Captain America: The First Avenger is one of the finest movies yet from Marvel Studios, and a big departure in tone and storytelling from most of the films they've made so far. It is a strong indicator that the more willing the studio is to experiment, the more exciting the...Read More

I've been got so caught up with this, that and everything else over the last three days that I somehow forgot to post last weekend's Oscar Poker chat -- sorry. Oscar Poker #41 didn't include boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino, who's become too much of a swaggering, in-demand big shot to take ten or twelve minutes to discuss box-office receipts with the likes of Sasha and myself. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

It's 11:30 pm and everyone needs to wind down for an hour or so before crashing. But Joe Johnston's Captain America (Paramount, 7.22) screened tonight at the Grove, and I was knocked over, levitated, delighted. I could feel the mixed energy in the room, and it's obvious that some are going to "meh" this amazing film. "It's okay," "Not bad," etc. Wrong! I'm just going to re-post tonight's tweets and let it go at that...for now.

Tweet #1: "Retro-Captain America is my favorite Marvel movie ever, by far. LOVED IT! Best Joe Johnston flick since...Read More

Last night I finally saw Mike Cahill and Brit Marling's Another Earth (Fox Searchlight, 7.22), a spare but imaginative low-budgeter about loss and recovery and redemption. It's partly a sci-fi fantasy about the approach of a second earth, but you're supposed to let that go and focus on the meaning of Earth #2 -- a 99% duplicate of our own world -- and the escape it offers to people who are unhappy and "want out."

Another Earth star, co-writer and co-producer Britt Marling, and director, co-writer and editor Mike Cahill following last night's screening at the Landmark....

Robert Redford is going to direct and star in The Company You Keep, based on Neil Gordon's 2003 novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by the great Lem Dobbs.

Redford will reportedly play a former Weather Underground militant (in the tradition of Bill Ayres, Bernardine Dohrn or Mark Rudd) wanted by the FBI for a 30-year-old bank job who is forced to abandon his daughter and go on the lam when a young reporter (Shia LaBeouf) outs him. As he "evades a manhunt and seeks out old comrades," according to a Publisher's Weekly synopsis,...Read More

This is for real. An actual Deadline Hollywood game will debut on Facebook this summer. Does this mean that the game (which I presume will have an app for smart phones) will somehow insert the Tyrannosaur-ish personality of Nikki Finke into the software, in the same way that the seething machismo in Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo is woven into the various Rambo games?

The Hollywood Elsewhere game would be some kind of travel-and-adventure-and-political-peril thing. The player would go from film festival to film festival (Sundance, Cannes, Toronto), wearing different color shoes, using little cowboy hats as...Read More

Below is an excerpt from Paul Thomas Anderson's screenplay of The Master, the so-called "Scientology movie" that's been filming since June. The Weinstein Co. will release it during 2012 Oscar season. It costars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Laura Dern. The other excerpt is from Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick". Read and compare.

The resemblance between Another Earth star/co-producer/co-writer Brit Marling and Night Moves costar Jennifer Warren isn't startling, but it's defintely there. No one under 40 has even heard of Arthur Penn's 1975 noir classic, much less seen it. And nobody remembers Warren.

Earlier today comedian Jonnie Marbles, a beefy-looking guy in a plaid shirt, somehow got into the Parliamentary hearing room where Rupert and James Murdoch were giving testimony, and walked up to the Murdoch table and pushed a foam pie into Rupert's face. (Or onto his head.) The crowd in the small room went "Oh!...oh!" The cameras didn't have quite the right angle.

Sky News identified Marbles as the assailant. Marbles tweeted shortly before the incident: "It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat."

I...Read More

This one-sheet seems like a rote, run-of-the-mill way of presenting Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 11.18). It tells you it's going to deliver a highly detailed, particular and exacting plot about men in suits and ties. The book is about finding a high-level traitor in a haystack of hints and clues. So where are the hints of malice, psychological intrigue, alarm, skullduggery? All I'm getting is "intellectual crossword puzzle."

The climax of the meltdown of the Murdoch publishing empire is nigh. Tomorrow will see testimony before British Parliament about the ever-worsening phone-hacking scandal by Newscorp's controversial threesome -- chairman Rupert Murdoch; BSkyB chairman James Murdoch; and former Newscorp honcho Rebekah Brooks, who resigned a couple of days ago. They're going to get raked over the coals, and will naturally say everything they can think of to try and keep more water from filling the hull, and in so doing will be hammered all the more. Mixed metaphors!

How can this not be great television?

N.Y. Times reporter Bill Carter says the...Read More

You know something's slightly amiss when a movie calls itself one thing, and then shuffles the cards and thinks it over and calls itself something else, and then changes its mind a second time by going back to the original title, etc. It usually suggests that certain parties (usually those involved with the financing or distribution) are uncomfortable with the content or tone of it, and are looking to camouflage things on some level.

I'm referring to a reportedly dark and creepy and (perhaps) somewhat Zodiac-like crime movie called The Texas Killing Fields. Directed by Ami...Read More

Here's N.Y. Times media guys David Carr and Brian Stelter riffing on tomorrow's testimony before the British Parliament by Newscorp's Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks. They'll answer questions about the phone-hacking scandal, of course, and in so doing will probably get verbally beaten all to hell.

Meanwhile Bloomberg's Carol Hymowitz, Jeffrey McCracken and Amy Thomson are reporting that "independent directors of New York-based News Corp. have begun questioning the company's response to the crisis and whether a leadership change is needed, said...

The kindly back-patting gesture of giving a Best Picture nomination to the final film in a highly successful franchise is over. It was a purely political, kowtowing-to-profits gesture when Return of the King was so honored, but the new Best Picture nomination rules don't allow for gimmmes and softies. You have to have the serious goods or forget it.

I heard the expected-but-welcome news today from the Toronto Film Festival guys about being press credentialed. I'm still stuck for a good place to flop (i.e., I never stay at hotels) but something always turns up. Toronto 2011 (9.8 through 9.18) is looking like a hummer. Like everyone else I'm expecting George Clooney's The Ides of March, Roman Polanski's Carnage, Bennett Miller's Moneyball, David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World to show up. What else?

I'm presuming that Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Focus Features, 11.18) and...Read More

Here's that Gordon-lying-in-a-hospital-bed teaser for The Dark Knight Rises. The one that appeared online for a few minutes last week before being taken down, I mean. "If you make yourself into more than just a man...if you devote yourself to an ideal...then you become something else entirely." Wait a minute...Gordon? The trailer is obviously about Bane (Tom Hardy) so why is it wrong to presume it's him behind the oxygen mask?

HE's congratulations to Sony Classics for steering Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris to the highest dollar tally of any Allen film ever -- $41,793,000. This clever little fantasy time-trip movie has been in theatres for two months and is still in the top ten. The word-of-mouth train will probably keep it going through August, and a possible surpassing of $50 million.

Annie Hall is still Woody Allen's biggest all-time grosser, if you adjust for inflation.

This was supposed to be one of the all-time worst driving weeks in West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, West Los Angeles and Santa Monica due to Carmageddon, and it turned out to be one of the most pleasant. There are very few cars out there. I can't think of the last time I drove around town with such ease.

I was out with a friend from about 9 am through brunch hour today in Beachwood Canyon, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and along Sunset Blvd. into Brentwood, and traffic was definitely lighter than on a typical Sunday. Brunch and going-to-the-beach...Read More

I decided a long time ago that silver-gray cross-training shoes are grossly unattractive. Especially the ones that have a kind of woven-stitch texture and a slight color accent, like pink or violet. There's just something about this color combo that grates on the soul and immediately lowers the value of the stock of the person wearing them. There are so many types of exercise/workout shoes that look fine (white, red, red-and-white, black, dark blue). Why would anyone freely choose gray-silver? I can't be the only one who feels this way.

I wish I could figure some way to...Read More

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is a satisfying, well-made, above-average film that concludes a highly successful franchise -- fine. But what's so great about it having made epic truckloads of cash this weekend -- a reported $289 million global -- other than the fact that it's broken a lot of records? As Cary Grant said in To Catch A Thief, "It's only money, Houston, and not even yours at that."

Does this box-office triumph brighten my life in some particular gleaming way? Has anyone's life (other than Warner Bros. stockholders) been changed? No....Read More

Some indie filmmakers radiate such a curious obsessive energy that you just can just about figure what their films are going to be like without seeing them. This needn't result in any kind of conscious decision not to see their films, mind, but it does seem to manifest a strange and concentrated inner force that blocks any attempt to do so. It makes the decisions like a stern parent. My head says "hmm, yeah, I think I'll see this flick" but the force steps in and says "nope, forget it...you don't want to go there." So don't blame me.

Jane Fonda has complained in a 7.16 Wrap article about QVC having cancelled an appearance today on the network to promote "Prime Time," her book about aging and fitness. She says QVC has caved in to right-wing pressure.

"The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear," Fonda writes. "I am, to say the least, deeply disappointed that QVC caved to this kind of insane pressure by some well-funded and organized political extremist groups....Read More

On the Catch 22 commentary track, Mike Nichols tells Steven Soderbergh that there's something to be said for flamboyance and showing off, and perhaps even for vulgarity. "The funniest thing about movies is that they don't like good taste. They don't like austerity. All the things...you'll see...the things that you're a little embarassed about, the show-off things. Those are things that are most alive 20 years later. It's one of the most interesting things about movies. It's that they like showing off. It's life, it's vitality. Austerity and classicism just lie there."

Or to put it more concisely, "Starkist doesn't want tunas with...Read More

I'm not saying Mike Nichols was wrong or incorrect when he began to regard his static, long-take style of shooting as "affected" (i.e., sensing that these shots were beginning to seem more about themselves than anything else) but I do love that style regardless, and I miss it. I wish somebody -- anyone -- was into shooting films this way today. Wait, has there been a recent film (or two or three) that has used this style?

I'll be driving out to the 405 Sunset overpass later today to take some shots of the utterly empty 405. Everyone has spoken about Carmageddon as a blight, a plague, a traffic nightmare, an imprisonment. Except totally deserted highways and roads are a profound visual delight, and the only way to capture them is to shoot at 5:30 am and even then, etc. Or organize the emptiness like Stanley Kramer did when he shot On The Beach.

Frame capture from the finale of On The Beach ('60).

Last night Real Time's Bill Maher explained how his various laments and complaints about Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann aren't sexist in nature, as some in the rightwing blogosphere have charged.

A 7.14 L.A. Times "24 Frames" report about a USC Twitter box-office prediction lab contains the following excerpt: "Cowboys and Aliens, [a] superhero movie opening in about two weeks, is barely registering with audiences on Twitter, a fact that doesn't bode well for its box office potential, according to Jonathan Taplin, communication professor at USC and director of the lab. 'It's almost imperceptible the amount of tweets on it, and that's unusual,' Taplin said."

The size of the Cowboys & Aliens balloon is awfully small. It's about the same size as the one for Crazy Stupid Love,...Read More

It's been seven or eight years since I last watched Trainspotting ('96), so I'm thinking I'll probably get the Bluray (out September 13th) for old time's sake. Danny Boyle's direction put him at the top of the list, and then he blew it with A Life Less Ordinary ('97) and The Beach ('00) until finally bouncing back in '02 with 28 Days Later. John Hodge's screenplay is one of the all-time finest.

Apart from the obvious ethical considerations, an underlying element in all the Rupert-bashing of the last few days is that the liberal media is revelling in an opportunity to lash Murdoch for creating and enabling the rabid-attack-dog, spread-the-rightwing-bullshit messaging that his news empire (including the especially odious and obnoxious Fox News and the New York Post) is known for, or to at least weaken or modify it some extent.

Whatever prompts Murdoch to modify his methods, in other words, may result in a roundabout fashion in a less arrogant and more temperate...Read More

The problematic 1950s theatrical technologies known as Smellovision and Aromarama are dead and gone and will never return. And subsequent attempts to bring odors into movie-watching are nothing to hold onto either. The scratch-and-sniff Odorama process used for John Waters' Polyester was lame. And a new version being used with Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, a kind of swipe-and-smell deal called AromaScope, is another cheap trick.

The Rodriguez film is in 3D so the added-aroma element creates what they're calling a 4D experience.

I for one would love it if Smell-o-vision worked -- if...Read More

I suffer a chalk-on-a-blackboard spasm every time I hear NPR reporter Michele Norris pronounce her first name as "MEE-shell." The correct pronunciation is Mee-SHELL (with that delicate French inflection on the second syllable) or Mis-SHELL. I literally wince when I'm driving in the car and Norris comes on and says her name. She doesn't just emphasize the "MEE" -- she revels in it. I've been to France many times and I worship the language, and Norris's mispronunciation, I feel, smacks of cultural arrogance.

I complained about this nearly three years ago, but I didn't offer what seems like a logical...Read More

What am I expected to say or do about the phenomenal Deathly Hallows 2 revenues? I'm obliged to re-post them, but I'm unable to generate (or simulate) that "oooh! oooh!" excitement that I'm getting from certain reports. Were they written by people on pogo sticks undergoing some kind of rapture? Take it easy.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 opens today domestically, but the int'l openings began two days ago. And the int'l tally is now $82.5 million from 43 countries ($37.6 million Thursday and $43.6 million Wednesday). Last night's U.S. midnight showings generated $43.5 million at 3,800...Read More

A ripped, bare-chested, long-haired guy (Taylor Kitsch) in Conan-the-Barbarian garb on the planet Mars? This is supposed to be semi-imaginative, some are saying. I'm sorry but it seems to me like the same old "rugged individual on a heroic quest to save a civilization with a hot girl in love with him" crap. Desert landscapes, armies on horseback, blah blah. Obviously aimed at comic-book geeks, ComicCon-ers, saps.

Okay, I chuckled. It's clever. And I respect the effort to put apes on the 405's Mulholland Drive bridge. But I want more.

I've heard the monster sound effects in this Thing trailer dozens of times before. That shrieking, smashing, guttural, mixing-board wail that only comes out of movie monsters when they're attacking the costars of a monster film. Some monster-movie director needs to come up with something different...anything. We can't keep listening to these same noises.

The 35th anniversary of the release of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver happened on February 8, 2011 since it opened on 2.8.76. The 2011 Berlin Film Festival screened a 4K restored version days after the anniversary. The excellent Bluray came out on April 5, 2011. And a beautiful pristine print showed two and a half months ago at the TCM Classic Movie Festival.

So why am I attending a 35th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver at Sony's Colorworks facility this evening? Because I believe that it might look just a little bit better when screened at...Read More

No, no...she's saying "shutz-pah," not "Choot-spa," which is how a YouTube poster has it. Michele Bachmann's inability to pronounce Yiddish terms and expressions (has she had a go at "mishegoss"?) says a lot about her insular mentality and aversion to stuff outside her own little bubble. Minnesota has a lot of Jews, remember. Has Bachmann heard of, much less seen, A Serious Man?

The Martin Scorsese 3D film formerly known as Hugo Cabret (Paramount, 11.23) and recently retitled Hugo (apparently because Paramount marketing data indicates that American moviegoers don't like a funny-sounding French name that they aren't sure how to pronounce), has a just-up trailer. Except Hugo sounds complex, no? Shouldn't they just retitle it Hugh or, better yet, H?

My impressions of the trailer: (a) The Paris cityscape looks animated, like something out of Tintin; (b) Scorsese directed...Read More

Yesterday morning and for a very brief period, a Dark Knight Returns teaser (which presumably will show at ComicCon 2011) appeared online. One of the appearances happened on buzzfeed. Jett saw it before it was taken down. "It showed a lot of old footage," he says, "along with the main detective talking about Batman while lying in a hospital bed struggling to breathe. Naturally nothing revealing."

This shot of Seventh Seal director-writer Ingmar Bergman (r.) conferring with costar Bengt Ekeroth, who played Death in this legendary 1957 film, is immediately going onto my iPhone photo file. Bengt is one of those actors (like 2001: A Space Odyssey's Dan Richter) known for giving one ultra-legendary performance -- i.e., personifying death as a solemn, white-faced hooded figure who plays chess with Max Von Sydow.

Seventh Seal costar Bengt Ekeroth, director Ingmar Bergman during filming, which presumably happened in the summer or early fall of 1956, as the film opened in Sweden in February...

Review sample #1: "Quirky, hilarious and moving, Paolo Sorrentino's first English-lingo production is a road trip of stunning scope yet deep intimacy, featuring an aged rock star-turned-Nazi hunter played by Sean Penn at his transformative best...pic may baffle but is certain to generate massive highbrow press and long-term cult status." -- Variety's Jay Weissberg.

Review sample #2: "Ultimately, the film's major flaw comes in the film's leading performance. Penn is simply the wrong actor for the wrong role, with each line reading coming off as a forced and stilted SNL-like parody of an alt/emo-rocker...it's a role...Read More

Yesterday's announcement about HBO acquiring North American TV rights to Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World for an early October airing was thin on particulars. So here's something no one's reported thus far, and which I got this morning from a source in the office of HBO's Sheila Nevins: the Harrison doc has an "approximate" running time of 210 minutes.

In other words, it's almost exactly the same length as Scorsese's Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, which runs 208 minutes. This explains HBO's plans to air Scorsese's film in two parts...Read More

I wrote something two years ago that sheds some light, I feel, on the arch-conversative mentality driving the Tea Party-kowtowing righties like Rep. Eric Cantor, and which also gives some perspective on the seemingly insurmountable dispute between the rabid Republican fringe and President Obama over the debt ceiling, cutting spending and raising revenue. The piece was called "Clarity." It's one of the most cleanly expressed pieces of political analysis I've ever written. Here it is:

"The essence of right-wing conservatism is an opportunistic social Darwinism. All righties believe, to quote an old barstool homily, that 'the world is for the...Read More

Yesterday I read and heard that the debt ceiling impasse would be more or less resolved by Sen. Mitch McConnell's suggestion that the responsibility for raising it be transferred entirely to the White House with the Republicans voting on nothing either way. A 7.12 Washington Post story concurrently explained that McConnell folded due to "a sprawling coalition of Wall Street and Main Street business leaders sent an unmistakable message to [Republicans] on Tuesday -- enough squabbling, get the debt ceiling raised."

Then came today's story, partly supplied by Republican House leader Rep. Eric Cantor, about President Obama walking out of a tense...Read More

The gist of this Shira Lazar "What's Trending" CBS interview is that after shooting Hit Somebody, his next film, director-writer Kevin Smith (Red State) doesn't see himself making any more theatrical features, and is thinking more along the lines of a web-based TV series.

Lionsgate marketing maestro Tim Palen has snapped an obviously provocative concept photo of Paz de la Huerta (Boardwalk Empire) to promote Douglas Aarniokoski's Nurse 3D, a "psycho-sexual thriller" about "a beautiful nurse who uses her sexuality to very severe ends." The pic will begin shooting in Toronto on 9.6, or just before the start of the Toronto Film Festival.

As a title, Nurse 3D sounds a little bit simplistic. I would have come up with something allusive, double-layered, with an echo...something.

A chilling, unnerving trailer for Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (Warner Bros./New Line, 9.9), a high-end horror film about a lethal one-touch plague, is up. Here's an Apple 480, 720 and 1080. The costars are Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle, Laurence Fishburne, Elliott Gould, John Hawkes and Demetri Martin.

A guy who makes films as good as this one probably is will be retiring next year? Not good.

Obviously a Robbie Conal portrait of a politician character played by Jude Law....

There's something oddly trustworthy about B. Fatt & Lazy's film reviews. They're obviously averse to James Agee-, Karina Longworth- or LexG-level discourse, but at least they're straight about who and what they are, and the grown-up Beevis & Butthead realm they live in.

For what it's worth and take it with a grain, but B. Fatt has expressed surprise in an early Friends with Benefits review "how funny it turned out to be.

"Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are both really funny" -- hey, he said "funny" twice in subsequent sentences! -- "and...Read More

I'm alluding, of course, to a very contained and non-expressive form of airport-terminal loathing. No "looks," no rolling of the eyes. Nobody knows what I'm thinking except me. LQTM. Update: 9 am SFO-to-Burbank flight now expected to leave around 11 am. Missing crew, gate switched. Greetings & salutations, United Airlines!

This two-day-old Jack and Jill-despising mashup reminds that I haven't seen Paul Schrader's Hardcore ('79) for a decade or so, and that I wouldn't mind catching it again. Scott's performance as a tight-assed Midwestern Calvinist looking for his runaway daughter is one of his all-time best. Peter Boyle and especially Season Hubley delivered excellent backup. A solid '70s film about square America going mano e mano with urban decrepitude. The violent ending is jusitified.

I haven't seen Jonathan Levine's 50/50 (Summit, 9.30) and don't know anyone who has, but the apparent marketing plan, to go by the one-sheet, is to basically reveal -- i.e., spoil -- the third-act resolution in order not to discourage business. Unless they're flimflamming and/or someone knows something I don't.

I've been somehow managing to not see James Marsh's Project Nim, which someone called "the monkey movie" during Sundance '11, but that will soon change as it opens in Los Angeles the day after tomorrow. Here's A.O. Scott's 7.7 N.Y. Times review.

The San Francisco Dolby team said farewell tonight to visiting journos and tecchies with a 9 pm dinner at the Mark Hopkins hotel. I have lots of notes, riffs and impressions to file after returning to Los Angeles tomorrow morning, but thanks to Joshua Gershman, Joan Levy, Kelli Havlik, Daniel Schneider and Julie Mathis for being thorough, thoughtful and tireless in taking care of their visitors.

The San Franciso Dolby p.r. team (l. to r.): Joan Levy, Josh Gershman, Kelli Havlik, Julie Mathis and Daniel Schneider.

It was announced today that four months hence Warner Home Video will release a Mutiny on the Bounty Bluray. (The '62 version, I mean.) This is a major deal for me because this half-good, half-problematic sea epic was shot in Ultra Panavision 70, meaning it will look exceptionally vibrant and detailed in high-def. Perhaps not as sharp and gleaming as WHV's forthcoming Ben-Hur Bluray, which was scanned in 8K, but both were shot in the same 70mm anamorphic process, and will be presented in an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1.

A little less than...Read More

Tell me how or why Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner Bros., 12.16) is going to be significantly different than the '09 original. Same arrogant attitude, same steampunk, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law again, same director (Guy Ritchie), same producer (Joel Silver), etc. No motive to do anything but repeat what worked before.

Posted on 12.27.09: " Sherlock Holmes is a corporate disease movie -- a period put-on concept that reaches out from the screen like a grinning Irish banshee and surrounds you with frigid air and induces a gradual...Read More

I saw and quite liked David Robert Mitchell's Myth of the American Sleepover (Sundance Selects 7.22) at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival -- 14 months ago. And now it's finally opening a week and a half from now. And it deserves a looksee because as small-town teenage community movies go, Mitchell's film isn't far from the realm of George Lucas's American Graffitti, and that ain't hay.

I said in Cannes that Myth "goes against the grain of typical teen-relationship flicks by being much smarter, better acted, more subtle and not reliant on animal-level humor...Read More

"If you're talking social mobility, yes...that has always been the American Dream. The ability of one generation to do better than the generation that spawned them. That was always the American Dream. Well, we're tenth in the American Dream [ratings] right now. We're tenth in social mobility, compared to other countries around the world. Which is like Sweden coming in tenth in Swedish meatballs or something. It's just a shame." -- Blll Maher talking to CNN's Piers Morgan, video posted July 11th.

This clip about Bachmann vs. Palin isn't too bad either.

Posted today by Badass Digest's Devin Faraci, this Alfred Hitchcock cook-book short is a graduation project from students at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany.

After last night's Dolby seminar (or sometime around 9:40 pm), I checked into the Mark Hopkins hotel. A youngish desk clerk gave me two pass cards to a room on the sixth floor. I went up there, slipped the plastic card into the door slot, and walked in. The first thing I saw was a short hallway with a right-turn ahead -- obviously a fairly big room. But the TV was already on...strange. I took the turn and came upon a middle-aged couple lying on the bed, watching CNN.

They stiffened and sat up and said "Oh, Jesus!," "My God!", "What are...Read More

I've finally figured out what the big deal is with Dolby Surround 7.1, which is not new and has actually been installed in some 2100 theatres. But until tonight I didn't fully understand what makes this sound system a distinctive development. The ins and outs were discussed this evening by several sound specialists at a Dolby headquarters seminar in San Francisco, but I didn't really get it until I spoke to Dolby marketing manager Stuart Bowling after it ended.

At this evening's Dolby Labs seminar on Dolby 7.1 Surround: (l. to r.) Eric Brevig,...

A day or so ago a New York Post photographer captured Al Pacino in one of his Phil Spector guises in the currently-rolling HBO biopic of the now-imprisoned music producer, which David Mamet is directing. Spector wore a big moustache and long, side-combed frizzy hair in the '70s or early '80s, so that seems to be the inspiration. Except Al's hair isn't frizzy. Get it right, fellas. It's not hard.

(l.) Pacino as Spector; (center) Spector with moustache and frizzy hair in the '70s; (r.) courtroom Spector.

ESPN's Colin Cowherd recently spoke to Chris Pratt about Bennett Miller's Moneyball (Columbia, 9.23), in which Pratt costars. Pratt has seen the film and not surprisingly speaks highly of it. But what he says lines up with a review/description that I posted last March.

"If you liked the book you're going to love the movie," Pratt says. "If you love baseball you're going to love the movie. It's different than what you [might] expect from a baseball movie. It's a great movie [and] really authentic to the sport. But it's not a 'baseball movie.'...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #40 late yesterday afternoon. We discussed the ongoing melodrama of LexG for a little bit and what happens when drinking ends and begins again. (Sasha: "If you're listening, Lex, put down that beer.") And Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The characters, dialogue, pacing, framing and cutting are all standard-issue Spielberg-Jackson stuff, but the digitally reconstituted water is, I feel, exceptional. Especially the crashing waves. H20 is very hard to get right, or so I'm told.

Why am I sensing hyperventilating, hopping-up-and-down excitement levels about Spike Lee signing to direct an Oldboy remake? Sounds like a very good thing, okay, but don't have a cow about it. The big news will be the casting of the lead.

I'm sorry but the atmosphere inside the once-exclusive and high-toned Beverly Wilshire hotel, which I visited last weekend, is like that of a shopping mall in Riyadh. Like much of Beverly Hills itself, it's been overrun by nouveau-riche Middle Eastern families. They're staying there for the social-statement and luxury factors, of course, but their presence, no offense, seems to de-luxurize the place.

Groups of loudly chattering women in black hijabs, rich kids running around in loud T-shirts, overdressed Eurotrash guys in their 30s with cream-colored suits with bling and tall blonde trophy girlfriends, Baby Huey-sized Arab tweens and teens hanging out...Read More

My flight to San Francisco and the Dolby Surround 7.1 hoo-hah event leaves from Burbank at 1:45 pm, so that's it for now. For the first (and probably only) time in my life I'll be staying at the Mark Hopkins hotel on Nob Hill, which was used as a setting in Bullitt and Kiss Them For Me and (I think) two or three other films. Question to publicist: "Does the Hopkins have a shuttle from SFO to the city? Or should I take a BART train?" Publicist: "Take a cab."

The last and final Harry Potter film, as I noted in yesterday's review, concludes the franchise on a note of high absorption and respectability. Good for that. I'm posting this 7.8 assemblage because one of the most affecting moments in Deathly Hallows 2 is a shot of Daniel Radcliffe's Harry at age 11 (or whatever he was when the series began production a little more than ten years ago). At the time he seemed nine or ten, at most.

It's rare for a LQTM type like myself to laugh out loud, but N.Y. Post film critic Kyle Smith's 7.8 account of his dealings with Virginia-based publicists Keith Appell and Peter Robbio (whose firm, Creative Response Concepts, is conservative-friendly) provided an exception. Robbio-Appell didn't allow Smith to attend a press screening of The Undefeated, the pro-Sarah Palin doc, because they'd invited his colleague, Lou Lumenick, and not Smith. Important distinction!

"What's hilarious about all this is that Lou, who probably had a George McGovern bumper sticker on his lunchbox in college, is far less likely than I, a sensible conservative, am...Read More

This is almost two months old but I hadn't seen it until this morning. Decent, mildly funny, etc. The thought of eating a Snickers bar right now is moderately repugnant. I have a vivid high-school memory of kissing a girl who'd just eaten a Snickers bar (or maybe a Mars bar) and suffering from serious olfactory blowback. Almond Joy, on the other hand, was never a problem.

A mere two days after coming upon a 1958 Los Angeles Times front-page headline informing that Zsa-Zsa Gabor had admitted accepting a $17,000 fur coat from Ramfis Trujillo, the Uday Hussein-like son of the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, I discovered a website showcasing 1950s-era covers of Whisper magazine, apparently a slimier, runtier version of Confidential, and a November 1958 story riffing on Trujillo, Gabor and Kim Novak, whom the dictator's son also allegedly "knew", so to speak.

I wasn't looking for Ramfis Trujillo material, mind. His Zsa-Zsa connection was a secondary...Read More

This line, spoken in a film I was half-watching an hour ago, sunk in: "Whereever there is greatness, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great. We progress and mature by folly. Perfect freedom has no existence. The grown man knows the world he lives in."

It's mildly pleasing on some level to report that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (Warner Bros., 7.15), which I saw this morning, is a tightly-scripted, action-heavy, relatively satisfying finale to a franchise that, for me, had worn out its welcome many years ago. When it ended I didn't just say, "Well, that's finally over!" I also said to myself, "Not half bad."

I wasn't exactly tingling with pleasure, being a confirmed Potter-franchise hater and all, but neither was I scowling or groaning or taking e-mail breaks. It's quite all right for what it is. Okay, maybe even better than...Read More

Most of the dreaded 405 freeway, a nightmare under normal conditions except in the wee hours, will be closed for 53 hours next weekend between the 10 freeway and the 101. The shutdown will begin late Friday evening, 7.15, and end at dawn on Monday, 7.18. Leave town or stay indoors or go into a coma, but forget driving to or from LAX on the 405 or going to the Valley for any reason, because north-south canyon traffic is going to be well beyond description.

I had a brief, enjoyable chat with the radiant Octavia Spencer (a.k.a. "Minny") at last night's press gathering for The Help (Touchstone, 8.10) at the Beverly Wilshire. Tate Taylor's period drama might have seemed like a liberal do-good fable to some were it not for Spencer's level-straight performance as an African-American maid with a fully justifiable chip on her shoulder. (And for the equally formidable performance of costar Viola Davis, who didn't attend last night's event.)

The Help star Octavia Spencer -- Saturday, 7.9, 8:05 pm, Beverly Wilshire hotel.

Best known for her comedic...Read More

All Adam Sandler comedies tend to be obvious and primitive and aimed at lowbrows, so I don't see what's so exceptionally heinous about Jack and Jill. At least it's addressing a basic fact about sibling relations, which is that some brothers and sisters are an unfortunate fact of life (and in some cases an embarassment) whom you'd prefer to not to keep in touch with, thanks all the same.

I loved my younger sister and younger brother after a fashion, but I didn't really seek out their company or friendship because they were both fairly undeveloped...Read More

On 7.6 Bill Simmons said during an ESPN B.S. report with Chris Connelly that he'd caught a screening of Jason Reitman's Young Adult, which he says will open in December. Simmons said he thinks "it's tremendous, and here's what I really liked about it, other than the fact that it was just well done.

"Remember when we said earlier about Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise and how he needed Jerry Maguire [to do that], and how you watched for two hours...? This is Tom Cruise throwing 98 miles an hour. Charlize Theron has never had a...Read More

I had a brief chat yesterday afternoon with Tabloid director Errol Morris. Very brief. The principal topic was Joyce McKinney, who kidnapped a young Mormon guy she was in love with named Kirk Anderson in 1977 England, and chained him to a bed and had sex with him. Morris's bemusing doc is a portrait of love, passion and never-say-die determination, among other things.

I reviewed Tabloid at last September's Toronto Film festival. Here's part of what I said:

"Who in Errol Morris's Tabloid can you believe? Or rather, who do you want to believe?...Read More

Imagine the journalistic standards and criteria that led the Los Angeles Times to go with a front-page banner headline on May 12, 1958 about Peter Lawford, then a 34 year-old moderately famous TV actor (The Thin Man), having possibly fractured his arm in an auto accident on Sunset Blvd. And I mean especially considering that Lawford wasn't even hospitalized but "went to his personal physician for treatment."

Imagine the newsroom conversation between the front-page, straight-news editor and entertainment reporter who covered the Lawford accident.

Entertainment reporter: "I've got something that...Read More

Last night Steve Coogan and journalist Greg Dyke tore into former News of the World deputy features editor Paul McMullan on "Newsnight," a BBC talk show.

Yesterday morning In Contention's Kris Tapley and Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson briefly revived their Oscar Talk podcast. But it was just a one-off. They announce at the conclusion that they're going on hiatus again and will return on 8.26.

Tapley and Thompson share some intriguing calls here and there. But Thompson, in my judgment, passes along what feels like contradictory sentiments.

Early on Tapley asks Thompson about the Best Picture and/or Oscar-nomination potential for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Thompson mulls it over, hesitates, decides what to say. "I have to tell you...Read More

All you need to know about Steven Spielberg's War Horse is in this two-minute clip of John Williams' score. Gentle, quiet and fluttery. Perhaps a score with a bit less of that Spielberg + Williams emotional chain-pulling we've all known over the last 30 years? And then the French horns kicked in, and I knew for sure that this film will be shovelling it big-time.

Williams' theme suggests pride, heart, struggle, conviction. More to the point, the use of French horns is movie-score shorthand that informs the audience of the following: "Something touching and stirring and triumphant...Read More

The best interviews in which both participants are filmmakers (or significant contributors to films) are those in which (a) there's a very slight vibe of contention or aesthetic disagreement between them, such as the famous Steven Soderbergh-Lem Dobbs commentary on the Limey DVD, or (b) the interviewer admires the interviewee but not to a degree that he's unable or unwilling to ask serious probing questions, like Soderbergh interviewing Mike Nichols on the Catch 22 DVD.

No offense, but the worst...Read More

Even the notoriously scowly, Resurrecting The Champ-hating Devin Faraci has to admit that this new Straw Dogs poster is an improvement over the previous attempt, which was revealed on 6.14. I didn't have a big problem with version #1 because it basically replicated the original 1971 poster while adding a slogan (which I could have done without) and a small insert of the face of Alexander Skarsgard, who plays James Marsden's nemesis, within the broken glasses.

(l.) Version #1, revealed on 6.19; (r.) Version #2, revealed today.

But the...Read More

About 10 months ago I wrote that "the highest calling of a Hollywood columnist during awards season is to be a strong and impassioned shepherd and show the sheep where the good grass is. Not to imply sheep don't have a nose for good grass on their own. Of course they do. But there is crabgrass, grass, decent grass, better grass, higher-quality grass and world-class gourmet grass, and I would humbly submit that committed shepherds have a special eye and an attuned nose for good grass...that's all.

"Put another way, the Oscar-season columnists who say 'I'm just taking the pulse of the town...Read More

Every time I visit a convenience store I start looking around for those clear rounded plastic jars containing cheap black combs. I'm referring to ones made out of slim and bendable plastic with thin, malleable teeth that go for only 99 cents, and not the stiff and unyielding slightly heavier kind with overly dense teeth that drugstores sell for $3.50 or $4. Only down-at-the-heels liquor stores sell cheapo combs. I refer to them as James Dean combs. They slightly bend with your hair and slip nicely into your back jean pocket without a feeling of excessive rigidity.

(l.)...

The latest obesity statistics (released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Trust for America's Health) indicate that Americans are much heavier now than 15 years ago. There are now five states (Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Tennessee and Louisiana) in which nearly one in three people are obese. And the state with the lowest 2011 obesity levels -- Colorado, with 19.8 percent of adults considered analogous to walking sea lions -- would have had the highest rate in 1995, the report says.

(l. to r.) Patrick Knowles, Errol Flynn, Alan Hale, Sr. in The Adventures of Robin Hood....

Sony Classics' new Restless trailer allows me to repost my initial Cannes impressions of Henry Hopper -- the 19 year-old son of the late Dennis Hopper -- who stars in Gus Van Sant's film: "The movie is somewhat precious and Harold and Maude-like, but I sense that Hopper has more in his quiver than what the material has asked of him. He seems to be holding back for some reason. Which, to me, feels interesting.

"Hopper projects interior currents that have been thought through, or at least don't seem too acting-school instinctual or showoff nutso....Read More

This isn't a review (or even a mini-review) of The Help (Touchstone, 8.10), which I saw tonight. That's for down the road. But I could sense from reactions at the screening that it'll be a hit with over-25 educated femmes, and perhaps beyond that demo. A youngish woman sitting near me was teary-eyed when the lights came up.

Emma Stone is the bright and diligent writer who interviews African-American maids working in Jackson, Mississippi, for a book exposing small-town racism. Bryce Dallas Howard plays a racist wicked-witch wife. But the stars of the film are Viola...Read More

Press screenings for The Undefeated, Stephen K. Bannon's pro-Sarah Palin documentary, are happening tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles.

I too am planning on attending next week's Dolby pressathon in San Francisco on 7.1 Surround Sound. Besides MCN's David Poland, I mean. I'd been looking forward to a wholesome and stirring learning experience. "Uhhm, I don't want to look in your direction...I'm looking through you...you're not there...if I don't maintain my Islamic jihad stance I won't be a man," etc.

A lowbrow comedy that racks up a lower-than-15% Rotten Tomatoes average, as The Zookeeper (Sony, 7.8) has so far managed, has nothing to worry about as far as the family-viewing crowd is concerned. Kevin James' latest, produced by Adam Sandler's Happy Madison crew, is allegedly reprehensible, and it'll do just fine this weekend with the millions who loved Night at the Museum, which The Zookeeper is basically aping.

Best slapdowns: (1) "Smells like the monkey house before cleaning time." -- Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy. (2) "If a worse movie is released this year,...Read More

Today a photo and a transcription of a 2.9.60 fan letter written by Stanley Kubrick to Ingmar Bergman (i.e., while Kubrick was working on Spartacus, as indicated by the Universal-International letterhead stationery) was posted.

Question: Can anyone imagine a reputable director today writing such a letter to Zack Snyder? If so, could they imaginatively compose such a letter themselves and send it along?

"Dear Mr. Snyder: I should like to offer my praise and gratitude as a fellow director for the unearthly and brilliant contribution you have made to the art of opening-credit...Read More

The names of the dwarf brothers from Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, opening on 12.14.12, are actually Snoopy, Gloopy and Picknose. No, seriously -- Dori, Nori and Or. The players (l. to r.) are Jed Brophy, Adam Brown and Mark Hadlow .

That long-running News of the World phone-hacking scandal has finally torpedoed Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid. The 168-year-old publication (Dickens almost certainly read it) will close on Sunday, 7.10, in an attempt to flush out sewage backwash from the Murdoch empire.

"The good things the News of the World does...have been sullied by behavior that was wrong," said James Murdoch, son of Rupert, in an official statement. "If recent allegations are true, it was inhuman and has no place in our company." "If"?

"The move to close The News of the World was...Read More

Wells to Paramount publicity: About a week ago Variety's Jeff Sneider tweeted that Paramount has decided to change the title of Martin Scorsese's Hugo Cabret to Hugo. And now Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet has just gone with Hugo in a preview piece. Did I miss an official confirmation?

If Hugo Cabret's title has indeed been dumbed down, is it because Paramount marketing research indicated that your average rural American might be thrown and perhaps turned off by the word "Cabret"? As in: "Hmmm...sounds kinda French. How d'ya say it....CaBRETT? Hugo CaBRAY? Arty-farty...right? Later."

This echoes...Read More

That little glimmer of pleasure in Meryl Streep's eyes and mouth as she explains what's important, nay, essential in her presentation to the British electorate is so friggin' Oscar-baity it's not funny. Forget it, game over, she's nominated. Like I said the other day, it's Streep vs. Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs vs. Charlize Theron in Young Adult plus two others.

Deadline's Pete Hammond caught about ten minutes worth of Iron Lady footage at last May's Cannes Film Festival. Here's his report.

This crashing-plane sequence from Mike Nichols' Catch 22 ('70) is one of the most ambitiously choreographed shots of this type ever. Obviously a single take with no vfx or gimmicks. The smoking plane coming in for a landing disappears frame-left and then, unseen, takes off and climbs up and away. The camera pans left with Jon Voight and Martin Balsam as we're shown a stationary burning plane pretending to be the other plane, etc. Show-offy? Sure, but thrillingly so.

Hearty congrats to Nichols, production designer Richard Sylbert (who passed in '02), dp David Watkin.

This...Read More

...with the same mind and spirit and perspective that he had before he died in the '90s but in the body of a go-getter Congressman from Southern California, and he'd probably have a tough time getting re-elected because he'd be considered too moderate, too thoughtful, too practical. He'd be regarded as a sleepy-centrist go-along Republican who doesn't get the ideological fever of the Tea Party or the debt-ceiling shutdown or any of the things that Eric Cantor or Michelle Bachmann believe in. He could almost be a centrist Democrat by today's standards.

Nobody who knows anything cares about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2...no one. The franchise has been over and done with for several years. The last one that mattered was directed by Alfonso Cuaron. The fact that each subsequent installment has made tankloads of money means absolutely dead nothing. It's no surprise that the Variety, Hollywood Reporter and Wrap reviews are favorable. It's all part of the script.

This clip of Page One reactions by serious journalists was sent to me by the p.r. guys working for Magnolia, the doc's distributor. I wrote back as follows: "I'm posting this & thanks for sending, but the Page One premiere and after-party in Manhattan happened a good three weeks ago, and this video was posted on July 1st. Why did it take two weeks for the video to be cut together, and why does it take you guys another week to offer it to the likes of myself?"

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star Daniel Craig to Esquire.com's Tom Chirella: "It's as adult as you can possibly make it. This is adult drama. I grew up, as we fucking all did, watching The Godfather and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie. Nobody makes those anymore.

"And Fincher, he's not holding back. They've given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, 'Are you fucking serious?'" And yet "it's not that he simply showed me footage that was horribly graphic. It was...Read More

For me there's one decent laugh in Horrible Bosses (Warner Bros., 7.8). And there are maybe 30 or 40 titters (i.e., faintly amusing material that doesn't resonate or sink in because it lacks the antsy undercurrent of classic no-laughers like Greenberg). But at no time did the entire house at last night's Arclight screening erupt in gales. Lone oddballs here and there would giggle (the guy sitting behind me wouldn't stop) but the film clearly wasn't connecting. That's because of one thing and only thing only. It's not good enough.

(l. to r.) Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jason...

The Adjustment Bureau persuaded me to never again watch another angels-and-gods-watching-over-mortal-lovers movie. There haven't been many, thank fortune. (The Bishop's Wife, Forever Darling, etc.) I'm cool with Heaven Can Wait because nobody helped Warren Beatty get together with Julie Christie -- the angels (James Mason, Buck Henry) were trying to rectify a mistake, not make a match. And Wings of Desire angel Bruno Ganz made his own decision to become a mortal and fall in love, and that was cool.

But I don't want to know about angels pulling heartstrings. Love is about luck and character...Read More

For whatever reason the 111 equation didn't penetrate until a friend pointed it out last night. Add the last two digits of your birth year plus your age this year (i.e., after your birthday) and the answer will always be 111. No exceptions. George Clooney, 50, was born in May 1961 -- add 50 and 61. Scarlett Johansson, born on 11.22.84, will be 27 on her 2011 birthday -- add 84 and 27. My son Dylan, born on 11.16.89, will turn 22 on 11.16.11 -- add 89 and 22. If Jayne Mansfield, born on 4.19.33, hadn't died at age 34 on 6.29.67 she'd...Read More

N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has tapped out a post-4th-of-July Twilight Zone riff on Rod Serling...without mentioning that recent Mike Fleming Deadline story about a Serling biopic from screenwriter Stanley Weiser (W, Wall Street). And yet Dowd mentions "Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone" (2009), a 50th anniversary tribute book co-edited by Carol Serling, who will produce the Serling biopic along with Andrew Meieran.

The Twilight Zone, Dowd notes, "was never gangbusters" in the ratings. Then why did CBS keep it going for five seasons? (The original series ran from October...Read More

The other day I agreed with Clarence Thomas; now I'm siding with Bill O'Reilly. What's happening? "Do you have chloroform residue in your car, Geraldo?"

Posted this afternoon: "In an exclusive interview set to air on ABC World News and Nightline, Casey Anthony juror Jennifer Ford said she and the other jurors cried and were 'sick to our stomachs' after voting to acquit Anthony of charges that she killed her 2-year-old daughter Caylee.

"'I did not say she was innocent,' said Ford, who had previously only been identified as juror number 3. 'I just said...Read More

"I can't just keep taking one reprehensible paycheck job after another," Johnny Depp is probably saying to himself. "Pirates, Lone Ranger...I have to break the cycle. How much more do I need...really? How much better can I live? How many hundreds of millions must I have in my bank account before I stop tarnishing my rep? I know that people of taste hated the last one and the third one. They're starting to hate me in a way, I think. The cool people, I mean.

"I know that, I know that. But I can't say 'no' to more...Read More

In a 5.19.11 posting from Cannes I called Pedro Almodovar's The Skin That I Live "a wicked-camp thing" that's "played more-or-less straight...a highly perverse and lusciously sensuous film about a mad plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) who recreates his dead wife and daughter with...well, let's not say.

"The story is also about rape-payback and revenge and a selfish young hound...Read More

Hasn't the release of Albert Nobbs this year been a foregone conclusion for a while now? Hasn't it been more or less presumed that the Best Actress race will likely include Glenn Close performance in Rodrigo Garcia's period drama because she's playing a gender-swap role?

L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik is reporting that Liddell Entertainment and Roadside Attractions will open Nobbs domestically in the fall with an Oscar campaign for Close.

In this 1860s Dublin drama, Close is a woman pretending to be a male butler so she can keep up...Read More

Tatiana von Furstenberg and Francesca Gregorini's Tanner Hall -- a drama about emotional-sexual intrigues among women at a New England boarding school -- began shooting in September 2007, screened at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival and will finally open on 9.7.11. The decision by Anchor Bay to distribute is apparently due to Rooney Mara, star of David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, being a costar.

Co-directors Von Furstenberg and Gregorini based their screenplay on their time at Brown University in the late '80s and early '90s. Gregorini is openly gay (I'm not sure about Von Furstenberg) but the...Read More

If only there was a liberal with balls occupying the White House. If only President Obama would call a spade a spade and label Congressional righties as the looney and fanatical faction they've become. If a tough, principled Democrat was to run against Obama in the primaries with a proposal of really getting tough on the financial elite, I would volunteer for him/her 20 hours a week. If Obama loses the 2012 election over voters' conviction that he hasn't even tried to bring justice to the Wall Street bad guys, he'll have no one to blame but himself. He talks good, but he's...Read More

I have too much going on in my life to have paid any more than faint attention to the Casey Anthony murder trial, but in the wake of this morning's "not guilty" verdict, the man-on-the-street presumption is that she killed her two-year-old daughter Cayley in 2008 but that she got off because of a lack of hard proof and too much circumstantial evidence. Henry Fonda and others have described cause for rendering a not-guilty verdict as "reasonable doubt," which I generally believed in until this morning.

In God's eyes...Read More

Four days ago this Matt Zoller Seitz/Stormy Monday video essay (i.e, Kim Morgan reading from Roger Ebert's 1988 review) appeared on Indiewire. It's an intriguing piece -- I'd love to see similar video essays about '70s and '80s films using Pauline Kael 's New Yorker reviews -- but Indiewire didn't supply embed codes so I didn't repost. This morning it finally appeared on Vimeo with codes.

But to be honest, something was suppressing my interest in this essay to begin with, and in fact had diminished interest when I first saw Stormy Monday 23...Read More

Daniel Radcliffe has admitted to GQ magazine he "'became too 'reliant' on alcohol while filming the last few outings in the Harry Potter franchise." The Guardian's Xan Brooks, lifting from the monthly, quotes Radcliffe as saying "there were a few years there when I was just so enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person's lifestyle that really isn't suited to me."

Radcliffe "admits [that] his lifestyle became an issue on the set of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the article says. "He went on to claim he has not touched alcohol since August 2010,...Read More

A q & a transcript between Screen Junkies' Fred Topol and the relentlessly feisty director Uwe Boll was posted four days ago (i.e., Thursday, 6.30). Early on Topol mentioned Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life; Boll said he hates it and explained his thinking.

Boll: "I totally hated that movie because I feel as a filmmaker that besides the fact that Terrence Malick did some great visuals on some movies, also on The New World, like the opening of that movie was really good but then he completely lost it. I think The Tree of Life is a piece of shit. Totally,...Read More

Some kind of congrats is hereby offered to Oscar blogger Scott Feinberg for landing in a big Samsung "Wonder Exchange" ad campaign in the pages of Vanity Fair, Wired, GQ and Architectural Digest. Feinberg shares the five-page spread (which begins on page 67 of the August issue of Vanity Fair) with Ubergizmo co-founder Hubert Nguyen.

Feinberg and Nguyen were given free Samsung Galaxy Tabs (10.1 version) in exchange for their supplying "review comments", as it were. They also commented about lounge robes, a titanium watch, a jacket, barbells and whatnot. C'mon, it's all free! And pretty...Read More

Earlier today Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #39 -- possibly the most meandering, lost-in-space, under-energized podcast in our joint history. We didn't discuss Transformers 3 but we did discuss, for far, far too long, the shortcomings of Larry Crowne. "How boring is the edited podcast?," I asked Sasha before hearing it. "Not too bad," she answered. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

According to L.A. Weekly writer Siran Babayan, a recently-published book by Hollywood screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon ("Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!") summarizes meetings the pair had with Billy Crystal and Sandra Bernhard "with just one word: dick."

"Well, at least somebody has the guts to let it be known what a selfish dick and insincere courtesan Billy Crystal is," a screenwriter friend wrote this morning.

"Perhaps so," I replied, "but I know three things: (a) Many if...Read More

The fact that I'm reduced to posting ping-pong photos (taken late yesterday afternoon in West Hollywood) tells you how dead it is out there. Topics for Oscar Poker #39: (a) the death of Larry Crowne; (b) What summer films (if any) are we looking forward to?; (c) the coming of Horrible Bosses and (d) Movie titles I cannot and will not abide, no matter how good the film may be: Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest.

Early this morning one of Fox News' twitter accounts (i.e., foxnewspolitics) was hacked, and the sad death of President Obama was announced. The messages were removed around 9 am this morning Pacific. FoxNews.com first posted a brief statement saying that the reports were incorrect, and that it regretted "any distress the false tweets may have created."

Most good lefties are "beyond borders" in their thinking. They're citizens of the civilized world who instinctively recoil when they hear the phrase "We're number one!" (an ESPN barroom American-ism if there ever was one), and who relate as much to Italians and Welsh-people and Argentinians and Qaddafi-hating Libyans and Lithuanians as they would to Middle Americans of any region. They're not into "American exceptionalism" or anything that smacks of xenophobia of Palinism or Gov. Rick Perry or Arizonian thinking or DuluozGray-ism.

I love American culture in many respects and am very happy I live here as a citizen, but I haven't felt...Read More

A bit of the apparent Island-copycat backstory:

How do you go from being a tough, provocative director of respected envelope-pushing dramas to a seemingly flailing director of wildly miscalculated embarassments? That's what Otto Preminger managed to do between the mid '60s and mid '70s. Many great directors lost their touch or their edge when they got older (Elia Kazan, Francis Coppola, John Frankenheimer, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, John Schlesinger), but only the once-great Preminger appeared to literally lose his mind, or certainly his judgment.

Otto Preminger sometime during the mid '50s.

I'm reminded of this by the recent DVD release of Such...Read More

I was stirred and intrigued and frequently taken away by portions of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life when I saw it in Cannes. So when friends told me they planned to see it last night it suddenly seemed like a good idea to join them. But now, 12 hours after the lights came up in Arclight #5, I'm not so sure.

Jessica Chastain in The Tree of Life

Life is still a gentle, layered, highly undisciplined cosmic church-service movie -- a quiet spiritual environment to dream inside of and meditate by. But (and I'm sorry...Read More

Eight days ago Jezebel posted Kathy Griffin's very well-told story about running into Michelle Bachmann. Griffin's money question was, "Were you born a bigot or did you grow into it?" Bachmann's reply: "That's a good question. I'm gonna have to get back to you on that one!"

Please, God -- let Ms. Bachmann become the 2012 Republican nominee for president. Chris Matthews said a couple of weeks ago on Real Time with Bill Maher that he believes she's going to beat Mitt Romney in New Hampshire because she stands for something and really speaks her mind...Read More

Last night I paid to see A Better Life -- paid! -- for the second time. (My first viewing was at the Santa Monica Aero on June 7th.) It was playing at Arclight #11, and after the show -- totally sold out, by the way -- director Chris Weitz and star Demian Bichir dropped by for a q & a. And then they were swamped in the lobby outside for photos and chit-chat.

Damian Bichir in Chris Weitz's A Better Life.

A second viewing doesn't diminish A Better Life in the least. If anything it seemed to...Read More

What a nothing Friday...I'm sorry, Saturday this is. Nothing happening anywhere and hot out to boot. I might as well just go to the club and do some laundry and then take a nap. Shine it. Jett flew out Thursday night for a visit but he decided to go to Las Vegas today with a platonic girlfriend so it's just me and the cats and my Blurays. That and a plan to visit with friends and go to The Tree of Life again. And then a scooter ride for an hour or so.

50 years ago Ernest Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. A.E Hotchner has recalled the novelist's final days in a 7.1 N.Y. Times article:

"What does a man care about?," Hemingway asked Hotcher. "Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven't any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them."

Hotcher visited Hemingway visited him in June 1961. The novelist had been succumbing to what seemed to be paranoia and had been talking about suicide (and had attempted it once or twice) and had been undergoing shock treatments....Read More

What Naval submarine captain knows enough about the price of recreational drugs to compare it to the cost of high-end cigars? Even if such a man exists, is it likely he'd share this knowledge with a subordinate officer? The cultural frame of reference behind Gene Hackman's remark to Denzel Washington is obviously not Naval, but that of wealthy, jaded Hollywood filmmakers. And that's why it's cool.

Edited by Jermain Odreman ("Jermyx") of Venezuela.

For 30 article-writing years I've been using the exploding-head scene in Scanners as a metaphor for being driven crazy by movies that drive me crazy. And yet the only one (or portion of one) that comes to mind is the first 20 minutes of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. The still was captured by DVD Beaver from the new German Scanners Bluray.

I don't know what I'd do if a supreme authority were to tell me I'll no longer be allowed to see any more Asian films about (a) "young Japanese women whose breasts double as machine guns," (b) "light-on-their-feet martial arts caper[s]," (c) "reasonably credible seventh-century mystery stories with supernatural elements" by way of Asian kung-fu, (d) "a beautiful courtier using her martial-arts skills to dress herself while dodging hundreds of arrows," and blah blah. But I'd be upset.

Actually, make that really upset. I imagine I'd be shouting and writing angry emails and stamping my feet in...Read More

Deadline's Nikki Finke has not, in my mind, broken the news about Larry Crowne being a 4th of July shortfaller. She's reporting today that tracking is indicating a mere $14 to $15 million tally for the four-day holiday weekend (i.e., from today through Monday evening) when it "should be" at least $20 million.

But Glenn Kenny, you see, put this out last night at 10:15 pm when he wrote that Crowne costars Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts "will, in less than 48 hours, be chastised by the usual suspects for an inability to put butts in seats." I think...Read More

"So are you going to the Con this year?," a bright and ascerbic fanboy asked me a couple of days ago. Naah, I replied. I think it would be wrong...well, dishonest of me to go. How can I fantasize one minute about strafing the ComicCon faithful and then turn around and drive down to San Diego and say, "Hey, I'm here...read my coverage!"?

We kicked that one around a bit, and then he said that the Big Question, parroting what was written in the N.Y. Times on 6.13, is "who's...Read More

A paragraph in Brad Brevet's pan of Larry Crowne (published early this morning) got me going. What are the likely financial particulars facing Tom Hanks' lovable, scooter-riding mellowhead, and does Mr. Crowne really qualify as being seriously damaged and downsized in our 2011 economy, and does he really have to abandon his one-story ranch house in order to make ends meet?

Franks' restaurant (960 Olive Ave., Burbank), where Tom Hanks' Larry Crowne lands a job after being given the heave-ho by UMart.

"Forgotten among the cutesy gags, gentle sobs and one whole week of job-searching is Larry's...Read More