I had intriguing discussions earlier today about the Ben-Hur restoration and Bluray with Warner Bros. mastering vp Ned Price and director Fraser Heston, and I recorded them even. But I have to get over to the New York Film Festival opening-night screening of Carnage and then the after-party at the Harvard Club, so the substantive Ben-Hur filing will have to wait.

Ned Price, vp mastering for Warner Bros. Technical Operations, earlier today at Manhattan's Essex House -- Friday, 9.30, 2:20 pm.

Director Fraser Heston, son of late Ben-Hur star Charlton Heston.

From master film restorationist/preservationist guru Robert...Read More

When Herman "the Hermanator" Cain said two days ago that African-American voters vote overwhelmingly liberal due to "brainwashing and people not being open-minded, pure and simple," he was stating a basic fact. Substitute "brainwashing" for "cultural conditioning" and he was describing how most of us are shaped by our native cultures, at least in our youth. There are specific reasons for African-American political allegiances that don't apply to some of us, but we're all "brought up" to think and vote in a certain way.

I was conditioned to be a liberal because of the left-liberal views of...Read More

In one fell swoop, Hollywood Elsewhere has significantly altered the imbalance between the greedy haves and the desperate have-nots. By going down to Zuccotti Park (Broadway and Liberty Street) this afternoon and taking pictures of the Occupy Wall Street crowd and posting them, I've...well, at least helped somewhat. Storm the barricades!

Jonathan Levine's 50/50 and Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter are far and away the best new films to see this weekend.

But please understand that 50/50 is not a comedy, despite what Lou Lumenick and others are saying.

I explained it thusly earlier this month: "All mature art is mixture of drama and comedy. Any film that insists on being a drama-drama or a comedy-comedy doesn't get this. Life is always a mixture of the two, and so naturally 50/50 is flecked or flavored with guy and gallows humor here and there plus one or two anxious-mom jokes...Read More

It doesn't matter if Occupy Wall Street (which has expanded to Boston and San Francisco and elsewhere) is lacking a specific goal, or if it feels unfocused or futile or whatever. The fact that a miniscule speck of GenY anger is being expressed is at least something. Or...you know, is better than watching Jimmy Kimmel. Any expression of dismay or loathing or rage about the sociopathic stacked-deck, rich-favoring U.S. economy led and exploited by the Wall Street machine gets my vote. That's why I'm going down there this afternoon...yeah!

I spoke last night to a guy who caught a research screening of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close last Sunday night at Leows' Lincoln Square (B'way at 68th). And he agrees with Kris Tapley's guy that Max Von Sydow's wordless performance as Thomas Horn's grandfather "will certainly get an Oscar nomination, perhaps the award itself."

And he has a slight dispute with Stu Van Airsdale's guy about the opening with "falling bodies, crushing thuds, and other vividly horrifying reminders of the initial scene at the World Trade Center." My guy's dominant impression is "an obliquely falling body in a white suit....Read More

Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale has spoken to a guy who's allegedly seen Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and one of his reactions, Van Airsdale writes, is that "the film's current introduction -- which features falling bodies, crushing thuds, and other vividly horrifying reminders of the initial scene at the World Trade Center -- was less emotionally affecting than just inappropriate" and "too soon."

Ten years later is too soon? I got fairly angry with people who were saying this five years ago when United 93 was about to open, but anyone who says this now is taking the post-traumatic thing...Read More

I think that the close-up image of Thomas Horn in the Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close poster is oddly intriguing. Hands to the face means shock or alarm, but Horn's eyes are laid-back, almost serene. He could be listening to a lecture by a teacher or watching a TV show or staring at a sleeping cat. An opaque expression in the midst of heavy drama about 9/11 and death and whatever else...cool.

At the 40-second mark in the just-released traiier for Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Warner Bros, 12.25), we see Thomas Horn, who plays the son of Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, react to the sound of an overhead jet. As this is a 9/11-related drama, it's naturally presumed that Horn is hearing (and perhaps seeing) American Airlines #11, the Boeing 767-223ER jet that hit the North Tower at 8:54 am that morning.

But the jet we briefly see in the trailer has twin engines mounted on the rear of the...Read More

I always thought that DreamWorks' decision to open Steven Spielberg's War Horse on 12.28 was a little strange to begin with, so switching the opener to Christmas Day feels like a shoulder-shrugger.

"After seeing the film, it became clear to us that War Horse is something audiences should be able to see when they're together with their families on Christmas Day," DreamWorks spokesman Chip Sullivan told EW's Anthony Breznican. "They have the time to see multiple movies during the holidays, and we want to be one of their choices when they are most available."

And the reason for the...Read More

In a 9.29 piece called "Generation Next: The Realignment," Marshall Fine makes various calls about where certain actors are in their careers, sinking- or rising-wise. Most of Fine's assessments are no-brainers, but I'm wondering if HE readers generally agree or not.

Assertion #1: "Larry Crowne marked Tom Hanks, who is now 55, as a star who can no longer open a movie. [He] isn't a star who is attractive to the demographic -- the 18-to-34 crowd -- that crowns box-office stars. And the audience that is interested in Hanks -- i.e., those closer to his own age -- aren't rushing out to...Read More

For about 40 years Arthur Krim (1910 - 1994), the distinguished chairman of United Artists and then Orion Pictures from the early '50s to early '90s, put out a run of quality-level, award-winning films that eclipses the record of Harvey Weinstein in terms of Oscar nominations and awards.

On top of which the soft-spoken Krim never took a producing credit and because of that "he was trusted by talent," a former confidante says.

Under Krim's guidance and final approval a long healthy run of Academy Award-winning productions as The African Queen, Marty, The Apartment, West Side Story, Tom Jones,...Read More

In an interview posted today (9.29), Empire's Helen O'Hara quotes Steven Spielberg saying a couple of things about Lincoln, which begins shooting in October. Spielberg begins by explaining that the source material, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team Of Rivals, "is much too big a book to be a movie, so the Lincoln story only takes place in the last few months of his Presidency and life.

"I was interested in how he ended the war through all the efforts of his generals...but more importantly how he passed the 13th Amendment into constitutional law. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war powers act...Read More

It took me a while to upload this clip from yesterday's New York Film Festival press conference with A Separation director-writer-producer Asghar Farhadi, moderated by NYFF honcho Scott Foundas.

During a Telluride Film Festival chat Tilda Swinton mentioned her admiration of Farhadi's About Elly. A questioner at yesterday's press conference brought it up also. I've never seen it so I obviously need to man up and buy the DVD on Amazon.

Here, again, is my rave response to yesterday's screening. All press screenings and conferences are happening at the Walter...

A little less than a month ago Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern mentioned an alleged fact to myself and a few others at a Telluride Film Festival dinner. He said that the colloquial term "loser" was first coined in Walter Tevis's 1959 book "The Hustler." It caught on in a bigger way two years later when Robert Rossen's The Hustler, an adaptation of Tevis's book, opened.

The line was spoken at the end of Act One by George C. Scott, referring to Paul Newman's Eddie Felson: "Stick with this kid...he's a loser." It...Read More

My attention was elsewhere when it was announced last May that Catfish co-helmers Henry Joost and Ariel Schuman would co-direct Paranormal Activity 3 (Paramount, 10.21). I felt Paranormal-ed out after part 2, but the Joost-Schuman plus Joe Leydon's Fantastic Fest Variety review makes me want to again submit.

"Paranormal Activity 3 earns points for its low-key ability to keep viewers primed over long stretches to expect that something very bad, or even worse, may happen at any moment," Leydon writes. "Slightly slicker and more densely populated than earlier pics in the franchise,...Read More

Five'll get you ten A.O. Scott decided to do a "Critics Picks" assessment of Karel Riesz and James Toback's The Gambler ('74) when he heard about the reported Paramount remake that became briefly notorious when Toback, who based his script partly on his gambling-addicted life, complained that no one from Paramount had given him so much as a courtesy call. If the remake happens, Martin Scorsese might direct with Leonardo DiCaprio in the James Caan role.

Deadline's Michael Fleming is reporting that the new life-of-Moses movie, which Warner Bros. is allegedly trying to get Steven Spielberg to direct (yecch!), is "not a remake of the 1956 Cecile B. DeMille-directed The Ten Commandments." And yet it covers "Moses from birth to death" including "his awakening to the plight of the Hebrew slaves that led Moses' struggle against the Pharaoh for their freedom out of Egypt, the Burning Bush, the Ten Plagues, the daring escape across the Red Sea, receiving the Ten Commandments, and delivery to Israel." Which is precisely what the DeMille film covers, so what'll different about this...Read More

I saw Asghar Farhadi's A Separation at this morning's New York Film Festival press screening, and yes, it hit the mark again. This well-honed, deep-well family drama is now the official Iranian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and is destined to be among the five nominees...unless the foreign language committee gives it the same kind of blowoff that they did with Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days. Let's call that highly doubtful.

(l. to. r) Sony Classics co-prez Tom Bernard, A Separation director Asghar Farhadi, Sony Classics co-prez Michael Barker at Gabriel's -- Wednesday, 9.28,...

The Best Picture forecast in yesterday's Gurus of Gold post-Toronto update has Alexander Payne's The Descendants on top, followed by Steven Spielberg's War Horse. The latter lost a lot of heat yesterday when everybody took a look at that Harlequin Romance horse's-mane-with-Fabio-hair poster, but perhaps the Guru vote was counted before this.

At this juncture War Horse's best Guru friends are EW's Anthony Breznican, Hitfix's Gregg Ellwood, In Contention's Kris Tapley and Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale.

The Help, significantly, now sits one slot below the fifth-ranked Moneyball. The Artist and Midnight in Paris are ranked third and fourth respectively. Seriously? Awards...Read More

While sitting at the bar last night at Phebe's I accidentally knocked some water onto the keyboard of my Macbook Pro. I didn't have a hair dryer with me, but I naturally picked up the device and wiped it off and hung it upside down and swore and hissed. Which didn't help. The screen freaked out, flashing an insane psychedelic collage of pink and white and purple and black impulse doodles, like some kind of alien sanskrit code...meltdown, crash, finality.

I turned it on and off a few times, hoping and praying. But it seemed pretty much dead and dysfunctional. The...Read More

My first reaction to hearing about Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, Laurent Bouzereau's documentary about the filmmaker recalling aspects of his life during his house arrest in Gstaad two years ago, was "why did Polanski sit down with Bouzereau instead of Marina Zenovich, whose exacting and persuasive Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired doc surely earned her Polanski's allegiance?"

My second reaction was to search for reviews of Bouzereau's doc, which screened last night at the Zurich Film Festival with Polanski in attendance. Others besides The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Roxborough may have watched the film and...Read More

I've just come out of a 3:30 pm press screening of Roman Polanski's wickedly hilarious Carnage, and on top of all the cackling and chortling and guffawing I was delighted to discover that The Playlist's Oliver Lyttleton was dead wrong when he wrote from the Venice Film Festival that there's "almost nothing to enable the identification of [this] movie as a Polanski picture." What horseshit!

Carnage felt to me as much a part of Polanski's realm as The Pianist or Repulsion or Tess or Cul de Sac or The Ghostwriter. I felt relaxed and soothed and charmed...Read More

October 1st is just around the corner, and New York City has been slamming me with hot weather and high humidity and occasional showers. It's too hot to wear a suit or sports jacket or anything but slacks and a T-shirt. I'm constantly damp. It's not like equatorial Africa but it's in that general ballpark. I guess I'll have to wait until I return to Los Angeles if I want a little cool fall weather. I sure as hell am not getting that here.

"To love a film by Roman Polanski, as I know from other irate readers, is to guarantee that you will be accused of going easy on a criminal," writes Manohla Dargis in a 9.21 N.Y. Times piece that appeared in Sunday's print edition (i.e., the day before yesterday).

"Some of this anger can be blamed on avid Polanski supporters who assert that he did nothing wrong, or that he's an old man now and has suffered enough. And, true, that Swiss chalet of his where he stayed after he was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 while waiting to hear if he...Read More

The beautiful amber-pinkish red sunset clouds and the obvious bond between Joey the horse and Albert (Jeremy Irvine) tell us that Steven Spielberg's War Horse (Touchstone, 12.28) is going to lay it on thick. This is basically going to be an emotional family-friendly film about caring and love and the romance of beautiful photography (by Janusz Kaminski, of course) and the always affecting strains of John Williams' score.

If you're the sort of moviegoer who lives for stark, this-is-life, take-it-or-leave-it, matter-of-fact realism, chances are you're going to feel a bit starved by War Horse in this respect....Read More

A couple of months ago In Contention's Guy Lodge passed along a kind of consensus view among some London critic friends that Rachel Weisz's performance in Terrence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea "is a career-best, according to trusted sources who have seen it."

Music Box Films acquired the film for US distribution earlier this month at the Toronto Film Festival, and is presumably intending to put it in theatres before 12.31.11 so that Weisz will qualify for awards action.

Based on the play by Terence Rattigan, Sea is a 1950s-era tale about...Read More

The New York premiere for 50/50 happened tonight at the Ziegfeld, and the after-party uncorked at the Four Seasons. Great party, superb food, nice hosts...but I was in a funny place in my head for some reason and left after an hour. HE mood pockets just "happen" sometimes, and there's no stopping them when they decide to creep in and take over. For those who might've missed it, here's my 50/50 review, posted on 9.11.

50/50 stars Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon Levitt at tonight's post-premiere party at the Four Seasons on East 52nd. Rogen's movies don't convey the fact...

Matt Zoller Seitz's Press Play is running a week's worth of essays about Roman Polanski, concluding and coinciding with Friday's big-deal premiere of Carnage at the New York Film Festival.

The first essay, narrated by Simon Abrams and edited by Serena Bramble, is called "Polanski's God" -- a riff of the director's bleak world view and apparent attitude toward religion and God.

Tuesday will see a piece by Steven Santos on the architecture and claustrophobia in Polanski's films. On Wednesday an appreciation of Cul-de-Sac by L.A. filmmaker Jose Gallegos will appear. On...Read More

I was told earlier today why Oliver Stone and Showtime decided to cancel screenings of the first three episodes of Stone's Untold History of the United States at the 2011 New York Film Festival.

It wasn't because of "scheduling conflicts," as the announcement read. It's because Stone, immersed in the cutting of Savages, an action drama about drug dealing, is way behind on preparing all ten episodes of the series. I'm told it may not air for quite a while, perhaps as late as September 2012 (or even later). So Stone and Showtime figured there was no promotional...Read More

Take the Salvador Dali-esque, psychedelic suggestion in this one-sheet for Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary (Film District, 10.28) with a grain of salt. As noted earlier, the idea of the film reflecting "some crazed hallucination" is a stretch. It's based on Hunter S. Thompson's book, which was begun in Puerto Rico in 1959. Nobody has weird visions on rum.

There's no question that the wrong music can diminish or ruin a widely admired film. Drive especially, given the popularity of its soundtrack. But you can ruin any good film with cruddy music. Imagine Robert Wise's The Day The Earth Stood Still with a Plan Nine From Outer Space-level score. You could hypothesize in this vein forever.

"Has anybody been watching the debates lately? You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change. It's true. You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have healthcare. And booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay. That's not reflective of who we are." -- President Barack Obama speaking last night at a Bay Area fundraiser.

I missed Abe Sylvia's Dirty Girl (Weinstein Co., 10.7) at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival. I have a chance to see it this evening, but Katey Rich's year-old Cinema Blend review has given me pause. A promiscuous bad girl (Juno Temple) and an overweight gay classmate (Jeremy Dozier) flee the horrors of Oklahoma for potential deliverance in California. For what it's worth the violet-pink one-sheet works.

Warner Home Video's Ben-Hur Bluray streets tomorrow. It's been selling in at least a couple of Manhattan DVD stores over the past week or so. If I was home in West Hollywood I'd have a screener by now and a review posted like everyone else. But I'm going to wait five days to see it on a big, panoramic screen at Saturday morning's New York Film Festival showing at Alice Tully Hall. I'll probably never see it projected like this again.

Five days ago Bluray.com's Jeffrey Kauffman described the Ben-Hur Bluray as "astonishing --...Read More

The one thing I find encouraging about Man on a Ledge (Summit, 1.13.12) is that the director, Asgar Leth, delivered a killer doc five years ago called Ghosts of Cite Soleil. The two things that give me concern are (a) Pablo Fejnves' heard-it-before, on-the-nose dialogue ("I am an innocent man!") and (b) the fact that it looks and feels like a typical standard-issue urban thriller -- i.e., the kind that tends to be released in January or February.

Ghosts of Cite Soleil is about two pistol-packing Haitian brothers who ran slum gangs during...Read More

The age-old Steven Spielberg = sweeping emotionality equation had led five Gold Derby experts -- Hollywood Reporter's Scott Feinberg, Village Voice's Michael Musto, Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale plus Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil and Paul Sheehan -- to forecast a War Horse Best Picture win. Five others have picked The Descendants, and two have gone for The Artist. I'm the only Moneyball guy, and Rolling Stone's Peter Travers is picking The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Anne Hathaway's Dark Knight Returns catwoman get-up will be fairly utilitarian. Not too much different from Julie Newmar's. A simple wrap-around mask, no cat tail, and no hair-concealing head mask or face-cover a la Michelle Pfeiffer's version. And no S & M midriff-exposure a la Halle Berry.

It goes without saying that when Hathaway gets into fights with much taller, bigger and stronger guys in this upcoming Chris Nolan film, she'll whip their asses like they're eight year-old boys.

Prior to last night's Moneyball screening at the AMC Lincoln Square I saw a somewhat longer and more plot-specific and dialogue-specific trailer for Tower Heist than the one released on 7.28. I was sold. It persuaded me that due to Eddie Murphy's standout performance, Tower Heist will probably be a funnier Ocean's 11. The idea alone of Murphy doing Gabby Sidibe...the mind reels.

The embedded trailer here is an international version that somewhat resembles the one I saw last night, but isn't exactly the same. The downside is that 15 or 20 of the jokes will now fall...Read More

I couldn't help myself. I had to slip into the AMC Lincoln Plaza earlier tonight to check out the 9:30 pm Moneyball show and see how it looked. What I saw would break Bennett Miller's heart, and definitely Wally Pfister's. The general darkness of the image was appalling, horrific. The foot lambert level must have been 9 or 10 instead of the proper 14. And the sound was definitely lower than the sound levels for the trailers.

I had tears in my eyes. Miller and Pfister have worked so hard and so well, and then the AMC guys come along and fuck it...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I recorded an epic-length Oscar Poker this morning -- i.e., 90 minutes. But it was a really good one, I thought. We began with Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino riffing about the Lion King 3D vs. Moneyball box-office battle, and then it was off to the races on anything and everything. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Just a reminder that Kris Tapley's In Contention now lives in a closet inside a drop-down menu inside the orange-and-blue scattershot nightmare that is Hitfix. He and Guy Lodge are essential reads so please bookmark and act accordingly.

How do you go from being a multi-millionaire to living in a van on a street in South Central? Hold on, let me think...drugs? This is easily the most noteworthy Sly Stone story since the bogus rumor about his having had an affair with Doris Day in the early '70s.

I've admired and sympathized with the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations because they've expressed a justified fury on the part of twentysomethings about how their financial futures have been shackled and all but ruined by Wall Street's sociopathic money-moving games. As you might expect some NY cops got rough and maced some women, and some screaming resulted.

With my Toronto Film Festival distractions and nobody talking about it since, I missed the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 9.14 announcement that the first three episodes of Oliver Stone's The Untold History of the United States will no longer screen at the 2011 New York Film Festival. I found it slightly bothersome that the reason given for the cancelleation was "scheduling conflicts." Which of course conveys nothing and in fact blows smoke.

I don't know what happened but you don't announce a long-awaited film event at the NY Film Festival and then un-announce it unless some sudden and unanticipated...Read More

I'm not the only one who's been hoping that Rick Perry would win the Republican Presidential nomination because that would mean an Obama victory. But now, all of a sudden, he's being seriously trashed by the Fox News gang. Fox News' Brit Hume this morning: "[Rick] Perry really did throw up all over himself in the [last] debate at a time when he really needed to up his game....[he's] about one half step away from almost total collapse as a candidate."

Maureen Dowd: "In a flash, Rick Perry has gone from...Read More

Everyone on the front lines has now seen (or will be seeing today) Moneyball. I know some people think I've been pushing too hard or too enthusiastically, and I don't just think they're nyah-nyah naysayers who say this stuff in order to pop me -- I know they are because I know this film is the shit, and that it's an all-around winner and a keeper. But if you feel the urge to counterpunch, please have at it.

Repeating: "It's mystical, statistical, spooky, emotional and wonderfully original. And wonderfully "pure" in a sense. The complexity mixed with...Read More

The fact that Lion King 3D edged out Moneyball this weekend, $22.1 million to $20.6 million, simply means that a lot of kids and families didn't go to see the 3D attraction last weekend, and that families go in groups of three and four or more. It's not an "aww, shit" for the Moneyball team at all. It's a very strong start, in fact. It'll probably wind up doing a multiple of four or five and hit $90 to $100 million. It's hitting with all age groups except, to some extent, with the under-25s. (Sasha Stone's 13 year-old daugter Emma found it...Read More

Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Moneyball performance as Oakland A's manager Art Howe is a hard-cut diamond type of deal. It's perfectly measured and shaped and, for me, hilarious. The performance is all about Howe's loathing and contempt and mistrust of Brad Pitt's Billy Beane, and the calmly stubborn way he keeps saying "um, nope," "I don't buy that" and "sorry but you're living on another fucking planet."

I absolutely worship the way Hoffman plays the above scene with Pitt and Jonah Hill. Pitt sticks his head in and says "Art, got a minute?" Hoffman glares at Pitt,...Read More

Hollywood Reporter awards-season columnist Scott Feinberg has sent me a dated video (recorded two weeks ago) of Elizabeth Olsen talking with him about Martha Marcy May Marlene. He sent me this because on 7.31 I riffed on the lack of interesting voices (and the preponderance of mincing, squeakity-squeak voices) among under-30 actresses, and because Feinberg feels that Olsen's voice has a snappy, stand-out quality. .

I half agree, although Olsen does utter the word "totally" at one point, and that's not good. "Totally" is as much of a term to avoid as "absolutely" when striving to...Read More

I've just put up some category projections in Oscar Balloon. The contenders are listed in order of likelihood and/or preference. Exceptions and disputations and the pointing out of arguable omissions are welcome. I haven't gotten around to Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay contenders.

Likeliest Best Picture Contenders: 1. Moneyball (d: Bennett Miller). 2. The Descendants (d: Alexander Payne); 3. War Horse (d: Steven Spielberg); 4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (d: Stephen Daldry, screenwriter: Eric Roth); 4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (d: Tomas Alfredson); 5. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (d: David Fincher); 6. The Iron Lady (d: Phyllida Lloyd);...Read More

For the last eight months too many people have been asleep regarding Olivia Colman's shattering performance in Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur (Strand, 11.18). Awards-season watchers have to be responsible and stop ignoring the clamor. I haven't seen a lead female performance this year that comes close to matching Colman's in terms of sensitivity, raw honesty and searing emotional exposure. It really is the shit.

It would be criminal to overlook Tyrannosaur for Colman's sake alone. You can't call yourself a serious entertainment journalist or an award-season columnist and not see it and give her your full consideration....Read More

An awards-season handicapper said this morning that while Brad Pitt as Best Actor and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination are strong possibilities, he's not yet counting Moneyball as a Best Picture candidate. To which I replied: "The Aaron Sorkin-authored The Social Network averaged a 96% critical approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and won Best Picture from every critics group in the country except...was it San Diego's? The partly-Sorkin-authored Moneyball is right now averaging 94% and inspiring waves of pleasure among the best critics, many of whom are calling it 'the Social Network of baseball flicks', and you're not calling it a Best...

This morning a journalist friend actually said that it's not a safe assumption that The Descendants' George Clooney and Moneyball's Brad Pitt will be Best Actor-nominated "unless a couple of stronger performances in smaller movies like Shame's Michael Fassbender or The Artist's Jean Dujardin get bumped." And what about Michael Shannon in Take Shelter, he added, or Joseph Gordon Levitt in 50/50?

The guy's first statement is not correct. It is a safe assumption that Clooney and Pitt will be nominated. It can be safely assumed, in fact, that one or the other will win.

Academy members support and vote for actors...Read More

In a Piers Morgan interview airing tonight, Morgan Freeman flat-out declares that the Tea Party's anti-Obama fervor is driven by racism. "Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term," Freeman says. "What's...what does that, what underlines that? 'Screw the country. We're going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we're going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.'"

The Best Picture preferences of the Gold Derby team (to which I belong) have been posted, and boy, are some these predictions weird! The percentages were tabulated by including predictions of various "experts" (i.e., columnists like myself) along with editor odds and preferences. Don't ask me to explain the calculus but at least there are some rankings to start with.

The leading default choice for Best Picture is Steven Spielberg's War Horse because of (a) the kneejerk Spielberg kowtow factor (i..e, obeisance before power), and (b) because journalists believe that the film will make people cry. George Clooney's The Ides of...Read More

Here's the mp3 of my 9.21 Sony headquarters chat with Moneyball director Bennett Miller. It's odd but as we were speaking a voice was telling me that Bennett was going too slow and taking too long to articulate this or that response, but listening to it today he sounds fine. He explains it all quite clearly.

Bennett Miller at Sony headquarters at 550 Madison -- Wednesday, 9.21, 4:40 pm.

It starts out a little raggedy (audio of my taking his picture, etc.) but I like it that way.

Excerpt #1: "Nobody wants to see a baseball...Read More

Apart from being in league with Nazis in Brazil and scheming with his mother to poison Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains' Alexander Sebastian -- the elegant villain in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious -- is a fragile, sympathetic figure. He's a compulsive romantic who falls head over heels in love with Bergman, and then becomes intensely jealous and possessive. Love runs him and gives him grief.

Rains loves with all his heart and soul and is betrayed for it, having been played as a sucker. Hard-ass CIA agent Cary Grant is in love with Bergman also, but he never...Read More

Those Republican debate audience members who last night booed Stephen Hill, the gay soldier in Iraq who asked a question of contender Rick Santorum, are bigoted scum. Santorum said "sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military." Except Hill, who asked Santorum if he would "circumvent the progress that been made for gay and lesbian soldiers," wasn't talking about sex. He was talking about due respect and recognition for military members on his side of the fence.

The Frank PR team hosted a press luncheon at Tao yesterday to promote the Hamptons Film Festival (10.13 to 10.17). My visit last year was bountiful and blissful. I was treated like royalty. And there were a lot of good films, a lot of talent. And I was busted for driving without my tail lights and held at the police station until 3:30 am.

Hamptons Film Festival chairman Stuart Suna, senior programmer Holly Herrick, exec director Karen Arikian, programming director David Nugent during yesterday's luncheon at Tao.

The films this year...Read More

Mexico's decision to select Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala as its foreign-language Oscar contender for the 84th Academy Awards is a no-brainer. I'll be seeing it for the second time on Saturday, 10.1, at the N.Y. Film Festival.

I'm looking at that "never compromise" slogan and thinking how the anti-Obama 21st Century righties would rather pull down the temple than be responsible legislators, and I'm telling myself that's how all nutbag righties are -- no compromise, pure agenda, we're doing the bidding of the rightwing God. And I'm smiling again at the notion of putting them all into green concentration camps. So no heart-swelling emotional currents for Meryl's Maggie Thatcher...not from this corner, at least.

And yet I know, perversely, that I'm going to enjoy the hell out of Streep's performance. I think we all know...

One of the few subway stops I've hung out on recently that didn't smell slightly of urine. I was grateful. I'm still grateful. Looking forward to more of these...thanks.

Gold Derby's experts are weirdly attached to the idea of Leonardo DiCaprio becoming a big Best Actor contender in J. Edgar. Maybe, maybe...but after that dicey J. Edgar trailer I'd be hedging my bets. (In truth I'm sensing a possible fall-off down the road.) Right now the Derby boys and girls have my personal fave, Moneyball's Brad Pitt, in third place with 73%. The Descendants' George Clooney, the most likely winner of the moment, has 100% and DiCaprio is sitting at 91%. Tinker Tailor's Gary Oldman is fourth with 64%.

Update: Moneyball's 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating (as of 10:20 am on 9.23) is just a notch behind The Social Network's final tally of 96%. But the latter reviews are warmer and more affectionate and...grateful? Elite critics are having a ball with Bennett Miller 's film. You can feel the elation. Finally a movie with a fresh game...one to write about with real feeling and spirit...a sports film that's not a sports film so how to describe it just so? And there's the fun.

Bertrand Blier's Going Places ('74) is one of the most curiously seductive films ever made about loutish, anarchic, groin-driven swagger. Gerard Depardieu and the late Patrick Dewaere are a pair of easygoing counter-culture brutes who fall into a series of sloppy impulsive adventures, and yet never act in what you'd call an especially harsh or cruel manner. They're dopey animals in a sense, and in another a couple of social adventurers looking to see what they can get away with.

Let's steal this or fuck that...anything we want. We're young and brash and can always get...Read More

Weather.com says it's 71 degrees in New York right now (i.e., 10 am). That's a lie. It feels like the Guatemalan lowlands -- humid, sticky air -- in the rainy season. And I've left my umbrella at home. Last night the E train wasn't running again, the L train crawled along as usual, and I waited 15 or 16 minutes for the G train a little after 11 pm. There's no air to speak of on the platforms, and more than a few Brooklyn stops offer a faint aroma of urine to the weary traveller.

It...Read More

Four months after the Led Zeppelin-scored Girl With The Dagon Tattoo teaser broke in early June, the first longish, plot-indicating, dialogue-prominent trailer is up. Three minutes and 45 seconds. Rooney Mara performs with a slight Swedish accent; Daniel Craig (who, by the way, attended last night's ides of March screening at MOMA) with his natural British accent. No more "feed-bad movie of Christmas" tagline.

Just to shake things up and/or keep the fans off-balance, Liam Neeson has done a movie that may -- I say "may" -- play above and beyond the level of a typical post-Taken Neeson paycheck venture. And director-cowriter Joe Carnahan, having all but devalued his once respectable brand with Smokin' Aces and The A Team, is trying his hand with a rugged survival-in-the-wilderness story.

The Grey (Open Road, 1.27.12) is about a bunch of guys stranded in Alaska after a plane crash, and trying like hell not to become wolf food. I don't know how...Read More

I'll be catching the second half of Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World at a New York Film Festival press screening in a little while. And then I have a Bennett Miller interview at 2:30 pm. I'll have a break from 3:30 to 6:30 pm before attending the MOMA screening of The Ides of March followed by an after-dinner. So no more filing until the late afternoon.

In the meantime I'll be looking forward to Sasha Stone's Moneyball piece, as she saw it last night and tweeted a very positive reaction. Read Robert Willonsky's Village Voice review...Read More

If I had to predict right now, I'd list my Best Picture Oscar favorites in this order: Moneyball, The Descendants, War Horse (who knows?), The Help, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (ditto), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ditto) and possibly Midnight in Paris.

I'm not talking about personal favorites, mind. I'm doing a Dave Karger thing here, predicting what the Academy will sanctify. Which I hate doing because it gives me indigestion.

The likeliest Best Director nominees are Bennett Miller (Moneyball), Alexander Payne (The Descendants), Steven Spielberg (War Horse), Tomas Alfredson (Tinker, Tailor, etc. -- the kneejerk...Read More

I've been saying for years that Steven Spielberg will be out of his depth with the Lincoln movie, which he'll soon begin directing in the Richmond area. He's basically a Tintin/Raiders/E.T./Catch Me if You Can/Amistad/Robopocalypse type of guy, and he knows that we know this. And leopards don't change their spots.

But at least this forthcoming Civil War drama have Daniel Day Lewis's performance as Abraham Lincoln, which we all know will be some kind of thrilling-exceptional-historic. It can't not be.

Spielberg has told the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore that "the movie will be purposely coming out after next year's...Read More

Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 12.9) is one dense opaque stew. And so crisply realized. Wait...what does that mean, "crisply realized"? Crisp like a Saltine or Heinz cracker? I'd better start over and just call it simultaneously ambiguous and clean and masterful in the manner of a slowed-down pulse. It's a film that you need to see at least twice -- once to sit in your seat and go "aaahh, yes...so adult and complex and underemphasized" and a second time to pay even closer attention and tie up the loose ends.

It's a furrowed-brow...Read More

"From an awards-season perspective, Christopher Plummer has everything going for him," Grantland's Mark Harris observes. "He has been chronically underrecognized by Academy voters -- it's still inexplicable to me that he wasn't nominated for his brilliantly acidic portrayal of Mike Wallace in The Insider. And his second-billed (but really supporting) role in Beginners feels laboratory-designed for awards:

"Getting to play a stoic gay man who doesn't come out until he's 75 and then learns he's dying of cancer is a little like bowling a strike after getting spotted nine pins, which makes the fact that Plummer's portrayal is so understated and...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I recorded our latest Oscar Poker two days ago (i.e., Sunday morning) as I sat in a friend's home -- a small beachside cottage in Fairfield, Connecticut. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

I'm sorry, but this is worth checking out also.

The Drive soundtrack is rocketing up the iTunes charts, says Hollywood Reporter's Lindsay Powers. It was at #7 over the weekend and at #5 this morning. Some Twitter guy reportedly wrote that "listening to the Drive soundtrack actually makes you 40% cooler than you were before," etc. The truth? Even I have downloaded College's "A Real Hero." The album is purchasable on iTunes for $9.99 or can be bought on CD on 9.27.

Here's to Sony Classics' Michael Barker and Tom Bernard and their ongoing celebration of the company's 20th anniversary, which more or less kicked off in Toronto. I've been dealing with them since the early '90s. As far as I'm concerned there's no team with a more intelligent or well-measured approach, and no finer brand in the indie realm (dependent or otherwise). I especially love Barker-Bernard for their long alliance with Pedro Almodovar.

David Poland's video interview works pretty well, I think. I don't have any Jihadist qualms about posting his stuff, so here it is...Read More

A German Bluray (Region 2) of William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) has been out since late August. A bit on the nose at times, but one of Wellman's finest. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Harry Morgan and Anthony Quinn gave career-best performances. Criterion would have done better to issue a Bluray of this (especially in view of Arthur C. Miller's moody, Gregg Toland-like cinematography) than that atrocious grainstorm Stageocach.

So when's the Region 1 Bluray of this 20th Century Fox classic coming out, Schawn Belston or James Finn? What other black and white...Read More

Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings has announced that Netflix's DVD-by-mail service will, "in a few weeks," be re-named Qwikster while the movie-streaming service will retain the Netflix name. The "qwik," of course, is a variation of the "quik" in Nestle's Quik, which I subsisted on for years as a kid. So it's that blended with Flixter.

Last night Albert Nobbs star-producer Glenn Close was handed the San Sebastian Film Festival's Donostia Award, which was basically a tribute to her long career. This will be the general Academy thinking or impetus if she's nominated for a Best Actress Oscar early next year. Nobbs director Rodrigo Garcia presented the award during a ceremony in Donosta-San Sebastian's Kursaal Auditorium.

Last night Jett, his roommate Sonya and I caught a 7:50 pm screening of Drive at Brooklyn's UA Court Street Stadium plex. I hit the bathroom after it ended -- two urinals and a toilet stall with nine or ten guys lined up. I was looking for a little sit-down action, but a black guy went into the stall first and took ownership and didn't come out. Three, four minutes. Five minutes. Six. Could he be giving birth?

Then, still on the pot, he began talking to his girlfriend on his cell, flirting with her, settling in. "How ya doin'? Movie's...Read More

A rhetorical, non-litigious claim is being made by author James J. Braddock (a.k.a. Josep K. Knezevic) that Angelia Jolie used the basic plot bones of his book, The Soul Shattering, in her script of In The Land of Blood Honey, an upcoming Serb-Bosnian war drama that she's directed.

Angelina Jolie directing In The Land of Blood and Honey.

Based on the myriad horrors of the Serb-Bosnian conflict and partly set in a Serb-run concentration camp, Jolie's plot is a variation on the Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story disparate-lovers theme.

Braddock is claiming there...Read More

Watchers of Terrence Malick, the most media-averse film auteur of all time, know that fluid moving footage has never been captured of Malick working on a set...never. So this 3-minute video sequence, captured yesterday by Johnny Garcia, of Malick and Christian Bale shooting a tracking shot of Bale roaming around an outdoor concert for some mystery project is historic.

Garcia even caught Bale and Malick turning in his general direction and smiling. Really amazing. This is almost as exciting as foootage of a Himalayan Yeti smiling and waving at...Read More

Boxoffice.com had projected Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs to earn about $8 milion this weekend, but it's only going to do about $5 million. Game over. The Alexander Skarsgard buff factor wasn't enough to trump the iffy reviews and I don't know what else. Female moviegoer concerns or intuitions about the rape scene? You tell me.

The audience winners of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival have been announced, and the top winner is Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now?. I didn't see it, and I'm trying to remember if anyone even talked about this film during the festival. Asghar Farhadi's A Separation and Ken Scott's Starbuck were the feature runner-ups.

Jon Shenk's The Island President won the People's Choice Award For Documentary. Bess Kargman's First Position and Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty. The Midnight Madness award went to Gareth Huw Evans' The Raid; Adam Wingard's You're Next and Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America.

So as of Tuesday, 9.20, In Contention's Kris Tapley will be folded into Hitfix and banging out his stuff (along with Guy Lodge). So where are the "Tapley Is Coming!" come-ons, or the easy-to-spot In Contention bullet logo? Right now the Hitfix main page (which emphasizes an undigestive orange-and-blue color scheme) has the usual links to the usual cheezwhiz stories and promotions...and zip about Tapley. Can you imagine adding a big-name columnist to your site and actually keeping this news hidden from casual visitors?

Presumably the In Contention link will appear alongside Drew McWeeny's Motion...Read More

DVD Beaver's Gary Tooze is calling the Ben-Hur Bluray "VERY impressive...I was blown away. Obviously from a 65mm film source [and] reportedly restored frame-by-frame...a 1080p in all its glory and around a 2.75:1 aspect ratio. Even things like the 'Overture' title are visually inspiring. Many scenes...appear truly overwhelming. The Blu-ray transfer brings Ben-Hur to another level of home theater appreciation...WOW!"

8K scan of 65mm elements, 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio, etc.

Concern: With the much higher resolution I would imagine that the shots of the miniaturized ships and little-doll-solders on board during the sea-battle sequence...Read More

Part of the curious power of John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that it overrides its own stoppers. Average Joes look at this thing and go, "Wait...a black-and-white western partly shot on sound stages costarring a couple of guys in their 50s pretending to be in their 30s?" John Wayne, James Stewart and Lee Marvin are straight and steady, but the other actors deliver in the usual Ford cornball style. Andy Devine's fat pushover sheriff is ludicrous.

But it has an underlying sadness and resignation, and the story sticks to your...Read More

A healthy percentage of the HE community has now seen Drive. How did the "room" feel as you watched it? (I'd especially like to hear from people outside the NY-LA sphere on this one.) Is it too artsy-chilly Scandinavian to connect with Joe Popcorn, or could Joe be in the mood for this kind of thing right now? Were any over-45 couples in attendance?

Earlier this week Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn shed some light (by way of The Playlist's Corey Everett) on how his Harrison Ford project The Dying of the Light fell apart. What is Ford's basic malfunction? He bails on this plus Traffic, Syriana, A History of Violence and A Walk Among the Tombstones and instead makes stuff like Cowboys & Aliens?

In early 2010 Refn partially explained the situation. "Unfortunately, it just didn't work out," Refn said. "It's a shame. The script was fantastic but things fall apart. It's one of those things that's difficult,...Read More

Jay Roach's Game Change, the forthcoming HBO film based on John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's book about the 2008 election, will apparently deemphasize the Democratic side of the story (Obama, Hillary, John Edwards) and ignore it entirely in terms of actors cast as principal Democrats. The focus will be on the Republicans, particularly John McCain (Ed Harris), Sarah Palin (Julianne Moore) and their handlers.

Photo totally stolen from posting by Awards Daily's Ryan Adams

I understand this approach entirely. It makes perfect sense. If I was going to direct or produce a feature...Read More

Every time I see a film shot in India, I vow to myself that I will never, ever visit that country for any reason. The dust, clutter, mobs, poverty, etc. Nor will I ever visit Bangkok due to the footage of that city in The Hangover, Part II. Vietnam, however, is another story. One way or another I'll get there.

According to Awards Daily's Patrick Mullen, Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur "was met with an enthusiastic standing ovation at last night's [Toronto Film Festival] screening...one of the few I've seen at the festival this year and well deserved." Which is analogous to what I've been saying all along.

Bill Maher and Keith Olbmerann's "Republican membrane man" routine happened last night. I'm also a huge fan of Maher's analogy riff (delivered last summer) about Republican voters and the Casey Anthony jury. I laughed out loud (rare for me) at Maher's riff about how Republicans are so insanely anti-Obama that if he said "I like your smile" they'd shoot themselves in the face.

I had one immediate reaction to last night's Wrap report by Joshua Weinstein that Warren Beatty and Paramount Pictures have parted company over his Howard Hughes movie, and that Arnon Milchan's New Regency will now finance the film. That reaction, which I muttered to myself as I sat in a Brooklyn club listening to Starfucker, was "hey...Peter Bart predicted this!"

Three months ago Bart privately remarked to a journalist friend that Beatty's Hughes movie probably won't happen at Paramount. "But it was just announced," I said. "With [Paramount chief] Brad Grey talking about what a delight the script is." My...Read More

A N.Y. Times/CBS News poll has President Obama with a 43% approval rating, which "is significantly higher than Jimmy Carter, who had an approval rating of 31 percent at a similar time in his presidency." Jeff Zeleny and Megan Thee-Brean's story adds that "Ronald Reagan had an approval of 46 percent" at this particular time in 1983 "and the elder George Bush was at 70 percent" at this juncture in 1991.

This Reno air show disaster video prompts every other person to ask the same thing of him/herself. Is it better to know your death is imminent and to prepare for it over days or weeks or months (which would naturally entail the usual fears and trepidations) or to slam into oblivion in the space of a few seconds?

A World War II-era P-51 Mustang crashed yesterday into "a box area in front of" a Reno viewing stand filled with spectators. Three have been reported dead, including the pilot, Jimmy Leeward . Over 50...Read More

According to Moviefone's Sharon Knolle (which is to say an Entertainment Weekly interview that she's quoting), Brad Pitt agreed to do Se7en only if the ending with Gwynneth Paltrow's head in the box would definitely be stuck to, and if his Detective Mills character would absolutely shoot Kevin Spacey in revenge.

"I will do it on one condition: The head stays in the box," Pitt told Knolle. "Put in the contract that the head stays in the box. And he's got to shoot the killer in the end. He doesn't do the 'right' thing, he does the thing of...Read More

My Porter Air flight leaves for Newark in 110 minutes and I haven't fully packed yet, or even gotten fully dressed. That's how I roll. At least the airport is less than a mile away. 3:45 pm Update: I made it with time to spare. I'm currently sitting in the Porter lounge and, uhm, typing this on the laptop. 5:20 pm Update: Just landed at Newark.

Poor Warrior under-performed last weekend, and odds aren't with it this weekend either. The pre-opening word wasn't just that director-writer Gavin O'Connor had made a near-great sports film, but that it was Best Picture material and that Tom Hardy might be singled out for some awards action. (I fully agreed on this last point.) So why did it fizzle? My guess it that the title scared women off -- it suggested a film that would be all about muscle and blood and machismo. Other theories?

In their latest Oscar Talk, presumably recorded a couple of days ago, Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson review the stand-out Toronto Film Festival films. I'm sympathizing with Thompson's admission that she missed this and that, etc. Toronto is a tough beat if you're going to file a lot of stuff every day.

Updated: As I listened on my Macbook Pro this morning I could've sworn I heard a passage in which they both flatly declare that Brad Pitt's Moneyball performance -- the charismatic pinnacle of his career, vulnerable and angry and charming and delivered with such relaxed movie-star assurance -- isn't...Read More

A "bruised-but-sweet flip side to Once's dreamy love song, The Swell Season -- a handsome black-and-white film -- sensitively captures frictions between characters who continue to love and respect each other. Performance footage may be briefer than some in the audience expect, but what there is is choice, capturing the contrasting kinds of vulnerability -- Marketa Irglova's shy but gutsy, Glen Hansard's eloquently raw -- that make the pair distinctive." -- from John DeFore's 4.22.11 THR Tribeca Film Festival review.

Roughly 13 months ago I took a couple of Manhattan street shots of director-screenwriter David Keopp filming Premium Rush, a bicycle messenger drama costarring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon and Dania Ramirez. Even back then it had a locked-in January release of 1.13.12, and it still does.

Check out this 8.20.11 N.Y. Times piece by Elizabeth Lesley Stevens about an allegation by novelist Joe Quirk that his book, "The Ultimate Rush," about "an adrenaline-fueled messenger who tears through the city on rollerblades as he tries to deliver a mysterious package," was/is the basis of Koepp's...

When Bill Clinton left office we had no wars and a nice budget surplus. After two terms with a corporate-kowtowing faux-Texas yokel we were in two hopeless wars and had $4 trillion added to the national debt plus a laissez-faire deregulatory wink-wink attitude towards corporate profiteering that led to the big crash of '08.

And then Obama came in on a wave of hope, pushed through a relatively weak, watered-down health care bill, killed Osama bin Laden but failed to show balls in his dealings with the Republicans' radical Tea Party wing. He's now seen as a fairly weak go-alonger -- a...Read More

Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive starts today with a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating, making it easily the best-reviewed opener. Boxoffice.com is projecting a $12.7 million weekend tally in 2886 theatres, or $4400 per situation. The cool people are onboard, but the styrofoam ADD crowd isn't...or not yet. Justin Lin's Fast Five, a synthetic, bloated car flick that's unfit to wipe Drive's boots, took in $86,198,765 in 3644 theatres when it opened last April...go figure.

Here's my one and only issue with Drive, apart from my general aversion to artery-slashing. It has two brilliant, super-cool, high-threat driving scenes. (It also...Read More

From Nerve Media, a pic of Heath Ledger skateboarding over Christian Bale during a break on the set of The Dark Knight, presumably sometime in mid '07.

Moneyball and Brad Pitt launched big-time. The Ides of March buffed Clooney and Gosling, attracted enthusiasm, took no hits. The Telluride headliners -- The Descendants, A Separation, The Artist, Shame, A Dangerous Method -- seemed to increase in value. Miss Bala became an absolute must-see. Albert Nobbs held steady, and costar Janet McTeer gained. And Oren Moverman's Rampart and Woody Harrelson broke out and impressed. (Okay, all I know for sure is that I liked it alot, and so did Kris Tapley back in L.A.)

Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz registered positively (especially with Drew McWeeny), and seemed to boost Michelle Williams'...Read More

As I said five days ago, Christopher Plummmer's Barrymore performance has to be seen by Academy members. Popped into the DVD player and watched...that's all. Because if you add this to Plummer's gay dad in Beginners plus his assumedly impressive turn in David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo , he's going to be awfully heard to beat for Best Supporting Actor.

Two days ago I wrote that Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs is "a mature complement to Sam Peckinpah's 1971 original" and that "in some ways [it's] a more complex film than Peckinpah's version." But that's chicken feed compared to Roger Ebert's statement in his just-posted Straw Dogs review that Lurie "has made a first-rate film of psychological warfare, and yes, I thought it was better than Peckinpah's."

I just want to leave Toronto. The festival is all but over and running on fumes, and I've been doing the 18-hour work day for seven days straight (this is my eighth) and I just want to go back to New York and downshift and resume my normal 14-hour work day. I always feel this way around the eighth or ninth day of any film festival. Later.

Yes, I want to catch Take Shelter at 6 pm -- definitely looking forward, etc. But I couldn't get into the Duplass brothers' Jeff Who Lives At Home. Jonathan Demme's I'm Carolyn Parker: The Good, The...Read More

The industry-media mob began leaving the Toronto Film Festival on Tuesday, and they really took off yesterday. You could almost hear a pin drop in the main upstairs lobby of the Scotiabank plex on Richmond and John. I've got an 11 am screening of Jay and Mark Duplass's Jeff Who Lives At Home at the Elgin, a film yet to be chosen in the early to mid afternoon at the Scotiaplex, and then Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter at the Ryerson at 6 pm.

I regret reporting that I had dealings yesterday with two mentally challenged Toronto Film Festival volunteers.

(1) I...Read More

I'd like to buy a nice, smallish, bouncy pillow with a battery inside it that keeps the pillow somewhere between cool and room-temperature normal. I don't like resting my head on overly heated, faintly damp pillows, which they all eventually turn into due to body-warmth (or head-warmth) transference. We're always flopping the pillow over so we can sleep on the cool side, and this is the solution. I've been surfing around for cool pillows but haven't found any so far.

Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America "may turn out to be my favorite viewing experience of the Toronto Film Festival," Marshall Fine has written. "Outrageous, bitter and wildly, inappropriately funny, God Bless America had me roaring at the story of a newly-minted spree killer who decides to eliminate what he sees as the worst of American popular culture, beginning with a spoiled rich brat who's the star of a reality show and ending up on the stage of an American Idol doppelganger with an AK-47.

Tara Lynne Barr, Joel Murray in Bobcat Goldwait's God Bless America

"Frank (Read More

In a 9.18 N.Y. Times piece about standout character performances, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott have praised Judy Greer's third-act turn in The Descendants. "Best known for kooky-friend roles in romantic comedies, Greer makes a strong, poignant impression in three scenes opposite George Clooney. [She's] playing a fairly tangential character: the wife of the man Mr. Clooney's wife had an affair with. But whether clueless, bewildered or tearful, Greer shifts the film's center of gravity and alters its emotional chemistry.

Judy Greer in The Descendants

"A star imports outsized individuality into every role, playing variations...Read More

Last night friend-of-HE Nick Clement -- a.k.a. "Action Man" -- saw the eight- or nine-minute Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sizzle reel that Toronto critics were also shown at the Straw Dogs screening. Clement also saw Moneyball as the main attraction. He emailed his responses to both last night.

Tattoo quickie: "As the lights went down for Moneyball and light flooded the screen, the footage began with...wait...Christopher Plummer in closeup, talking about some dark family stuff? And then wham...massive excitement levels. It was like watching a mini-version of David Fincher's upcoming film, but not in a...Read More

I've just come out of a TIFF screening of Oren Moverman's Rampart, a corrupt cop L.A. noir starring the great Woody Harrelson. The ending is a problem (a woman behind me went "what?" when the credits came up) but it's way, way better than Moverman's first film, The Messenger ('09) -- visually, stylistically and definitely performance-wise.

Harrelson is Dave "date rape" Brown -- a half-terrified, half-arrogant beat cop in a black-and-white who beats up various perps and suspects, and who killed a suspected rapist back in '87 and is basically a loose cannon and a...Read More

If you've ever been stuck in some hippy-dippy atmosphere or environment that you couldn't escape from...if you've ever been more or less forced to spend time with graying, balding, pot-bellied, granola-slurping doobie-tokers...a prisoner of smiling people dressed in Mexican peasant shirts and sandals and beads and easy-fit jeans who won't stop speaking in '60s psycho-babble platitudes...if you've ever had to suffer this way, as I have once or twice over within the past 15 or 20 years, then Bruce Beresford's Love, Peace and Misunderstanding will bring it all back home.

It's pretty close to excruciating. How could the director of Breaker...Read More

No, I haven't seen Salmon Fishing in the Yemen or You're Next, which is "basically another Shaun of the Dead," a guy told me last night. Why would I, the king of "writing five or six hours in the morning and seeing two or three films in the afternoon and maybe also in the early evening and then going to a party after that" get around to seeing two films that nobody knew anything about until they saw them here?

I don't take chances. I don't walk into pitch-black rooms. I walk into semi-lighted...Read More

My teeth are clenched. I'm pulling my hair out. I can't stand this. It's 1:22 pm and I have Faust or Peace, Love and Misunderstanding at 2 pm and then Oren Moverman's Rampart at 5:15 pm and I didn't even get around to reviewing yesterday's highlights, Michael Winterbottom's Trishna and David Hare's Page Eight. Both are highly intriguing adult dramas, particularly the Winterbottom, which is quite handsomely shot and framed and cut and richly performed (most notably by Freida Pinto, who has seemed challenged in her previous performances). Maybe sometime this evening.

"What do we know about the Best Actor race right now?," Awards Daily's Sasha Stone wrote this morning. "We know that George Clooney is, to my mind, in the frontrunner's spot for The Descendants. Right behind him, I figure, is Michael Fassbender in Shame."

Due respect but I have to say no on Fassbender. His performance is too malignant and frosty, and you don't get a Best Actor nomination for a performance that includes walking around your New York apartment with your elephant-sized appendage hanging out and bouncing against your upper thigh. Portraying a sexual pervo in a clinically accurate way is...Read More

In a GQ interview with Mark Harris, Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio have issued non-denial denials that J. Edgar is focused in any significant way on a gayish subcurrent inside the decades-long relationship between J. Edgar Hoover (DiCaprio) and partner/ally/confidante Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).

On one hand, Eastwood says "it's not a movie about two gay guys [but] a movie about how this guy manipulated everybody around him and managed to stay on through nine presidents. I mean, I don't give a crap if he was gay or not."

But he also says that Hoover and Tolson...Read More

That's all she wrote for an independent, stand-alone, buckaroo-style version of Kris Tapley's In Contention...say adios. The highly respected awards-focused site is folding itself into Hitfix.com and will eventually migrate its archives. Tapley will maintain ownership and all In Contention content. Yes, Guy Lodge is along for the ride. "We're simply plugging into a wider audience and higher traffic margin with all the infrastructure and tools that HitFix brings to the table," he says. "And indeed, they will be selling all advertising."

A rather silly political statement written by Harvey Weinstein was read last night by Olivia Wilde at the TIFF premiere screening of Butter (Weinstein Co., 10.21) . It spoke of a linkage between Jennifer Garner 's uptight racist harridan and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Just a mild goof, but one that might up the interest factor in Jim Field Smith's cultural comedy, which premiered at Telluride to somewhat mixed reviews.

"I would like to take this moment to formally invite Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann to co-host with me the big premiere of Butter in Iowa...Read More

Another Blake Lively-type iPhone photo thing is going on today. The work of a phone hacker, apparently, possibly stemming back to last March. These shots always seem to hit the web one way or the other. Why, then, do actresses take them in the first place? To what end except a likelihood of eventual annoyance and embarassment?

Hollywood Reporter award-season tracker Scott Feinberg saw Moneyball yesterday and is now calling Bennett Miller's film the TIFF premiere that "got the biggest awards boost by far," particularly concerning Brad Pitt's shot at a Best Actor Oscar. The Pitt thing is unquestionable, as far as I can see. I'm betting this will become accepted doctrine when Moneyball opens on 9.23.

Believe it or not a fellow columnist was declaring a couple of days ago that Pitt will be Best Actor nominated for his performance in The Tree of Life with Moneyball acting as backup. Nope. People vote...Read More

Last night I attended an Italian-themed gathering, organized by Frank Public Relations, that was about announcing the debut of the Perugia Film Festival, which will happen in late March 2012. Naturally I'd like to cover because it'll mean hanging out in a beautiful hilltop city in Umbria for four days. Who wouldn't, right? The festival is being run by Hamptons Film Festival director Karen Arikian with festival president Emanuele Rossi, and is being produced by Stratus Media Group's Paul Feller and Paul Seull.

Stratus Media's Paul Feller, Karen Arikian, SM's Paul Seull at last night's event.

The...Read More

The about-to-pop Blurays of the original Star Wars trilogy "are, in a word, amazing," writes Bluray.com's Casey Broadwater. "If you grew up watching these films on VHS you're going to be blown away. And I don't say that lightly. When I popped in A New Hope and saw that first great close-up of R2 in all his worn-in glory -- the scuff marks finely resolved in high definition -- I knew I was in good hands. And I kept having moments like this.

"Seeing the weft of the fabric of Obi-Wan's cloak as he tells...Read More

I so love Neil Young's voice and phrasings and those great ballsy rocker chords and deeply stirring chord changes that I was willing to sit through Jonathan Demme's Neil Young Life. Even though it's a fairly undisciplined, loose-shoe doc made up of (a) Young singing several of his songs in a May 2011 Toronto concert at Massey Hall and (b) footage of Young cruising through northern Ontario in a 50 year-old gas guzzler.

It's a nice way to kill time, but 20 or 25 people bailed during the first 45 minutes, and then I...Read More

John Calley, one of the most sophisticated and filmmaker-friendly studio chiefs of all time whose golden years were at Warner Bros. from 1968 to 1981 (and then later at Sony from 1996 to 2003), has left the earth. He was 81 years old, or close to that. I love the fact that when Calley was handed the Academy's Thalberg award in 2009, he voiced an uncommonly frank remark about the life of a studio executive: "You're very unhappy for a long period of time. And you don't experience joy. At the end you experience relief, if you're lucky."

My first screening yesterday was Marc Forster's Machine Gun Preacher. It's a unexceptional boilerplate thing about a criminally-inclined druggie (Gerard Butler) who finds Jesus and then goes off to the Sudan to build houses and wipe out the evil warlords, etc. It's not a dreadful film but one completely untouched by any kind of vision or inspiration. "What's happened to Marc Forster?," I asked a couple of friends yesterday. "He used to be the artful Monster's Ball guy, and now he's made a so-so film in the style of an anonymous hack."

Then came William Friedkin's Killer Joe, which is based on a...Read More

I still haven't reviewed Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala, but I tweeted twice about it two or three days ago. Tweet #1: "If Michelangelo Antonioni had made a movie about a Mexican beauty queen grappling with drug gangsters, the result might have been Miss Bala." Tweet #2: "Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay & his acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots and almost no cut-cut-cut-cuting."

I met with Naranjo late yesterday morning. Mostly I just flattered him and the film. I also met Stephanie Sigman,...Read More

I arrived a bit late at yesterday's GE/Cinelan press breakfast, but the gist of the announcement was that GE and Cinelan are partnering on a new series of three-minute nonfiction shorts about innovation in various fields. It's called the Focus Forward documentary project, and there's an exclusive deal for Vimeo to present the results. Participating filmmakers include Morgan Spurlock, Liz Garbus, Joe Berlinger, Alex Gibney, Steve James, Barbara Kopple and Jessica Yu.

"I saw Moneyball," a friend said, "and it's rather amazing, especially on a thematic and/or screenwriting level. But the last thing it is is a power Oscar play. I expect Brad Pitt could find some flow this season, and maybe it'll figure in the adapted screenplay category (given the names), though it's not the kind of script that resonates in the season. (I don't make the rules.) But that's it. I don't see 300 people putting this in their #1 spot for Best Picture."

No, I responded. No, no, no, no...wrong. It is a kind of Oscar play...a quiet, forceful one that's something...Read More

I'm at the 50/50 post-premiere party for the Toronto Film Festival, and I'm fuming at all the full-of-themselves under-40s who, in the middle of a super-crowded, celebrity-studded madhouse party (Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon Levitt are sitting 20 feet away), order tray after tray of complicated mixed drinks from the bartender, tying her up for minutes on end. Just order wine or beer or straight shots, you thoughtless jerks, and give other people a chance to order what they want so everyone can have a nice time.

Update: There was one other bartender besides the woman I'm speaking of, and some guy darting...Read More

"I'm so sick of assholes using their phones in movies. I'm thinking of starting a terror campaign with a makeshift pea shooter -- a straw from McDonald's and a small bag of lentils from a grocery store. Wonder what kind of range or accuracy I could get? I've actually taken to kicking the seat of people in front of me who take their phones out in the middle of screenings." -- Formidable Toronto-covering critic, written earlier today.

"It's a drama about a guy who thinks he is trying to win baseball games, [and] has come to believe that in order to be okay with who he is, this thing has to happen. And it ends up being a classic wisdom story, a King Arthur type of thing -- get the grail and all will be restored to order. And of course, it's an impossible task but it's the journey of the thing that teaches the lesson that needs to be learned.

"And so you never quite get your hand right around it, but you...Read More

It is significant, I think, that Marshall Fine is a fan of Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs. Partly because Fine is an author of "Bloody Sam," a well-written book about Sam Peckinpah, director of the original 1971 version. And secondly because Fine didn't like Lurie's excellent Nothing But The Truth...weird.

James Marsden, Kate Bosworth in Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs.

Lurie's Straw Dogs "is a solid, tense drama that packs a wallop and tells its story on Lurie's own terms," he writes. "It's less a remake than a new version of the story, filtered through...Read More

I've never wanted to be in the same room as Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star. I knew that instantly when I saw the ads. I don't want to smell it, think about it, acknowledge it...nothing. I don't even want it in the dumpster in my garage. Since opening two days ago it's become common knowledge that it has a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating. So there's been a kind of competition this weekend to top the most withering putdowns filed by critics. if anyone's seen it, have at it.

I saw Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs three months ago, and wrote down some reactions within hours of seeing it. Now that it's about to open, I can let them out. This new Dogs is flawed here and there, but it's also the most visceral, straight-from-the-solar-plexus film that Lurie has ever made. And it's spooky in a couple of ways that Sam Peckinpah, director of the original 1971 version, never divined.

At the very least Lurie's version is a mature complement to Peckinpah's. There's no reason at all to trash it. It may be your cup or not,...Read More

Sony Pictures Classics' Michael Barker and Tom Bernard hosted their annual TIFF dinner last night in Yorkville. You'd never know it from the lack of a jump-page indication, but I've run five photos from last night's festivities so click on the headline and view the whole thing.

Take Shelter star Michael Shannon, director Jeff Nichols at last night's Sony Classics' dinner at Michele's Brassierie (or whatever it's now called).

Take Shelter costar Jessica Chastain.

I've been saying to journalist pals that "if you don't put your foot down and show some discipline in the face of all the Toronto Film Festival temptations" -- junket interviews, dinners, parties, panels, lunches, pretty girls -- "you can easily fill your days without seeing any films." And they've all agreed to a man/woman...of course, easily!

I have my five or six stories per day quota to fill plus my usual evening social-political shenanigans (i.e., a couple of parties per night or a dinner and a party), and with that daily load I've been fitting in only two and 1/2 films...Read More

Jonathan Levine's 50/50 (Summit, 9.30) is an exceptionally honest, no-punches-pulled, very honorably acted adult drama about a young guy (Joseph Gordon Levitt) grappling with The Big C. It's seasoned with occasional laughs, for sure, but there's no way this is a light mood comedy, as the 50/50 trailers have implied. And I mean that with the utmost respect.

Based on screenwriter Will Reiser's brush with cancer a few years ago, 50/50 is about an
obviously "difficult" subject, markeing-wise. A significant portion of the public (i.e., people over 40 or 45 or 50 who think...Read More

Asked by TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey about his tendency to make movies about flawed characters facing tough times, The Descendants director Alexander Payne bristled and snapped, "I don't mean to pick on you, but what movie doesn't have characters who are flawed and are facing tough times in their lives? I'm sorry, but I was asked the same question at the press conference this afternoon, and I don't get it." -- reported last night by TheWrap's Steve Pond.

Come to think of it, even if a character isn't flawed -- even if he's Mr. Perfect -- Jesus Christ, for example -- all...Read More

Unlike most I don't immediately default to Charly when I think of Cliff Robertson, who died yesterday at age 88. I think instead of his performance as Higgins, the cynical CIA official in Three Days of the Condor ('75). Or his hammer-like performance as Joe Cantwell, the sanctimonious, Richard Nixon-esque presidential candidate in The Best Man ('64).

Charly is an agreeable, sweetly touching drama, and Robertson played a mentally challenged man with care and sensitivity. But gentle sentiment never ages well. For me something more interesting came out when Robertson...

Christopher Plummer's beguiling performance in Mike Mills' Beginners (i.e., a 70ish dad who decides to come out and live his waning years as a gay man) has looked like a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor Oscar all along. But after seeing Plummer charm and electrify and ham it up and speechify in gloriously boozy Shakespearean fashion in Barrymore, which I saw a couple of hours ago at the Bell Lightbox, I'm all but convinced he has the Oscar in the bag.

Christopher Plummer during a post-screening interview with director Atom Egoyan following this afternoon's screening of Barrymore....

The sidewalk sunlight was hell -- I felt like Lawrence of Arabia's Gasim baking in the Nefud desert -- as I stood for 90 minutes on King Street yesterday. I was a rush line to get into a public screening of Barrymore. I was sweating and melting, and I was beginning to smell like a gym towel on top of that. I will never again suffer like this in order to get into a TIFF public screening.

The Sony buffet for junket whores journalists (myself included) doing Moneyball and The Ides of March interviews, taken yesterday morning inside the Ritz Carlton 2nd-floor lobby.

Posted/tweeted today around 6:30 pm Eastern by Moneyball costar Jonah Hill. These guys have real chemistry in Bennett Miller's film. it's not bromance chemistry but a kind of yin-yang thing -- Pitt gets into Hill's face, asks him a blunt question, Hill hesitates and gives him the answer Pitt wants to hear. They do this over and over. It's great.

Moneyball costars Jonah Hill, Brad Pitt -- shot either today or yesterday inside Toronto's Ritz Carlton.

If my Bennett Miller interview comes off on schedule (i.e., five minutes from now), I'll be able to catch a 12:15 pm screening of Gareth Huw Evans and Iko Uwais' The Raid, which had its Toronto Film festival debut on Thursday night. A Twitchfilm post called it "a bad-ass fusion of Die Hard and Assault On Precinct 13 with a body count that would make John Woo blush as the bullets, blades, sticks, elbows and feet get flying early and never let up."

A tip of the hat to Fox Searchlight for acquiring Steve McQueen's NC-17 Shame. As I more or less said in my Telluride review, it's hard to like Shame as you're watching it (because it's so friggin' bleak) but it's all but impossible to not think about it, a lot, after it's over. It might become a modest commercial hit (maybe0, but the Academy blue-hairs are going to blow this movie off so fast your head will spin. Nonetheless, any distributor that puts cash on the barrelhead for a bona fide art film has my admiration.

Another quote from my Telluride...Read More

At last night's Ides of March party Phillip Seymour Hoffman -- a.k.a. "Philly" -- insisted that Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, which he just finished filming, is "not a Scientology film." But I've read an early draft and it seems to be about a Scientology-like cult, i said to him. And I've read about the parallels. "I don't know what you've heard and what script you've read," Hoffman replied. "Trust me, it's not about Scientology."

Maybe not specifically or literally, but there are just too many proofs and indications that The Master (or whatever it's eventually going to be called) is at least...Read More

I'm on my way to an Ides of March party that starts at 7 pm and then another one for the Weinstein Co.'s The Artist, but I have to at least paste a couple of tweets about Gerado Naranjo's Miss Bala, which I missed in Cannes but finally saw today. Tweet #1: "If Michelangelo Antonioni had made a movie about a Mexican beauty queen grappling with drug gangsters, the result might have been Miss Bala." Tweet #2: "Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay & acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots...Read More

I'll be appalled for the rest of my life that my Reel.com editor (whose name I'm not going to mention) chose to summarize the column that I wrote from the Toronto Film Festival on the evening of 9.11.01, and which appeared the following day, as follows: "Jeffrey Wells reports on the toll that current events have had on the Toronto Film Festival, and tries to muster enthusiasm for films that have screened, including Lantana, Monsoon Wedding, and Last Orders."

This was back in the day when entertainment websites wrote about and/or acknowledged only entertainment subjects...even if...Read More

Koch Entertainment's One-Eyed Jacks Bluray (out 11.8) will, of course, be some kind of high-def enhancement of a public-domain version, and all One-Eyed Jacks public domain versions are shit. There was a laser disc version that I owned in the early to mid '90s that wasn't too bad, so maybe Koch's Bluray will be the equal of that. If it is I'm buying it...fool that I am.

This near-great 1961 psychological western has to be freed from public-doman jail and remastered and made into a eye-popping Bluray by its owner, Paramount Pictures. But of course Paramount...Read More

With In Contention's Guy Lodge having posted a Venice Film Festival pan of Ami Canaan Mann 's Texas Killing Fields (Anchor Bay, 10.7), it seems fair to post my own reaction, which is a bit more favorable but only a bit.

Texas Killing Fields costars Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chloe Moretz, Stephen Graham, Jessica Chastain and Annabeth Gish. I reported in mid-August that it's about the Texas I-45 Murders, a series of unsolved killings of prostitutes and lonely girls in the '80s, probably by more than one assailant, in a blighted area south of Houston near Interstate I-45, which...Read More

Yesterday In Contention's Kris Tapley excerpted my Moneyball rave (thanks) but at the same time said "Jeff flies off the Oscar handle on dubious players too frequently to trust this just yet." I don't deserve that. I admit I've gotten it wrong from time to time, but hardly "frequently." Generally my instincts are on-target, and I sure as hell know formulaic garbage when I see it. And I know when a film is up to something extra-special and worthwhile.

At the end of the day I'd rather be the guy who occasionally jumps on the wrong...Read More

So I finally saw Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (i.e., in Manhattan the night before last) and re-discovered what I'd known all all along -- that popcorn thrillers can be extremely cool and culturally nutritious if they're (a) smart, (b) clever, (c) believable, (d) stylistically intriguing and (e) packaged with taste and class. Most thrillers fall short to varying degrees; many (especially those starring Jason Statham) are the cinematic equivalent of fast-food or Cinnabons. But not this puppy.

The Soderbergh pedigree alone should tell you that Contagion delivers with quiet pulsing authority and creepy chills. The reviews (mine...Read More

George Clooney's The Ides of March (Sony, 10.7) is a smart, taut political thriller -- well-acted, gripping (particularly after the shit starts hitting the fan in Act Two) with a chilly, bitter edge. In a term, fully enjoyable. Plus it packs a stiffer, heavier punch than Beau Willimon's Farragut North, a 2008 political play that Clooney and Grant Heslov adapted for the screen, and in so doing added a third act involving sexual indiscretion.

Is Ides about us on some level? Does it reflect or shed light upon some universal current that we've all come...Read More

Passport in hand, I caught a 12:30 pm Porter flight to Toronto and was cabbing toward my rental on Soho street by 2 pm. I picked up my press pass 45 minutes later, and am now sitting next to Joe Leydon in theatre #1 at the Bell Lightbox, waiting for George Clooney's The Ides of March at 4 pm.

Bennett Miller's Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) is my idea of a triumph. A triumph of surprise and deception, I should add. It's an emotionally low-key, thinking man's Field of Dreams -- a smart, true-to-life, business-of-baseball movie with a touch of the mystical and the sublime, and propelled along by a highly pleasurable lead performance by Brad Pitt. It's not just the emotional and spiritual currents that makes it great, but the subtlety of them.

Earlier this year someone called it "the Social Network of baseball movies," and that's a close enough description except for the fact...Read More

My heart fluttered when Grace Kelly appeared in this Dior J'adore spot. The appearances of Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe are pretty cool also. I first wrote about the reanimation of dead actors in a 1991 Empire piece. Back then people thought that the ability to reconstitute and re-use an actor so that he/she could actually "costar" in a feature was maybe 20 or 25 years off. I guess not, but I really want to see this happen someday.

Yesterday TheAtlantic.com's Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg posted a short reel of "process plate" rear-projection footage of downtown Los Angeles, shot sometime around '48 or '49, I'm guessing. "If it was ever used, it was seen fuzzy and out of focus," she wrote. "Today, however, it's amazing documentation of a lost neighborhood.

"Watch the signs, the spectators and passersby, and...

Being at the Telluride Film Festival caused me to miss a 9.3 Maureen Dowd N.Y. Times column that openly asked if President Obama is doomed, primarily due to the wimp factor. In '09 and '10 many worried that Obama was becoming Jimmy Carter. I think he's now surpassed that feeling of late '70s Carter enervation. There's just a general sense that Obama can't man up about anything, particularly regarding the Republicans.

"There's nothing the Republicans say that [Obama] won't eagerly meet halfway," Dowd wrote.

"No. 2 on David Letterman's Top Ten List of the president's plans for Labor Day: 'Pretty much whatever...Read More

When you've got the likes of Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham dismissing Sarah Palin's credibility as a presidential contender and calling her followers a small, hair-trigger fringe, what is there left for Nick Broomfield's You Betcha! doc to say?

Especially with Undefeated, that Palin hagiography doc, having commercially tanked and Palin herself having thoroughly discredited herself since she quit the Alaskan governorship and particularly since her "blood libel" speech in the aftermath of the Gabriele Giffords shooting. What else is there to say?

Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, which premieres this week at the Toronto Film...Read More

Earlier today Movieline's Julie Miller riffed on the trailer for The Big Year (20th Century Fox, 10.14), a Ben Stiller-produced comedy that looks like a non-cancer-afflicted Bucket List meets "The Great Outdoors meets Planes, Trains & Automobiles meets Jack Black eating pretzels in his underwear," as Miller noted. The costars are Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson.

And yet Howard Franklin's script is based on Mark Obmascik's "The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature and Fowl Obsession" -- a book of amusing reportage about three guys who spent all of 1998 watching several...Read More

Interruptus Schmuptus Update: I've gotten new emergency passports in less than a day in Los Angeles and Paris, but New York's passport bureaucracy is another story. A story you don't want to hear about. Bottom line is that an L.A. friend is overnighting my passport to NYC and so I'll be flying to Toronto tomorrow. Porter Air charged me $345 for a new one-way ticket. They would have charged $600-something but they're offering a special 50% discount sale at the moment. Nice guys!

Newark Airport bulletin: I've brilliantly left my passport back in Los Angeles so no flying to Toronto and the Toronto...Read More

Late last night it was announced that Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar will premiere at the AFI Fest 2011 on 11.3. The Hollywod-based fest will run from 11.3 to 11.10. Hence the launch of a possible Best Picture campaign, and a likely Best Actor punch-through for Leonardo DiCaprio as Gay Edgar Hoover. Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer and Judy Dench costar.

Yesterday I was trying to think of a way to re-activate the Eddie Murphy-as-Oscar host conversation, but it would have just been a replay of the 9.4 kick-around so I dropped it. But let's consider Tom O'Neil's assessment. One, Murphy is a humbled, partially unknown 50 year-old whose career "[has] been in decline in recent years." Two, he's nonetheless a player and a survivor whose career "may be back on the upswing soon" with the release of Tower Heist and A Thousand Words. And three, he's funny.

My earlier point was that for Murphy to really be funny in...Read More

Between her scripts for this Jason Reitman-directed Paramount film and the yet-to-be-shot Lamb of God, Diablo Cody has, it seems to me, created a pair of headstrong, somewhat startling post-millennial female characters (i.e., 20- and 30somethings) whom you haven't quite known or perhaps even met before. At least someone is coming up with new lassie permutations.

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I recorded our post-Telluride Film festival sum-up yesterday afternoon as we drove south on 550 from Durango toward Albuquerque. The sound quality is relatively decent considering we were inside a barrel-assing SUV at 80 mph. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Marcu Hu's Strand Releasing has acquired U.S. rights to Markus Schleinzer's Michael. The Austrian-produced drama preemed at last May's Cannes Film Festival and will have its North American debut next week at the Toronto Film Festival. All Toronto-covering journos are urged to catch it. Nothing is "shown," trust me. And you won't be sorry.

In my Cannes review I called Michael "a somewhat chiily, jewel-precise study of an Austrian child molester. It isn't "pleasant" to watch, but it's briliiant -- emotionally suppressed in a correct way that blends with the protagonist, aesthetically disciplined and close to...Read More

Per official request I'm holding my reactions to Bennett Miller's Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) until the day after tomorrow (i.e., Thursday, 9.8). But I don't see how I'd be breaking an agreement by linking to a 3.24.11 posting that included two responses to a Moneyball research screening in Los Angeles. Just to get the readership in the mood, so to speak.

I took an LA-to-NY Delta redeye last night, landing this morning around 8 am. I slept for a couple of hours at my son's Brooklyn apartment, and then G- and M-trained over to Sony's Madison Avenue headquarters to catch a pre-Toronto screening of Bennett Miller 's Moneyball (Sony, 9.23). I then stumbled around midtown in the rain, finally settling into a Starbucks on 57th near Lexington.

There's nothing quite like Manhattan during a windswept, slightly chilly rainstorm. Tens of thousands of bodies, voices and spirits (plus that many umbrellas) all trooping down streets and boulevards, all...Read More

The last interview I did at the Telluride Film Festival was with Chapin Cutler, honcho and co-founder of Boston Light and Sound, and one of the few people on the planet who really know how to project films to their absolute technical utmost. Cutler oversees the projection of all films during Telluride as well as Sundance, Hollywod's TCM Classics Film Festival, and the Doha and Dubai Tribeca film festivals.

Cutler is like a NASA rocket scientist when it comes to theatrical projection. He adheres to standards that most commercial exhibitors avoid due to their...Read More

Steve McQueen's Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that's entirely about a malignancy -- sex addiction -- affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light. It's a bucket of bleak. Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattaan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He's into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, doomed.

Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up...Read More

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (Sony Classics, 11.23) is one of those brilliant, highly refined dramas with stirring elevated dialogue that are good for you, like spinach. It's difficult to truly enjoy films of this sort as you watch them, but they're hard to forget or dismiss after you've left the theatre. In the long or short run all good cinema gains upon reflection.

Keira Knightley in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method

But at the same time A Dangerous Method, which I caught late yesterday morning at the Telluride Film Festival, is a vaguely oppressive thing to...Read More

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, a forthcoming Sony Classics release which won the Golden Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, is far and away the finest film I've seen at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival...and I didn't even see the first 40 minutes' worth. But soon after I slipped into the Chuck Jones theatre early yesterday afternoon I knew I was in the presence of something genuine, compassionate, complex and unflinching. This Iranian film is affecting and profound in a way that transcends nationality and culture and any other obstacle you can think of.

Given...Read More

The absolute post-production disaster that is Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret will finally open on 9.30, a full six years after it began principal photography. The problem with releasing films this old is that they look like period pieces. The present-tense Anna Paquin in True Blood is a blonde, lithe, aerobicized hottie. But in Lonergan's film she's chubby and dark-haired. How odd that Fox Searchlight chose to point this out on the one-sheet.

From the film's Wiki page:

"Court documents show Margaret started filming in New York in September 2005 and wrapped photography about three months later....Read More

I've predicted two or three times that Steven Soderbergh's stated intention to quit directing films on favor of painting would not turn into a permanent retirement but a "Frank Sinatra retirement," or a battery-recharging sabbatical of two or three or four years. I repeated that prediction, in fact, to Soderbergh himself at an LA Film Festival party last June.

Well, in Venice today Soderbergh confirmed this. A year or so from now he'll be doing a temporary withdrawal from directing. Five years, maybe less, but mainly to re-orient his head. How did I know this earlier? Precognition, ether in the air, insect...Read More

Descendants star George Clooney was holding court in the Sheridan bar last night with Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, In Contention's Kris Tapley, myself and two or three others during a cool Fox Searchlight party. Most of the gab was about politics (Clooney does a good Rick Perry impression, in a manner of speaking), but he and I briefly discussed The Descendants and particularly The Ides of March, his directorial effort which opened in Venice and which will play again next weekend in Toronto.

Descendants star George Clooney, director-writer Alexander Payne at Telluride's Sheridan bar last night....

Presumably there are reactions to last night's news (broken by Deadline, followed up by everyone else) about Eddie Murphy being producer Brett Ratner's first choice to host the 2012 Oscar telecast. It's by no means a locked deal but please have at it.

I saw Murphy perform live gigs twice in the early '80s, and as hilarious as he was back then his material was about 80% X-rated scatalogical (anal wonderland, trim, suck my dick, "Mr. T in a gay bar," etc.) -- that's where his comic mind naturally went back then. So unless he's turned...Read More

Hollywood Reporter awards-season correspondent Scott Feinberg has posted a good audio interview with Albert Nobbs star-producer-cowriter Glenn Close. He reminds that Close collected five Oscar nominations in seven years ('82 to '89) -- a nomination tally matched only by Greer Garson, Bette Davis and Meryl Streep.

For me Close's two best nominated performances were the psychopathic rabbit-killing witch in Fatal Attraction and the ultra-perverse schemer in Dangeorus Liasons. Followed by Jennie Fields in The World According to Garp, Kevin Kline's soulful wife in The Big Chill, and "the blonde in the bleachers" in The Natural....Read More

In terms of delivering solid, exciting creme de la creme fall releases the Telluride Film Festival, for all its soothing aromas and enjoyments, has felt thin to me. The Descendants thus far has been the only solid triple/home run. That could change with today's dual showings of Steve McQueen's Shame, which the Guardian's Xan Brooks and other Venice Film Festival have mostly raved about.

Michael Fassbender in Steve McQueen's Shame, the Telluride Film Festival's last best hope to at least match the Descendants buzz.

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method will also screen twice in Telluride today, but...Read More

Deadline's Pete Hammond wrote early this morning that Jim Field Smith's Butter "played like gangbusters at its first packed screening at [Telluride's] Galaxy theatre" and that "there were big laughs for the small-town, butter-carving satire."

Butter star-producer Jennifer Garner, director Jim Field Smith prior to last night's screening.

I would politely dispute that account as I was in the same theatre. There were certainly laughs from time to time (even I guffawed five or six times) but my general impression was that audience energy levels eventually turned flat. Because after the first 25 or 30 minutes...Read More

So the mob is going apeshit over Warrior, and I think it's just a rousing, brother-against-brother, forgiving-and-healing, emotionally manipulative MMA movie. Rank-and-file festivalgoers are creaming over The Artist...every Telluride viewer I've spoken to loves it...and I think it's just a clever, assured, highly diverting curio -- a tribute to the lore of black-and-white silent cinema and the divergent-Hollywood-career plot used by Singin' in the Rain and A Star Is Born. And women of all shapes and sizes and social classes love The Help, and we all know the name of that tune.

So what am I to do? Do a flip-flop and...Read More

Here, thanks to Awards Daily's Sasha Stone for sharing a video of the q & a that followed yesterday afternoon's screening of The Descendants at the Chuck Jones theatre. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy moderated the stand-up chat session with George Clooney, Shailene Woodley and director-writer Alexander Payne.

And by the way, Sasha's chuckling improves the video -- it makes it feel more natural and technically unpretentious and real-timey.

Glenn Close gives a classic minimalist performance in Albert Nobbs. One defined by a restricted palette and limited moves, but no less expressive for that. The great Kristin Scott Thomas went to this well, of course, in I Loved You For So Long, and the legendary Steve McQueen (the dead one, not the director of Shame) was surely one of the reigning minimalist actors of the 20th Century. So there's a tradition here, a realm, and Close knows exactly how to operate within it.

Albert Nobbs star Glenn Close -- Saturday, 9.3, 9:45 am inside Telluride Mountain Village's...

Glenn Close and Rodrigo Garcia's Albert Nobbs screened last night at Telluride's Galaxy theatre to, it must be said, a somewhat muted reaction. With the exception, I should add, of Janet McTeer's brilliant supporting performance as Hubert, a woman pretending to be a man.

Nobbs came to Telluride with the advance buzz being that Close might be delivering an Oscar-calibre performance. Close is striking, no question -- she's playing a sad, curious inhabitant of a long-ago era in a granular, highly concentrated way -- but McTeer's performance has the dignity, heart and heat.

Close's Nobbs, a 19th Century Dublin waiter...Read More

A friend writes: "The Butter script was number three on the Black List and was one of the funniest scripts I've read in years. If the movie comes even close to the script, it will be this year's Little Miss Sunshine.

"Plot is the story of a young black girl who doesn't like white people (hilarious reverse politically incorrect racism), is adopted (for the one hundredth time -- she never unpacks her bags) by a very, very whitebread Midwestern family

On the other side of town, the guy who wins the butter carving competition (regarded as the...Read More

Pics from this morning's Telluride Film Festival Patron's Brunch, which was held on a scenic elevated pasture some 20 minutes out of town, slightly to the west of the Telluride airport. Splendid food, killer scenery, great company, gang's all here, etc.

This guy never stops quipping, charming, posing for pictures, etc. Indefatigable smoothie. And a likely Best Actor contender, trust me, after this morning's screening of The Descendants.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, his son Ezra.

Pina director Wim Wenders, Into The Abyss helmer Werner Herzog.

Here are six or seven tweets about Alexander Payne's The Descendants from late this afternoon:

#1: "The Descendants, a Hawaiian family drama about death and letting go and waking up, is deep and real and true to life."

#2: "George Clooney's performance as a beleagured, soon-to-be-widowed dad is touching, real, honest. He's immediately in Best Actor contention."

#3: "The first Telluride showing if The Descendants just broke, and I KNOW when I've seen a drama that doesn't try too hard but sinks right the fuck in."

#4: "I for one love the abrupt, subtle tonal shifts between straight drama and whaddaya-gonna-do, throw-up-your-hands, low-key...Read More

Constant Telluride activity since daybreak, but no time to write about it (except for tweets). The Patron Picnic ran from 9:30 to noon (got good photos of George Clooney and everyone else, didn't have time to post). Then a press schmooze-confab at the Sheridan, and then a 2:30 pm of The Descendants (which deserves a solid A) at the Chuck Jones theatre. And then came a 6pm screening of George Harrison: Living in the Material World, which I was half-and-half on and decided to bail on after 90 minutes (I can see the rest at the NYFF). And I'm now waiting to see...Read More

"The take-off and landing are a bit bumpy," writes The Playlist's Oliver Lyttleton from Venice, "but most of David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is fearsomely smart. It's a grown-up, absorbing film that doesn't forget to move you even as it fires up the synapses, and one of real substance (certainly more so than the enjoyable, but somewhat hollow Eastern Promises). It examines the creative and destructive elements of sexuality in a way that very few filmmakers would dare

"If anything keeps it from quite hitting the heights that it could, it's Christopher Hampton's scripting.

Variety's Justin Chang also...Read More

Last night Telluride Film Festival p.r. director Shannon Mitchell declared that "no photography [will be] allowed inside the theaters at any of the George Clooney events -- i.e., the Tribute and screenings, intros and q & a's of The Descendants." But that's over now. Photos are okay, sez the Clooney camp. All is cool. Snap away.

Mitchell later wrote, apparently in response to joshing complaints, that "I'm getting a lot of funny comments about this but do want to be clear that this is not a request made by Clooney or his publicists. It's a decision by festival organizers to try and keepRead More

Last night was just about cool mountain air and kicking back and breathing a little heavy as we walked up hills. It's not Mount Everest, but the oxygen levels are lighter up here. I prefer to think of the Telluride air as select, rarified. I'd been told to drink only a single glass of wine, but I threw down two glasses of Pinot Grigio like I was Ernest Hemingway, like it was nothing at all.

With George Clooney (The Descendants) and Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin) being tributed by the 2011 Telluride Film Festival,...Read More

Telluride Fact #1: I was in a Tellluride market a couple of hours ago and ran into Elizabeth Berkley and her husband Greg Lauren. (They're here to attend the Sunday wedding of Andrew Lauren and Lauren Bush .) And she said that Johnny Depp is here. Telluride Fact #2: A connected indie film guy told me he's heard that Depp's Rum Diary is one of the not-yet-announced secret screenings. Do the math = maybe.

The Patron Brunch, to which I've been invited, is tomorrow morning from 10:30 am to 12 noon. Tomorrow's films: (a) The Turin Horse...Read More

The 2011 Telluride slate is out, and topping the hot list are Alexander Payne 's The Descendants and Rodrigo Garcia and Glenn Close's Albert Nobbs (which I knew about but couldn't report). Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (seen it), David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (great!), Wim Wenders' Pina and Steve McQueen's Shame are also slated -- excellent news.

A Telluride tribute is set for George Clooney and they're not going to screen The Ides of March, which he directed (and which just premiered in Venice)? The Telluride fathers must be planning on announcing March as a special surprise because to not show it would...Read More

Apologies to Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale for not passing along thoughts about likely 2011 Oscar contenders for the first early peek-out Oscar Index. I got hung up with the usual chores plus last-minute travel preparations, etc. Warrior is a good film, and in some respects an astonishing one, but anyone who think it's a Best Picture contender needs to stop shooting heroin, splash water into his/her face, walk outside and smell the air.

In the view of The Guardian's Xan Brooks, Madonna's W.E. -- about a lonely New York woman in the late '90s (Abbie Cornish) obsessing about the late 1930s marriage of King Edward VIII (James D'Arcy) and Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) -- is a "primped and simpering folly, extraordinarily silly, preening and fatally mishandled... jaw-dropping...the turkey that dreamed it was a peacock."

Madonna's direction "is so all over the shop that it barely qualifies as direction at all," Broooks claims. "W.E. gives us slo-mo and jump cuts and a crawling crane shot up a tree in Balmoral, but they are all...Read More

The Playlist's Oliver Lyttleton, whose show-'em-no-mercy review of The Ides of March was posted yesterday, has stuck a knife into Carnage, Roman Polanski's adaptation of Yasmina Reza's hit play which premiered earlier today at the Venice Film Festival.

Carnage is "a film of very little ambition, a minor entry in the director's canon. Perhaps it was just the desire to shoot something fast and quick after his brush with Swiss justice, which is certainly understandable, but he has essentially taken a pre-existing script, cast four A-listers, locked them in a room, and shot it.

"There...Read More

Sasha Stone and I met last evening around 6:15 pm at the Albuquerque airport's baggage retrieval area. But the car rental took longer to figure out than expected plus we experienced a 40-minute wipeout due to missing the 550 north turnoff. So we didn't really get going until 7:40 pm. But we arrived in Durango, Colorado around 11 pm, and that was with a 20-minute Subway stop. We dropped our bags at the Siesta Motel, and then hit a local bar and drank hard stuff.

A young female bartender told us about two Durango-to-Telluride routes -- the...Read More