The overture fade-to-black in the West Side Story Bluray starts at the 29-second mark. The video is from the British Bluray, which arrived today. It comes from the same high-def master that was used for the U.S. version that streets on 11.15.

I completely agree with an opinion by Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet that the cow-being-killed clip in Ridley Scott and Kevin McDonald's Life In A Day (around the 43:35 mark) is appalling and sickening. The poor beast senses what's about to happen and...I don't want to talk about it. But it's awful. Otherwise I found the first half of this film (I'm watching it on the flight back to L.A.) slightly boring.

A day or so ago Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil posted video chats with Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg about likely Best Actor and Best Actress contenders. Savannah hurly-burly kept me from re-posting immediately.

Way back when people from Georgia used to speak with delicate Georgian accents. I remember hearing them at gas stations and diners when I drove through Georgia on my way to Florida. Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara spoke like a Georgian. Jimmy Carter still does, pronouncing "oil" as "awwl" and so on. But I heard no Georgian dialects during my three and a half days in Savannah. Okay, one or two but just about everyone sounded like they came from Connecticut or Maryland.

Atlanta has always been an uptown burgh, but I've always thought of Savannah as some kind of genteel hamlet where you...Read More

I've long admired a certain veteran publicist for his ability to remain completely focused and lucid while letting go with red-faced rage. It's a bad idea, of course, to let emotional ferocity color any sort of discussion, but a lot of people go there regardless. Some of us can hold on to our thoughts after getting pissed, but a lot (most?) of us can't. Anger makes you spit and sputter and your sentences sound lumpy and primitive. The angrier you become the less able you are to deliver your points with any finesse. But this publicist, whom I worked for in the '80s,...Read More

Sam Levinson's Another Happy Day, which has been on the film festival circuit since bowing last January at Sundance and which will open on 11.18, played last night at the Savannah Film Festival. It's definitely not The Family Stone, as Levinson exclaimed during the q & a. And it has "Red Twitter Queen" Ellen Barkin delivering the most searing, over-the-waterfall performance of her life as one of the most sensitive and well-intentioned crazy-torpedo moms of all time.

Barkin and Levinson talked a bit after the film ended, and I was there in the...Read More

I've told a few journalist acquaintances about a Sundance condo share...zip. They're all set up elsewhere and/or can't be bothered to reply so I'm going public. It's a very large & spacious one-bedroom apartment at the Park Regency that easily accomodates three (i.e., myself and a journalist friend plus tenant X.) There's a whole separate bunk bed area for the third person. The rental term is Saturday to Saturday so we're taking it for two full weeks (1.14 through 1.28) for $2675. Divided by three = $891 or $89 per day if you're Sundancing for the full 10 days.

The place has...Read More

A filmmaker friend saw The Descendants last night (i.e., Sunday) at West Hollywood's Soho House screening room. "Amazing movie, should go all the way," he wrote. "The whole cast including George Clooney and Judy Greer plus all the kids were there along with [director-writer] Alexander Payne w/ Pacino, Jack N., Reese W. and Albert Brooks in the audience.

We're on the same page then, I replied. "It's got to be the front-runner," he said. "And Clooney for Best Actor. Shailene Woodley could get nominated and maybe Judy Greer also on the basis of just four scenes." Three scenes, I countered. "No,...Read More

Late this morning I finally saw Neil Labute's Sexting, an eight-minute short that premiered at Sundance 2011. A typically sharp and blunt LaBute piece. It's basically Julia Stiles as the proverbial girlfriend talking straight into the lens but actually or anxiously to the wife of the married guy she's been having an affair with. The nature of their exchange is hinted at around the 25-second mark.

I took two Olympus digital recorders to yesterday's Barry Lyndon discussion with Alec Baldwin and James Toback. I pushed the record button on the newer one and placed it on the stage just before the session began, and somehow it recorded nothing. I successfully recorded their discussion with an older device from my seat, but after a while I wondered what the point was of having two recordings so I turned it off.

Director-writer James Toback (l.), actor Alec Baldin during yesterday afternoon's hour-long chat at Savannah's Lucas theatre.

Baldwin was funny and brilliant and so was Toback,...Read More

Five Savannah Film Festival-visiting entertainment journalists -- myself, Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Hollywood Reporter's Tim Appelo, critic Todd Gilchrist and CHUD's Renn Brown -- took part in a confession session this morning with about 25 Savannah film students. It happened in the plush lobby of the Marshall House, and it began, believe it or not, at 8:15 am. Here's an mp3 file containing some of what was said.

I almost had words with a driver of a dark sedan during this morning's bike ride through Savannah's historic district. "Almost" is actually overstating it. I could have had words with this guy if I had a little less self-control.

I was stopping to take a picture on a small cobblestoned street, and a friend pulled her bike over to the opposite side. Along comes asshole in his dark sedan, and he doesn't like that she's taking up 18 to 24 inches of space in the right lane. He stops and waits for her to walk the bike entirely out his way...Read More

At 5 pm (95 minutes from now) Alec Baldwin and James Toback will be leading a post-screening discussion of Barry Lyndon ('75) at Savannah's Lucas Theatre. The Stanley Kubrick film began showing around 2 pm. I waited in the green room before it began to do a chat with Toback (which I'd been told I was scheduled to do), but he wound up doing a longish TV interview and I was shunted aside. I didn't care that much. I took a nap in an easy chair instead.

I went upstairs to see how Barry Lyndon looked, and...Read More

I have to be honest and report that I felt under-nourished and bored during my second viewing of Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, which opened the Savannah Film Festival last night. I felt mostly pleased and charmed when I saw it in Cannes five and a half months ago, but it's too cloying and simplistic -- too much of a peanut- gallery pleaser -- to stand up to a second viewing.

Last May I called The Artist "a winning 'success' and at the same time a half-and-halfer -- a film that delivers beautifully...Read More

Low-key offbeat mood movies like The Rum Diary have always been tough sells, even if they're relatively assured and "well made" as far as that goes. The odds are that half the critics are going to take a dump on them because they aren't dramatic or wacko or plotty enough. But dry, rambling, mild-mannered half-comedies are okay in my book, and I was surprised to discover earlier this week that this long-delayed Bruce Robinson-Johnny Depp film is far from a burn.

Either you let it in or you don't. It is what it is, and it ain't...Read More

Gas lighting "refers to creating of artificial light from combustion of a gaseous fuel, including hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, propane, butane, acetylene, ethylene or natural gas. Before electricity became sufficiently widespread and economical to allow for general public use, gas was the most popular means of lighting in cities and suburbs. Early gas lights had to be lit manually, but later gas lights were self-lighting." -- from Wikipage.

I've been saying for years that it's cool with me if the Motion Picture Academy wants to give Doris Day a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. She was fairly big during the '40s and huge in the '50s and early '60s, and what she stood for -- prim, old-fashoned, pure-of-heart virtue in a perky persona -- was unmissable in its time and essential for any film scholar or historian to acknowledge today.

But to me Day's aversion to any suggestion of real sexuality always seemed a bit curious and even weird. I always thought of her as a...Read More

Michael Cieply 10.28 piece about War Horse director Steven Spielberg, called "What Makes Spielberg Jump?", will appear in Sunday's print edition. The invisible subtitle is "Spielberg really wouldn't mind winning an Oscar for War Horse (Best Picture or Best Director or both), and this is the opening salvo in an attempt to make that happen."

Here's the portion that got my attention: "For those who wonder what drives him, money is no object: The Los Angeles Business Journal recently listed Spielberg as this city's eighth richest person, with a net worth estimated at $3.2 billion."

Let's say for the sake of argument I'm having this hypothetical conversation with these other guys, and someone asks if there's a clear Best Picture frontrunner out there now. Let's imagine this conversation and see where it goes.

"The Descendants has it all," I would say. "And so does Moneyball. You or yours may not like that idea, but they both mix honest emotionalism (as opposed to cloying sentiment) with smarts and great style and thematic wholeness. They're the top dogs of the quality-movie fraternity right now.

"The Artist is a lovely homage to Hollywood's silent, black-and-white past as well as...Read More

Today's activities include a small noon lunch thrown by my Savannah Film Festival hosts (which I'm late for as we speak) and some writing/filing this afternoon along with a little bike-riding around the city. There's some kind of street party this evening along with a screening of The Artist. Maybe James Toback (who's doing a q & a with Alec Baldwin tomorrow afternoon) will fly in today or tonight, and we can do a little carousing.

Thanks to the Savannah Film Festival and the Marshall House for allowing me to stay in rom #314 (i.e, the one with...Read More

Featured in the current print issue of Esquire, but not, apparently, in the online edtion.

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone is arriving at the Savannah Film Festival tomorrow. She told me a day or two ago that she heard it might be "cold." (When women say "cold," they mean cool, brisk, sweater weather, etc.) Well, I got here about two hours ago and it's almost like Palm Beach -- it's T-shirt weather, a bit warmer than Los Angeles.

Savannah College of Art and Design theatre on Broughton Street, Savannah -- 10.28, 10:05 pm.

I arrived at the Marshall House, the festival's nerve center, around 9:15 or so, and right away I...Read More

HE's Continental Airlines prolonged agony day continues unabated. I sat in a munchkin-sized middle seat from LAX to Houston, next to a guy eating stinky barbecue Doritos. Awful. My first-class sensibilities don't synch with flying coach or sitting next to riff-raff. Currently standing next to Gate B75 -- "hellgate" -- at Houston Airport. Charging phone. No wifi or wall outlets, of course. No massively obese people waiting for the flight, which is good. Flight is delayed 85 minutes and counting. At best I'll check into Savannah's Marshall House by 7:30 pm.

Yes, I always favor the earlier, black-and-white version. Whenever, whatever. But I'm also convinced in this instance that the dead-eyed expression on Robert Mitchum's face is somewhat scarier and more malignant than the one on Robert DeNiro's. Right now the 1962 Bluray version (which costars Gregory Peck in the 1991 Nick Nolte role) is available only from Amazon.co.uk.

Robert Mitchum as Max Cady in J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear ('62).

Robert DeNiro as Max Cady in Martin Scorsese's's Cape Fear ('91).

"Bloggers and the writers who turn out well-crafted pieces on their own websites are free to write what they want. The best of them, such as Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun or Farran Nehme Smith at The Self-Styled Siren, give public voice to the way movies function as private obsession.

"Their film knowledge is broad and deep, but they wear that knowledge lightly. They understand that the true appreciation of any art begins in pleasure (and not in the "work" of watching movies). To read them is to...Read More

I've just been told that Carey Mulligan, being interested in Hollywood Elsewhere in advance of our scheduled phone interview, read yesterday's post about her evolving appearance ("Transformer") since early '09. And her feelings were hurt by some of the comments. And so she doesn't feel safe appearing on HE, given this atmosphere, so the phone chat is a no-go.

I don't blame her. I deleted a couple of the nastier ones yesterday (one by "my brain is melting"), but I guess I should have been more slash-and-burn about it. As soon as I was told the interview had been cancelled,...Read More

Today has been one of the slowest, most agonizing filing days in memory. With every post I've felt as if my arms and hands were covered in molasses and maple syrup on a cold day in February...physically and mentally drowned in the stuff, and with both of my computers (iMac and Macbook Pro) running slow and lumpy and requiring re-starts etc. I really give up. Two screenings to get to now. Back at it after 10 pm. Awful.

In a non-video jailhouse interview Bernard Madoff has told GMA's Barbara Walters that he suffers nightmares and "terrible remorse" for having "ruined his family" but is "happier in prison" than he was on the outside.

"I feel safer here," said Madoff. "I have people to talk to, no decisions to make. I know I will die in prison. I lived the last 20 years of my life in fear. Now I have no fear because I'm no longer in control."

Walters explained that "the other prisoners treat him with great respect, especially the young ones,...Read More

It's intriguing that the designer of Oscilloscope's We Need To Talk About Kevin poster chose to show Jasper Newell, who has very little screen time as the very young Kevin, rather than the utterly demonic-looking Ezra Miller, who has the much larger role of the teenaged Kevin.

From my 5.12.11 Cannes Film Festival review: "As far as Ramsay's film is concerned Kevin is just a steely-brained, black-eyed Beelzebub who's been brought to life in order to pour acid into people's lives. His ultimate acts of destruction happen at the very end, but they're pretty much...Read More

Putzing around online, writing long letters, tending to this and detail about tomorrow's trip to the Savannah Film Festival. It's already past 11 am and six or seven stories to file. Where is Yvonne Medrano hiding out and why hasn't my British West Side Story Bluray arrived yet? Two screenings to attend later today -- the very first Hollywood Elsewhere-funded screening of Tyrannosaur at Aidikoff Screening Room at 3:30 pm and then My Week With Marilyn at 7 pm.

The above six-word statement is not one of my wish-upon-a-star fantasies. It's a direct headline quote from the latest Movieline "Oscar Index" chart, presumably written by Stu Van Airsdale. I'm finally not the only guy standing against the headwind of sight-unseen War Horse praisings. If War Horse surges after it screens, fine. If it wins Best Picture, fine. But at least handicappers have stopped sipping the preliminary Kool-Aid, which is due in part to the sudden surge of Alexander Payne's The Descendants.

Carey Mulligan's sleek frosty-blonde look, seen at Monday night's Hollywood Awards, is basically a Baz Luhrman creation as she's currently playing Daisy Buchanan in Baz's 3D version of The Great Gatsby. But she's been looking fairly glammy for a while now, and I was struck this morning by the contrast between these two photos. The left-side shot was snapped by yours truly at Park City's Egyptian Theatre in January 2009 just after the first screening of An Education; the other was taken the night before last.

Share your impressions by all means,...Read More

Tower Heist star Eddie Murphy has told an anonymous Rolling Stone writer that he didn't angrily storm out of the 2007 Oscars after losing the Best Supporting Actor trophy to Alan Arkin. A Huffington Post account of the RS interview claims Murphy is saying that it's "not so" that he left the Oscars. But it sounds to me like Murphy isn't denying that he walked out -- he's saying he didn't leave in a pissed-off mood.

If Murphy is claiming he didn't actually leave the show then his driver, Karlo Ateinza , doesn't share this recollection....Read More

Warner Bros. and the producers of the currently-filming The Dark Knight Rises have all earned major pussy points for deciding against filming a scene that would have used the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park as a backdrop. Because of this one presumably brief scene TDKR would have been more than just another corporate-money-grab-on-the-back-of-a-comic-book-franchise, but now it's back to square one.

If director Chris Nolan was more of a man, he would have stood up to his producers and said "no, no...this is important...we have to shoot there."

A Dark Knight Rises insider has told me that a Zuccotti Park...Read More

I can't help being impressed by the visual qualities in this video from last night's tear-gas police attack on Oakland Occupy-ers. It's all "natural," so to speak, and it looks like something lighted by Vittorio Storaro in Apocalypse Now. Politically and historically speaking, whatever happened to the basic First Amendment right to peaceably assemble?

Six days ago...six days ago!...this brief interview with Drive sound designer Lon Bender appeared. It takes him two minutes to arrive at the subject, but some people need to meander around a while before getting down to business, and that's okay. I guess.

In recognition of the ongoing celebration of the 20th anniversary of Sony Pictures Classics as well as the generosity of the current principals, an earnest thank you from Hollywood Elsewhere. I'll use it this weekend for my trip to the Savannah Film Festival.

Focus Features needs to get the lead out and start selling Tinker Tailor Solder Spy baseball cards with a little rectangle of pink chewing gum inside each package. Sell them at newsstands and at Starbucks and Best Buy stores and 7-11s. Because that's exactly what these iTunes image profiles look like. There are at least 18 or so characters in Tomas Alfredson's film, which comes out in December, so it would take a while to collect them all.

I would buy all I can and keep them in a shoebox and trade them with...Read More

I've learned three or four things since posting last Saturday's story about that uttterly ridiculous fade-to-black mistake contained within the overture sequence in the forthcoming West Side Story Bluray, which will street on 11.15. The error was spotted last week in the British Bluray, which came out on 10.17. It was discussed at length on Home Theatre Forum starting last Friday or thereabouts.

Here's what I've been told so far:

1. Fox Home Video is the distributor of the West Side Story Bluray but it had nothing to do with this recent high-def...Read More

Given what I've been hearing for years about widespread ignorance among GenX and GenY's about American history, the possibility that a significant percentage of under-40s or certainly under-30s not having clue #1 about who J. Edgar Hoover was doesn't sound like a huge stretch. So I would guess Warner Bros. marketing is facing a slight hurdle in selling Clint Eastwood's biopic to this demographic.

Once upon a time the brainiacs out there might have assumed that J. Edgar Hoover founded the Hoover Vacuum company back in the '20s, but...well, maybe some do think that....Read More

"It's been more than a bit surreal watching the media grapple with Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots, Ad Age's Simon Dumenco wrote on 10.24. "A month ago you could tell that many big media organizations were kind of hoping, or at least expecting, that the movement would quickly fade away.

In a 9.23 piece titled "Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim," N.Y. Times "Big City" columnist Ginia Bellafante zoomed right in on the flakiest protesters she could find and then made fun of...Read More

Herman Cain's...I mean, Mark Block's recently surfaced web ad is an absolute howl because of how it ends. After saying that "I really believe that Herman Cain will be 'united' back in the United States of America" and "if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be here" and "we've run a campaign like no one's ever seen," Block sucks in a lungful of cigarette smoke.

Obvious message: If individual voters or small business owners or corporate chiefs want to act in some kind of irresponsible or unhealthy way, President Herman Cain will not give them...Read More

Tonight's Hollywood Awards ceremony was the first awards show of the season, and it occured to me early on that the major award recipients -- George Clooney, Glenn Close, Viola Davis, Christopher Plummer, Bennett Miller -- were using this event (as they do every year) to try out and refine their acceptance speeches, like a Broadway-bound play playing Boston or Los Angeles. So who fared best?

For most of the show I thought Close was the shit. Her words were eloquent, heartfelt, well chosen. Plus she got a long standing ovation as she walked to...Read More

I'm blowing off a screening of Tower Heist to attend the Hollywood Awards at the Beverly Hilton. It starts with an hour of cocktail chit-chat from 6 to 7 pm and then will run from 7 pm to 9 pm (or something like that). Every actor, director and producer chosen for an award has to attend because if they don't, someone else will be chosen and they'll attend so there's no way to win except to show up, etc. Everybody gets that. Nobody cares. It's the first pre-, pre-, pre-senior prom.

George Clooney will accept the...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Gold Derby's Tom ONeil and I riffed on the usual-usual yesterday. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

A few days ago Spike Jonze, Simon Cahn and Olympia Le-Tan's stop-motion short Mourir Aupres de Toi (To Die By Your Side) surfaced online. It was first seen at last May's Cannes Film Festival as some kind of partnership deal with Jonathan Caouette's Walk Away Renee. It's set inside Shakespeare & Co., the old-time Paris book store.

One of the interesting things is that the Macbeth skeleton's head looks like the skeleton of a cat's head.

This is one of the most overtly carnal stop-motion shorts I've ever seen. Particularly due to a couple...Read More

Why does the trailer allow us to hear Asa Butterfield pronouncing his character's full name, i.e, Hugh Cabret? Won't that alienate the bubbas out there who don't like to hear any French-sounding words? Paramount changed the title from Hugo Cabret to Hugo for precisely this reason, right? In fact, why not play it safe and dub the film so that Hugo's last name can be changed to Flabbergast or Appleseed or Wishbone? Wipe that French off the map!

Question for those who saw Hugo at the NY Film Festival: Is Hugo specific enough to identify the Paris...Read More

This is bad. This can't be good. Okay, maybe it's better than it seems but if William Shakespeare's ghost had the ability to keep tabs on Hollywood adaptations of his plays, there would be much concern right now. "It's bad enough for Roland Emmerich 's Anonymous (Sony, 10.28) to assert that Edward de Vere was the actual author of my plays," the outraged ghost might complain, "but the idea of sci-fi/fantasy journeyman-drone Joss Whedon (The Avengers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel) shooting an adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing...that's past the point of tolerance!"

From HE reader/journalist Gabe@ThePlaylist, posted earlier today: "I mostly liked Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and I'm not sure if I'm just touchy about 9/11, or that you genuinely have to be an asshole to HATE it. But it kinda gave me a headache, and the kid was unbearable. Still, except for me, not a dry eye in the house. I haven't seen a movie work like that in awhile.

"It turned me around on a lot of things: (as) Favorite Stephen Daldry movie by far...though I am not a fan; (b) Favorite Sandra Bullock performance. Again, definitely not a fan;...Read More

I'm sorry, but I've finally seen Sony Home Video's Caine Mutiny Bluray and the best I can give it is a B. I don't think it's all that fabulous looking. It's more vibrantly colored and offers more detail than the previous DVDs so yes, it's an improvement. But for a film shot in three-strip Technicolor, it doesn't have that natural glow and special richness that ought to be there. The color feels a bit grainy and "pushed," and a little too blown-up looking at times. Too many pinkish or spray-tanned faces.

And I honestly do...Read More

Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil and The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Feinberg do another Oscar chit-chat. The Best Picture contenders of the moment, they say, are still The Artist, The Descendants, Moneyball, The Help and Midnight in Paris...obviously not counting the big unseens. Noteworthy: Feinberg remembers and pronounces the name of Michel Hazanavicius, director of The Artist.

O'Neil: "The Artist is not going to win a single critics' Best Picture award. It's very lightweight. The story is a little bon-bon."

Feinberg: "There's a lot of affection for The Descendants, but I don't see it...Read More

David Nicholson, a Scotland-based HE reader, reports that the site has been looking blurry on his iPhone since he installed the iOS5 upgrade. He deduces that it has something to do with (a) JavaScript and/or (b) "something in IOS5 [that is] automatically prioritizing an embedded video (the top one?) over the rest of the site content and treating it as if it should immediately preload in preparation for playback, and accordingly blurring the background to concentrate its efforts on this task."

I noticed this problem myself last night, and am asking myself -- anyone -- what can be done to fix it? When...Read More

How to explain the $55 million earned this weekend by Paranormal Activity 3? Even with the Catfish guys (Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost) directing I felt no particular hunger to see thing. We all know the routine with these films so what was the big deal with this one?

The reviews were good for the most part but they werent ecstatic -- it only managed a Rotten Tomatoes score of 72%, which means dissent in the ranks. And it only got a lousy C-plus CinemaScore, which, if you know anything about CinemaScore grades, is...

The late Muammar el-Qaddafi (also known as Muammar Gaddafi in London's Daily Mail and Moammar Kadafi in the L.A. Times) died of a bullet to the head, according to a heavily illustrated 10.21 Daily Mail story by David Williams.

"Moments after the last grainy video was shot, it is believed Gaddafi was killed," Williams writes. "Initial reports suggested he had been executed by revolutionary forces in front of a baying mob. But there have been claims by rebels who witnessed the killing that Gaddafi was actually shot by one of his own bodyguards to spare him...Read More

Perhaps the biggest Bluray blunder since last May's Barry Lyndon aspect-ratio debacle has been discussed and lamented by members of Home Theatre Forum over the last couple of days. It concerns the just-released British Bluray of West Side Story (which is presumed to be a duplicate of the forthcoming domestic Fox Home Video version). The complaint is about a crazy and nonsensical fade-to-black that happens toward the end of the overture sequence.

Doofuses might argue that it's a relatively minor boo-boo in the greater scheme, but it's one hell of a mistake in the...Read More

Minneapolis Star Tribune contributor Claude Peck caught last Wednesday's screening of Jason Reitman's Young Adult in Edina, Minnesota, and yesterday filed a two-paragraph mini-review (which I've re-formatted into four graphs).

Charlize Theron in Young Adult

"Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody's new collaboration shares some stylistic notes with Juno -- a pop-saturated soundtrack, a woman-child stuck between adolescence and adulthood, a droll appreciation of daily life in suburbia.

"It's also a step in a new direction, both for the creative team and for movies, a mature and humane comedy centered on a misanthropic female antihero.

"Think...Read More

Now that some HE regulars have seen Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene, I'd like to know what the shakeout is. No more bearded-hipster film festival cruise-throughs -- the time for facing Joe Popcorn is nigh.

Three days ago I projected that "the word-of-mouth will be very positive, I expect, and it'll be necessary for everyone to carefully inspect Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the Loathsome Twins.

"But an unsettled feeling is also going to kick in when Joe and Jane Popcorn sit down with this film. The smooth asphalt road of the last nine and a half months is...Read More

For years Tyler Perry has done a fairly good job of proving his mediocrity as a director and playwright. Lionsgate managed to sell the notion that he might be upping his game with For Colored Girls, but the proof was in the pudding. Now he's managed to lower his rep further by casting the loathsome Kim Kardashian in a supporting role in The Marriage Counselor, his latest feature. Simply for the value of her worthless celebrity allure among vapid under-25 females (sex tape, already-over marriage to seven-foot-tall Lurch, product-endorsement deals, etc.).

Last night I finally sat down with Jennifer Seibel Newsom's Miss Representation, a 90-minute doc about the the cultural suppression of women of all ages by way of sexual pigeonholing, leering and lip-smacking. It's an old feminist lament, but it does seem that the media has been eyeballing women in a somewhat more intensive sexual manner over the last 10 or 15 years than before. And that this "conditioning" has created an unhealthy psychology among millions of younger women, persuaded as they've been to shape their images, goals and personalities to suit this Maxim-ized ideal.

I'll admit...Read More

While passing along news that United Talent Agency has dropped Boardwalk Empire star Michael Pitt as a client, Deadine's Nikki Finke mentioned that she'd "never heard" of Pitt when this development crossed her radar screen. Where was she from '02 to '05? Pitt was unmissable and almost blazing when he starred in Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Gus Van Sant's Last Days.

I'm grappling with Pete Hammond's theory that recent disputes between the two top Republican presidential candidates about treatment of Mexican illegals may somehow raise the award-season profile of A Better Life.

Hammond notes that Texas Governor Rick Perry attempted three days ago to change an opinion that he's soft on Mexican illegals because he once signed a bill allowing children of illegal immigrants to have their tuition paid under Texas's education system. He did so by accusing Mitt Romney of hiring illegal gardeners at his home several years ago. And Hammond is saying, I gather, that the general rumpus over...Read More

I had to make a couple of minor changes in the three contributor-funded Hollywood Elsewhere press screenings of Tyrannosaur, but they're now set in cement. Screening #1 will happen at the Aidikoff Screening Room on Thursday, 10.27, at 3:30 pm. Screening #2 occurs at the Ocean Avenue Screening Room on Monday, 10.31, at 7:30 pm. And Screening #3 will happen at the Sunset Screening Room on the Strip on Wednesday, 11.2 at 4 pm.

Earlier today Strand Releasing's Jenna Martin sent out her own emailed invitation to all Los Angeles press. Please RSVP to strand@strandreleasing.com. Friends of HE who didn't...Read More

I know I've posted this clip before, but it's the only atmospherically intriguing, emotionally affecting moment in Lewis MIlestone's otherwise humdrum Ocean's 11. And this fact raises a question. What other films are mostly unremarkable except for their finales? Mostly offbeat or mediocre affairs that somehow pulled it all together and brought it home with just the right ending?

The only other scene that works in this over-rated caper flick is when Richard Conte has his heart attack on the Vegas Strip and goes down saying "never the luck! never the luck!"

Remember -- we're...Read More

Set within the Serb-Bosnian conflict and particularly in a Serb-run concentration camp, Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey (Film District, 12.16) is a riff on the Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story disparate-lovers theme. A Bosnian woman (Zana Marjanovic) submits to the tender passions of her Serbian captor (Goran Kostic), but the soup is spoiled when Kostic's father (Rade Serbedzija, constantly cast as a crude, low-minded brute) plants seeds of doubt.

"U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the U.S. House, canceled his scheduled speech at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business because if was going to be open to the first 300 people who showed up. Given that hundreds of Occupy Philadelphia protesters were planning to march from City Hall to the campus to protest the speech, that could have been lively audience." -- from Chris Brennan's report in recent 10.21 posting in the Philadephia Daily News.

The two best films opening this weekend are Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene and J.C. Chandor's Margin Call. The mob will be pouring into Paranormal Activity 3, of course. But Margin Call is the movie of the moment if the Occupy movement means anything to you.

It's basically a 24-hour pressure-cooker piece about top analysts and brass at a Lehman Brothers-like outfit getting wind of the impending 2008 financial collapse, and about the various players deciding whether to make a clean breast of it, or sell off assets while the rest of...Read More

If I was in Libya right now, I would assemble a mob to hunt down the guy who shot this video. "Severe punishment to all atrocious cell-phone video shooters!" would be our war cry. Once we capture him and have him down on his knees, men in the crowd will shout, "Don't kill him! Don't kill him! He has no talent but we need him alive!" And the shooter will likely say, "What do you want? Don't kill me, my sons." (Video on jump.)

I'll be attending the Savannah Film Festival the weekend after next, from 10.28 through 10.31. It's been ten years since I last attended. I was brought down by NY publicist and Savannah native Bobby Zarem, who introduced me that year to Jane Fonda and Stanley Donen . The lures this time around are Ellen Barkin and Another Happy Day, and the company of Alec Baldwin, James Toback and Ray Liotta. And the ghosts, of course. Savannah is filled with them.

Two thoughts after seeing David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method for the second time last night. Keira Knightley is still the spark of the film -- things would be too dry and measured without her jaw-jutting intensity. And the talkiness plays better the second time. You go in knowing what it is and accepting that, and you settle into Christopher Hampton's script like an easy chair. Here's my original review.

Following last night's Academy screening of David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (l. to r.): Sony Pictures Classics co-honcho Michael Barker, Cronenberg, producer Jeremy Thomas, SPC co-honcho Tom Bernard.

Zhang Yimou's The Flowers of War (formerly Nanjing Heroes) is about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, at the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Christian Bale plays real-life missionary John Magee, an American priest who helps a number of Chinese as they struggle to survive the violent invasion of the city by Japanese troops.

Set to open in China on 12.16.11, pic has been selected as the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards.

Between his wonderfully exacting and deeply felt turn as Edward de Vere in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous and his immersive, authentic performance as a somewhat burnt-out musician in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg, I'm ready to offer an apology to Rhys Ifans for trashing him ten years ago...despite the fact that I was on the money when I did.

Here's how I put it in a 2001 Reel.com column called "Stop Rhys Ifans," which was mainly written in response to his performance in Roger Michell's Enduring Love:

"I want to put this carefully so as not to be...Read More

I went into Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (Sony, 10.28) with a chip on my shoulder. I've been suffering for 15 years from Emmerich's end-of-the-world monster-disaster films (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Patriot, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), and if there was any way I could mess with Anonymous, I was ready and loaded for bear.

Why the hell was this Destroyer of Worlds making a film about Edward de Vere (who some believe to be the actual author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare) anyway? You can't make films for cretins and then just...Read More

"Studios would love to eliminate the massive cost of having to produce hard-copies of their films to send to awards voters," The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Feinberg has written, "but will streaming completely replace DVDs or Blu-Rays anytime soon? Say, within the next five years? The overwhelming consensus among awards strategists is that they will not -- unless the Academy updates its rules again and demands that all studios make the transition at the same time.

"Understandably, no studio wants to be the first to make that transition, because doing so would inherently limit the audience of their films to some extent,...Read More

Oh, wait...sorry...this is from the 1973 Richard Lester version. The really good one, I mean, as opposed to Summit's 3D version (opening on 10.21), which currently has a 26% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Aaah, the brilliance of staging a beautifully lighted sword fight inside a church with a group of nuns telling the combatants to "stop! stop!", and then both men becoming so exhausted by the end that they can barely stand and are close to passing out. When the loser takes a sword through the chest, you're sensing that he's saying to himself,...Read More

HE follower Reed Barker asked this morning if I think that yesterday's exotic animal massacre in Zainesville, Ohio, may prompt 20th Century Fox to delay the release of Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo, currently slated to open on 12.23.

No, I doubt it. The film won't open for another two months; people forget and move on. But it does underline -- remind -- that there's something fundamentally selfish and anti-nature about keeping exotic animals inside pens and cages.

Consciousness about zoos has changed over the last few decades. Zoos are intriguing, yes, but...Read More

To his dying day, Western news sources could never agree on the spelling of the former Libyan dictator's name. MSNBC just spelled it as "Khaddafy." The N.Y. Times went with "Qaddafi." Many have sided with "Kadafi."

I've just heard from an MSNBC anchor that Qadaffi was found cowering in some kind of foxhole or drainage pipe after a gunfight, and that he said "don't shoot!" when he was captured. If this is true, clearly one or more of his captors weren't sympathetic. "Don't shoot!" is like Frank Lopez begging Tony Montana to please not kill him in...Read More

Six and a half months ago I saw Chris Weitz's A Better LIfe, and I wrote right away that Demian Bichir's authentic, quietly moving performance as a Mexican "illegal" tree-trimmer in a tough spot due to the theft of a recently purchased pickup truck was award-worthy. I'm still saying that despite the odds, and Bichir is still the quiet-man contender with his feet planted and all that. Yeah, he's been pushed aside by the fall contenders (which always happens) but he still delivered like a champ when he had his shot.

Demian Bichir at Le Pain Quotidien a...

Hollywood Elsewhere's Tyrannosaur screening fundraising campaign became a complete success this morning when the collected amount topped $2000. Many thanks to all the Good Samaritans -- you know who you are. The plan is to have three screenings. So far I've gotten verbal assurances for the Aidikoff Screening Room on Thursday, 10.27, at 4 pm, the Interactive Screening Room on Monday, 10.31 at 7:30 pm, and the Sunset Screening Room on Wednesday, November 2nd at 4 pm.

I'm figuring that between these three dates most of the necessary movers & shakers will be able to attend.

I've put the first Sherlock Holmes movie out of my mind. The basic idea with the new one, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner Bros., 12.16), is, I gather, to (a) preserve everything that was ghastly and soul-curdling about the first one and (b) buffoon things up a bit more than before. Sherlock Holmes in drag? Absolutely! This franchise is a free-for-all anyway. But why isn't Sasha Baron Cohen playing a supporting role?

Remember David Denby's review of the original, which I excerpted in a piece called "To hell With Holmes":
...Read More

Part 1 of Aaron Aradillas and Richard Seitz's latest essay -- "The Golden Age of the Car Chase, 1968-1985" -- naturally focuses on the car-chase sequences in Bullitt, The French Connection and The Seven-Ups. The narration is by Matt Zoller Seitz.

Because Lindsay Lohan has so far performed only 21 of the 360 community-service hours she was ordered to perform at the Downtown Women's Center, and because she was eventually kicked off that program, and because she's never once appeared at the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office, where she was ordered to perform 120 hours of service...because she's been acting like a haughty entitled bitch and basically thumbing her nose at the LA judicial system, Judge Stephanie Sautner revoked her bail and put her in cuffs. Lohan made bail, of course, and will return to court on 11.2.

The New York Film Critics Circle announced today they'll be cold-cocking the National Board of Review by holding their annual vote for the 2011 Film Critics Circle Awards on Monday, 11.28...two days before the annual first-out-of-the-gate NBR vote. Hah! Eat our dust!

The NYFCC's new chairman John Anderson was obviously the prime mover behind this initiative. This early vote will also slightly undercut the LA Film Critics Association (LAFCA), which also votes early-ish every year as the first legit critics croup following the NBR but now that's out the window...tough!

This means, of course, that...Read More

Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene (also known in some circles as Martha Marlene...Uhm, Whatever) has been cruising along on the bearded hipster festival circuit for almost ten months now, starting with last January's Sundance Film Festival, which is where I saw it. Everyone except David Edelstein has been pretty much on his or her knees with awe or admiration or deep like. I'm an ardent fan myself, as far as it goes.

(l. to r.) Borderline Films' Josh Mond, Antonio Campos and Sean Durklin during last weekend's Martha Marcy May Marlene junket.

The conference room stuff isn't "funny" but it's not half bad. The idea is humdrummy (i.e., we're all mediocre) but the Jack Black routine kicks it up some. But the ending totally gets it. You just have to hang in there.

Yesterday afternoon I announced Hollywood Elsewhere's Tyrannosaur fundraising campaign with the idea of raising $2000 to cover the rental of a screening room that Strand Releasing doesn't want to pay for. I'm happy to announce that just shy of $700 -- more than a third of the amount required! -- is now in the safe. So I'm asking again for all believers to step up and throw in $20 or so to help pay for this. Tyrannosaur power!

Send your Pay Pal dollars to Jeffrey Wells (gruver1@gmail.com).

The backstory behind this bizarre but encouraging turn of events...Read More

I'm looking to add a person or two to a large Park City apartment I'm co-renting with a colleague during Sundance 2012. I asked a columnist friend to join. "I can't imagine attending Sundance since January is so heavy, Oscar-wise," came the reply. "I usually have to be camped out in front of my server which continually crashes around that time of year."

My response: "You should try Sundance once. It's stimulating, loads of fun, euphoric at times...and it gets you out of the Oscar penitentiary for a few days, which is AGONY by the time January rolls around. You can't keep...Read More

In Bressonworld, casual cruelty and inhumanity are visited upon a saintly little donkey. In Spielbergland, bombs explode at night, pretty photography commences, John Williams' music swells, and everyone falls in love with Joey-the-adorable-horse. Or so the trailer indicates.

It was my hope that Steven Spielberg, needing to replace the wondrous effect of the pretend horses in the stage show, would shoot War Horse as a total horse-POV thing, allowing us to see our carnage and compassion anew through the eyes of an innocent....

I spent almost two hours yesterday futzing around and then downloading iOS5 onto my old rickety iPhone 4.0 (purchased in October 2010), and it definitely seems slicker, spiffier and faster now. I'm kind of wondering if it's worth $300 to get an iPhone 4S just so I can have a 1080 video camera (which I have anyway in my Canon Elph 300) and talk to Siri. I would absolutely get it if they would allow users to download a Douglas Rain/HAL 9000 Siri voice.

Mouse -- Monday, 10.17, 3:05 pm.

On...Read More

This new Descendants trailer is doing the usual lowball thing by trying to sell Alexander Payne's quietly comedic, often deeply moving drama to the dumb-asses by emphasizing all the obvious broad elements. George Clooney running down a street like an ostrich and hiding behind a hedge like Chico Marx, Robert Forster cold-cocking a teenage kid, etc. Every bit in this trailer says "fear not, folks...this film is going to aim low and stay low...everything in it will be right on the nose."

"I keep meeting people -- typically, men in their late 20s and early 30s -- who say, 'You know, I just don't have the impulse to go to a movie anymore,' or 'There aren't any movies any more, are there?'" This is New Yorker critic Pauline Kael writing 37 years ago about a certain spirit falling away in movies and moviegoers, and how Hollywood's tendency to flaunt crudeness and brutality was turning off audiences, and how others seemed to "like movies that do all the work for them" and were revelling in the lack of feeling and finesse.

...

Because my attention is splattered all over the place and there's only one of me and because an occasional N.Y. Times editorial will catch my eye, I've only just now seen this month-old Elizabeth Warren video (which is mentioned/linked to this 10.17 editorial "Elizabeth Warren's Appeal"). Sue me, admonish me, slap me around.

"Warren's larger appea comes from her ability to shred Republican arguments that rebalancing the tax burden constitutes class warfare," the editorial says. "In a living-room speech that went viral on YouTube last month, she pointed out that people in this country...Read More

So I'm running Tyrannosaur ads to help the film, and Olivia Colman's husband and I have arranged for me to do a phoner with her sometime tomorrow. But Strand Releasing is still refusing to screen it for LA movers, shakers & bloggers in a timely manner. The only screening I know about will happen at West L.A.'s Royal Theatre at 10 am or thereabouts on Tuesday, November 8th -- three weeks from now, and 10 days before the film opens on 11.18 .

No other screenings have been set, and I double-checked with Strand and its New York pr rep, Falco Ink,...Read More

Has wildcat tweeter Ellen Barkin fired her publicity firm or is she just being spritzy or colorful by saying her "pr peeps can fuck their motherfuckin' PR selves"? A headache, obviously, for the publicist[s] in question but at the same time it's hilarious. The woman is manic, fearless...a tweet Valkyrie. We live in public. "Jew. Jew. Jew. Muthafukkin Jewish fuckin' Jew"...shades of Ginsberg and Burroughs!

If consumed in sufficient quantities, rum can make you feel like you've dropped a tab of mescaline. This is a 21st Cenmtury concept, I realize. I wish I'd known about it in the old days but I guess the rum industry wanted it kept quiet. Which reminds me that I haven't gotten any screening invites to see The Rum Diary. Has anyone?

Philadelphia Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey wasn't elbowed out of her job like so many film critics have been over the past few years. She opted out, she's saying, because the 60-hour-per-week pace had become so demanding that she could barely keep up , and because she couldn't find a way to write book pitches on the side. She wants to write long-form.

Rickey will continue to tap out reviews on the side but only six per month, she says, or roughly 1.5 reviews per week.

A Philadelphia Daily News guy told me this morning that many, many people have been offered...Read More

Awards Daily today celebrated its first full year of podcasts. Unfortunately this happened to be a dull week so Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I covered the usual topics, etc. But this is a flat period right now -- the calm before the storm. It was all we could do to keep from nodding off. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

From Matt Taibbi's 10.12 Rolling Stone article: "Break up the monopolies. Pay for your own bailouts. No public money for private lobbying. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. Change the way bankers get paid."

If (and I do mean "if") an Occupy mob was to somehow block the path of Eric Cantor's limousine on Pennsyvania Ave. and smash the windows and pull Cantor out and rough him up like a punk and give him a Robert De Niro-in-Taxi Driver Mohawk haircut and rip his clothes off and tie him to a tree and apply a blow torch to certain parts of his anatomy, I'd initially condemn them, as would any responsible citizen...but I'd also try to forgive.

Once-legendary super agent Sue Mengers, whose career peaked from the mid '60s to early '80s, died yesterday. She was a bit of a terror in terms of her personality (or so I was always told) but a very tough and shrewd player. Dyan Cannon's character in The Last of Sheila was more or less based on Mengers. She was respected and valued and "liked", but not especially loved...or so I gathered. Here's an farewell piece written by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter.

Portrait of Sue Mengers painted by Jack Nicholson, as found on this Vanity Fair q...

The Guns of Navarone Bluray looks significantly better than any DVD version I've seen. It's worth owning for that fact alone. Compare, also, the two screen captures and notice how the Bluray version (top) contains just a wee bit more left-right information that the DVD version. As insignificant as this may seem to Average Joes, it matters to twisted Bluray fanatics like myself.

"Playing a bad mother is more taboo than playing a serial killer," Ellen Barkin recently told The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Feinberg about her role in Sam (son of Barry) Levinson's Another Happy Day. "It's just, you know, the untouchable thing."

As long as we're talking about attitudinal undercurrents, a friend suggested this morning that Barkin's current romantic relationship with Levinson -- she's a MILFy 57 and he's 26 -- will somehow work against the film's rep in some vaguely values-oriented or creatively suspicious or snooty socio-cultural way. I sharply disagreed. People who work together sometimes...Read More

In a 10.16 post on his site, Zachary Quinto has posted the following: "In the wake of the senseless and tragic gay teen suicides that were sweeping the nation [and particularly] the suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.

"Jamey Rodemeyer's life changed mine, and while his death only makes me wish that i had done this sooner,...Read More

Nobody cares about Real Steel. (Okay, obviously some people do but I don't, I mean, and I can't see how anyone of any taste or refinement or...you know, who sees the world as I do could give that much of a damn.) Nobody cares about Footloose either. Nobody cares about The Thing. Nobody cares about The Three Musketeers. Nobody cares about The Big Year...an eighth-place, $3 million wipeout. Nobody, nothing, flatline...barely a pulse.

The only box-office statistics that matter are (a) the spirited, above-average business done by Pedro Almodovar's just-opened The Skin That I Live In, and (b) the fact that...Read More

Alexander Payne's The Descendants won't open until 11.18, but the word's been running strong since Telluride/Toronto, and I think it's time to settle into a chat about Judy Greer's brief but poignant performance as Julie, the wife of a Hawaiian realtor (Matthew Lillard) whose slight relationship to George Clooney's Matt King hinges on a relationship her husband has had with Clooney's wife. She's only in three scenes, but the final one really gets you and delivers -- quietly, almost surprisingly -- one of the big emotional moments.

Judy Greer at Le Pain Quotidien -- Friday,...

I was flying NY-to-LA last Saturday and by the time I got my LA legs back the moment had passed, so that's my excuse for not posting this seven days ago.

This is one of the saddest lonely-guy endings ever. It gets me every time. But I always felt that director Bill Forsyth didn't quite mix the sound at just the right levels for the final shot of the village. The framing should have been a little tighter on the red phone booth, and the ring-ring should have been a bit louder with Mark Knopfler's music turned down just a tad. If you're not listening carefully (or watching on your 1998 TV with the sound too low) the ring-ring is almost inaudible.

David Bordwell wrote the following...Read More

I was so underwhelmed by David Frankel's The BigYear (20th Century Fox, now playing) that I forgot to review it. Howard Franklin's script about three bird-watching devotees (Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, Jack Black) tries to create an interest in who will catch sight of (or take pictures of, or simply hear) the most birds in a given year. But bird-watching tallies require no proof so anyone can fake a sighting or two. It's an honor-system competition so who could care? How could such a passive pastime possibly be seen as a "race"?

I hated Frankel's...Read More

An intelligent believer in democracy representing the "Black Hispanic Tea Party" has titled this video "Sean Penn, Liberal Democrat, Calls Both Herman Cain and Obama Niggers."

I saw Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing 21 years ago, once. And that was it. No seconds because I was soothed as opposed to aroused. I had a good time and enjoyed the hell out of Barry Sonnenfeld's cinematography and Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Albert Finney and John Turturro's performances, but it didn't blow me away. I had it ranked just below Barton Fink and just above Raising Arizona.

I saw it again on Bluray this morning and everything changed. Now it's a near-masterpiece. Now I plan to watch it...Read More

I don't know what they're eating or drinking in the Windy City, but the 47th Chicago International Film Festival has given a Silver Hugo for Best Actress to Olivia Colman in Tyrannosaur "for an outstanding performance hitting every note showing her vulnerability, her power and her humor."

From a 10.14 story by N.Y. Times reporter Marc Santora: "The average rental price for a Manhattan apartment in September was $3,331, according to data compiled for The New York Times by Citi Habitats. Last year at the same time it was $3,131, and in 2009 it was $3,013.

"In the past year the increase has been especially sharp. In TriBeCa, for example, a one-bedroom in a doorman building averages $4,635, compared with $3,937 last September, and a similar apartment in Harlem is now $2,398, up from $1,786 last year, Citi Habitats found.

"The average rent for a two-bedroom in a nondoorman...Read More

Amidst a tsunami of Venice Film Festival pans of Madonna's W.E., some overlooked that fact that the Daily Mail's Baz Bamigboye wrote a rave. "It's going prove divisive," he admitted. "A lot of people will loathe it, simply because it's been made by Madonna. But if they were to watch it with no knowledge of who directed, they would be pleasantly surprised.

"They might even find much of it enjoyable, although the odd moment may have them wondering if Madge has committed treason.

"It also happens to be one of the best-dressed movies of the...Read More

N.Y. Times sports writer Jonathan Mahler has hit on something in a 10.14 piece called "It's All Moneyball Now." The piece isn't entirely about the political echoes in the film, but it nails something I've been kicking around for about a month now.

"Thanks partly to the cultural phenomenon of Moneyball, which demonstrated that teams didn't need a big payroll to win, we're all small-market fans now, no longer rooting for the hapless underdog -- sorry, Mets and Cubs -- but for the team that is doing more with less.

"It's a subtle but significant distinction and it has unmistakable political overtones,...Read More

The difference between Hollywood Elsewhere and other sites is that HE will occasionally...uhm, make that very occasionally run ads for reasons that are somewhat questionable from a business perspective. Not within the hardcore Academy season (late October through February), of course, but once in a blue moon in the spring or summer or early fall I'll do what I can for a film I like. Because sometimes (i.e., when a film is really exceptional) it feels better to show aesthetic allegiance and/or spiritual support than to run things strictly by the Gordon Gekko handbook. Call me irresponsible but every now and then a...Read More

Former baseball player and manager Ken Medlock has been acting in character parts since '75. But I didn't notice him until he played Grady Fuson, the old-school Oakland A's scout who clashes with Brad Pitt's Billy Beane. I was so taken with Medlock's natural-seeming performance that I got his number from Moneyball director Bennett Miller and called him a couple of days ago. We did a phone interview yesterday.

Ken Medlock, Brad Pitt during filming of Moneyball.

During Medlock's first scene (i.e., the conference-room discussion between Brad and the scouts) I said to myself, "I...Read More

I drove up to Montecito last night to attend a swanky, splashy, champagne-fizzy tribute-fundraiser for Michael Douglas, organized and staged by the Santa Barbara Film Festival and honcho Roger Durling. It was a Douglas family event. The trophy is called the 2011 KIRK DOUGLAS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILM, and 94 year-old Kirk Douglas was there, of course. As was Michael's wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, old pally and creative partner Danny DeVito and Michael's American President costar Annette Bening.

For a guy who was grappling with serious throat cancer and a hovering gray cloud a year...Read More

This Kermode & Mayo interview with Tyrannosaur's Paddy Considine and Olivia Colman also works.

Included in Elvis Mitchell's November 2011 schedule for Film Independent at LACMA: (a) Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema on 11.3 with Bridesmaids director Paul Feig discussing it with Mitchell afterwards; (b) Steve McQueen's Shame on 11.7 with McQueen and Michael Fassbender appearing; (c) an 11.10 screening of Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel; and (d) an 11.16 screening of Alexander Payne's The Descendants with Payne, George Clooney, Shailene Woodley and producer Jim Burke.

The trailer for This Means War is probably a much better distillation of what it is -- Spy vs. Spy In Love With The Same Woman -- than the film itself. Two guys can't tumble off a 15-foot balcony and crash onto a table below and then go "whoa" and shake it off and walk away like it's nothing. When that happens you're in McGLand. The thought of Tom Hardy soiling his rep with a slick paycheck job is depressing, but he has bills to pay like the rest of us.

"Editor's note: Each week, Globe and Mail editors supply tongue in cheek captions to our celebrity of the week photos. This week: our Occupy Wall Street edition." -- from today's Globe and Mail's Celeb Photos page.

I noticed something at my 25th anniversary high-school graduation party. There's a special gleam in the eyes of high-school grads because they're at the beginning of their adult lives and it's all about what's to come...can't wait! That sparkle seemed diminished if not sedated in the eyes of 80% to 90% of my former classmates when they were in their 40s. Here's to those 10% to 20% who presumably still have it. If you dont have curiosity and a sense of excitement about what that curiosity may lead to, you're dead.

It's generally understood that a measured application of a predatory/ruthless instinct is a necessary component in any successful showbiz career. But if clawing becomes the all of it, you're submitting to a kind of self-poisoning. I don't even know if the predatory shark ad below (which I found through a David Poland tweet) is real or a put-on, but there's a vibe that comes off Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood game that's part put-on and part repellent, and which speaks in any event to the lesser angels of our nature.

Patti Smith perhaps wasn't attuned to the full upside of social network vistas when this was recorded three years ago, but in the first portion of this clip she expresses the seed of the mentality that has fed the various Occupy movements happening now. (Thanks to Awards Daily's Sasha Stone.)

My heart was light and gay when the news broke two months ago that Jerry Bruckheimer's The Lone Ranger had been kibboshed by Disney for being too costly. Now that the show is back on and set to open in May 2013, I'm sliding into the hole again. Barring some inspirational miracle, The Lone Ranger will primarily be about Bruckheimer, Depp, Armie Hammer, Gore Verbinksi and Disney stockholders making piles of money, and the rest of us submitting to a slow spiritual poisoning through IV tubes attached to our seats.

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg invited me to talk about everything last Sunday morning. It finally posted last night. It was a good lively chat. Feinberg sounds fine. I sound like I'm talking into a tinny 1925 microphone on an overseas line.

The play bar is at the bottom of the page. There should be a separate, stand-alone mp3 URL so people can directly link to the sound file rather than Feinberg's intro page.

When President Bill Clinton said to David Letterman last night that "one of the best things about Americans is that we don't really resent other people's success," the retort should have been something along the lines of "okay, but I think they're starting to on some level...no?"

"As the Occupy Wall Street message of representing 99 percent of Americans has spread across the country, news media coverage of the Occupy movement has spread to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts," The N.Y. Times' Brian Stelter reports in a 10.13 story. "Coverage of the movement last week was, for the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the Tea Party movement in early 2009, according to data released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center."

Related: "The U.S. anti-corporate movement has inspired an offshoot occupation in London," reports The Washington Post's Suzy Khimm....Read More

In the view of Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale, the Best Actress contenders with the most heat at this stage are The Iron Lady's Meryl Streep (based on nothing), My Week With Marilyn's Michelle Williams (good buzz on her performance last weekend at the NY Film Festival), The Help's Viola Davis (whose so-to-speak candidacy drew a "meh" response from a name-brand director last weekend), Albert Nobbs' Glenn Close (career referendum), and We Need to Talk About Kevin's Tilda Swinton.

The Outsiders, Stu seems to believe, are Young Adult's Charlize Theron (quite conceivably), Martha Marcy's Elizabeth Olsen (solid...Read More

What aside from the cutting and the choice of clips is different from the previous whatever-it-is-that-I've-seen-on-YouTube? The jaunty narration.

"The Occupy Wall Street crowd basically is saying, 'I'm unemployed and the people that caused this have their jobs again and their bonuses again and their incomes are high again. There's something wrong with this country. This is not working for me.' So I think it can be a good positive debate." -- Former President Bill Clinton, whose "let the big boys have their fun" policies contributed to the current economic malaise, speaking Tuesday night at Chicago's Chase Auditorium.

The Weinstein Co.'s My Week With Marilyn has delayed its opening by almost three weeks, ditching 11.4 in favor of 11.23. The idea is to play right through December and into January -- the heat of awards season. Deadline's Mike Fleming says the change was inspired by positive critical reaction after the New York Film Festival debut. "If you live on the Upper West Side and only take cabs, you'll love it"?

I saw Ami Canaan Mann's Texas Killng Fields sometime in late August, and now it's opening this Friday (10.14) via Anchor Bay. I've noted before that the costars are Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan (who gives the best performance), Jessica Chastain, Chloe Moretz, Stephen Graham and Jason Clarke.

I don't what to say or where to start, but I can say one thing in summation. It wasn't that good or satisfying, but at the same time I didn't feel badly burned.

"I think it's basically a very intriguing, misshapen mess," I told a...Read More

There's a moment in Moneyball when Brad Pitt asks Jonah Hill, "Would you rather get shot in the head, or take five shots to the chest and bleed to death?" Pitt was talking about the best way to fire a baseball player, but the metaphor also applies to the killing of a movie. Particularly in the matter of Paddy Considine's heavily praised Tyrannosaur, and the fact that Strand Releasing has done a brilliant job of nickle-and-diming it to death before the 11.18 opening. Especially in the case of Olivia Colman's stunningly fine performance as an abused housewife.

What kind of low-rent blonde has it off twice with a famous Hollywood actor and then gives an interview to Us Magazine about it? I'll tell you what kind. The bumblefuck declasse kind from Texas who calls herself a Lutheran. The kind that mentions Rick Perry in a discussion about presidential candidates and says she doesn't know if she'll vote for him.

Whatever happened to the idea that it's a low-rent thing to kiss and tell? The under-30s have no shame. Let it be known far and wide that Sara Leal and anyone resembling her...Read More

Forget Univeral's plan to offer Tower Heist to VOD customers in Atlanta and Portland on 11.25, or three weeks after its theatrical release date of 11.4.11. Too many exhibitors howled and threatened Armageddon and Universal caved under duress.

From a rough draft of the release: "Universal Pictures today announced that in response to theatere-owners turning purple-faced with fury and completely freaking out and spitting saliva and throwing tantrums and slamming their fists through the plaster walls and threatening to go to the mattresses Luca Brasi and Clemenza-style a request from theatre owners it has decided to delay its planned premium...Read More

Thanks to whomever at Paramount for not inviting me to this morning's screening of eight scenes from James Cameron's 3D Titanic. I really, really would have liked to attend given the likelihood that Cameron's demanding standards will result in an exceptional conversion.

TheWrap's Mike Ryan wrote this afternoon that this steroscopic Titanic "looks absolutely stunning...after watching screening after screening of shitty 3D films, it was more than refreshing to see what can be done to a film -- even a film not originally filmed in 3D -- if the appropriate amount of time and effort are applied."

The 3D scenes shown:...Read More

Frank Sinatra crooning by Nick Amado. Music, lyrics and video editing by Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan (Conan the Barbarian: The Musical, Silence! The Musical).

Actual YouTube comment by "Psychicwhoosh": "I saw Sinatra and Dean Martin perform this at the Desert Inn in 1960. It was magical. Dean was such a ham. He kept chasing Sinatra 'round? the stage with a needle trying to prick his hand for a blood sample."

Here we go again with the same old horseshit, and people don't care because they want to see this thing and you can't stop them, etc. One look at this trailer and you've more or less seen the movie, on a certain level. I'm developing a notion that Samuel L. Jackson has read every line in every part in every film he's ever been in the exact same way. Robert Downey, Jr. has his Tony Stark performance down to a science, but at the same time it feels as if he phoned it in.

I'm singling out this 10.10 Henry Rollins video clip because he supplies the best thematic line since "we are the 99%," to wit: "Obama dropped the ball and the people picked it up. I'm a fan of the guy, but he's got some splainin' to do."

Edited: My general impression is that last night's work-in-progress screening of Martin Scorsese's Hugo didn't go over all that well. Well, it did for some but for others it was an in-and-outer. And given this less-than-a home-run-or-perhaps-even-a-triple response, I would have felt badly if I'd spent $600-plus to remain in New York in order to see it. (Which of course I didn't.)

Martin Scorsese before last night's New York Film Festival showing of Hugo.

Here's a mildly amusing account of the Alice Tully Hall experience by Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale.

Hugo "will be a worthy addition...Read More

"Boston police began arresting scores of Occupy Boston protesters who refused to leave a large part of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway early this morning," the Boston Globe's John M. Guilfoil and Derek J. Anderson reported at 2:55 am this morning.

"At 1:20 a.m., the first riot police officers lined up on Atlantic Avenue. Minutes later, dozens of sheriff vans and police wagons arrived and over 200 officers in uniforms and riot gear surrounded the Greenway.

"Police Superintendent William Evans and Commissioner Edward F. Davis watched from across the street. Evans gave the crowd...Read More

I'm sorry but this scene is amusing, perfectly acted and shrewdly written, like the film itself. And the cool, calm and collected Christoph Waltz rules here like he never ruled in Inglourious Basterds.

A failing aspect-ratio grade is hereby given to Sony Home Video's new Bluray of The Caine Mutiny, and particularly to Sony's restoration guy Grover Crisp for approving a 1.85 masking of a film that was absolutely intended to be seen in a 1.33 or 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio.

Image from the recently released Bluray of Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny.

Same scene (although perhaps not same shot) with boxier cropping. What do we gain as viewers from not seeing a bit more sky, and a fuller view of the lecturn...

William F. Buckley's voice had a wonderfully deep timbre, and his chilly blue eyes had a faintly demonic glint as he was making his points against opponents. I'm asking myself if any TV interviewer today introduces guests in this slightly jaundiced way that seems to be saying to the viewer "this man or woman doesn't pass muster according to my sights, and is possibly not be trusted."

Nobody would dare do this today, and yet there was something delicious in Buckley's way of putting his guests down. He was like a man who was masterful with...Read More

Leaving aside the merits of the view that Obamacare and Romneycare are two sides of an evil coin, you have to give some creative credit to Perry's advertising team for delivering a horror-film, lightning-flash, evil-twin image in Perry's Romney-takedown ad, which has just been released. If a presidential candidate has ever used a horror flash-cut in a political ad before, I'm not aware of it. Here's the ad, and Michael D. Shear's N.Y. Times story about it.

The way to understand establishment hostility towards the Occupy Wall Street-ers, in the view of N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman, "is to realize that it's part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

"Wall Street's Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They're not John Galt; they're not even Steve Jobs. They're people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people,...Read More

Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil isn't entirely sold on the term "Oscarball," which I came up with yesterday to describe his new, in-depth, sabermetrics-styled polling and tabulation system on his reconfigured site.

But I think it's a perfect way to describe his new vote-analysis software program (which has cost him a pretty penny), and it does seem to be a kind of Bill James/Billy Bean-ish way of sizing up award-season action by aggregating opinion from three sectors -- so-called Oscar "experts", Gold Derby editors and readers -- and allowing participants to change favorites...Read More

Nobody at the Weinstein Co. told me about last night's 6 pm screening of My Week With Marilyn, which was more or less concurrent with the NY Film Festival evening showing. A friend told me about it at 5 pm while I was at a party, but it was too late to put down my glass of red wine and plate of food and hop on the scooter and go roaring over to the Wilshire screening room with a mild buzz-on. So I shined it.

That aside three reviewers -- Deadline's Pete Hammond, Variety's Ronnie Schieb and...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I began yesterday morning with a box-office discussion with Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino for Oscar Poker 51. And then we did a Part 2 at the Sunset Towers with Gold Derby 's Tom O'Neil -- partly a discussion of Tom's new sabermetrics analysis engine -- i.e., "Oscarball." And partly a general discussion of Oscar season hopefuls. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Last night I mentioned the alleged inevitability of The Help's Viola Davis winning the Best Actress Oscar to an A-list director who was hosting a party at his home, and if anything his pulse rate dropped. His reaction to Davis in a word: "meh." Not a nod that said "okay, yeah, maybe," Not a half-enthusiastic "yeah, she's good in that film" or "yeah, friends have told me they like her a lot in that film." Just a shrug and a meh. And he knows a lot of working Academy people who know people, etc.

I'm not saying Davis isn't an all-but-guaranteed nominee....Read More

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced today that "it is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs. This means no change: one website, one account, one password... in other words, no Qwikster."

Update: Deadline's Michael Fleming is reporting that tonight's NYFF "work in progress' sneak is definitely Martin Scorsese's Hugo.

Previously: Last night Deadline's Pete Hammond seemed to more or less agree with what I posted on Friday about Martin Scorsese's Hugo most likely being the "work in progress" sneak that'll screen tonight at the New York Film Festival. The tweets confirming...Read More

The most devastating withering amusing response so far to this morning's My Week With Marilyn press screening wasn't Eric Kohn's Indiewire pan, but a tweet by Jamie Christley: "If The King's Speech bugged you, steer clear of My Week With Marilyn. But if you live on the Upper West Side and only take cabs, you'll love it."

Kohn has called this Weinstein Co. release "exactly the type of tolerably superficial crowd-pleaser that it looks like. Like Richard Linlater's Me and Orson Welles, it studies classic Hollywood yore from the perspective of a little known crew member. However, My Week With Marilyn...Read More

Of all the bits on last night's Saturday Night Live, the most popular, to go by critics and comment boards, was Bill Hader's impersonation of Clint Eastwood. Which I naturally can't find a video clip of.

The death of former Watergate bagman Kenneth H. Dahlberg, 94, was reported today, although he died four days ago. It's not fair that Dahlberg, an ace dogfighter and a P.O.W. camp escapee in World War II and a successful businessman for most of his life, is primarily known as the guy who was busted for Watergate money shenanigans by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But that's how it is.

I feel I know Dahlberg as well as I know Harry Lime or Alec Leamas or any other ethically murky character in an adult...Read More

I saw this Sean Young-talking-to-David Letterman clip last night on David Poland's Hot Blog. I've always liked Young's brass or sass or whatever but reaching out to the "big boys"? Doesn't she look a little too 40ish and mommy-ish (i.e., heavy) to rouse the imagination of that crowd? I think she needs to reach out to the "small boys" and see what happens. At least she's being honest.

As much as I admire and respect Michael Fassbender's sex-addict performance in Shame, I don't think he has a chance in hell of getting any Best Actor action from it. He's playing an ice man who's too remote, too indecipherable. Ditto his performance as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method. The 2011 Fassbender performance that got to me the most? That I found emotionally whole and affecting and quite supple? His performance as Rochester in Cary Fukanaga's Jane Eyre. But no one's paying attention to that one so I suppose that means "game over" for the guy. Or does it?

The central dramatic element in The Swell Season, a nicely captured black-and-white doc about how Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova coped with the success of Once, is, of course, the breakup of their romantic relationship. And the big torpedo, boiled down, is Irglova's inability to deal with the hooplah, which is due to her being too young.

This is almost completely typical. Whenever an under-25 performer suddenly hits it big, they tend to withdraw from the resulting attention, and then rebel against it in this or that way. Leonardo DiCaprio seemed to more or less...Read More

The narration's boastful tone towards the end of this trailer for Barry Avrich 's Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project has me concerned. There's a great documentary to be made about Weinstein, whom I've always seen as a scrappy East Coast mogul in the tradition of The Bad and the Beautiful's Jonathan Shields (as played by Kirk Douglas). A little voice is telling me that Avrich's film, which opened online yesterday via Sundancenow, might not be it.

Has anyone seen it? I'll try to catch it sometime this weekend.

Bullfighter Juan Jose Padilla was badly gored in the face last night by a bull named Marques. To which I say "tough tits." I have no sympathy at all for a costumed sadist who gets hurt while acting out a ritual in which a poor dumb animal is ritualistically taunted and then speared to death for the delight of spectators. The altercation happened in a bullfight that was part of the annual Virgen del Pilar festivities in Zaragoza, Spain.

A journalist friend said something yesterday that's stayed with me. We both agreed that in a perfect world Olivia Colman's performance in Tyrannosaur would easily place her among the very top contenders for the Best Actress Oscar. But she hasn't got a chance, my friend said, because Strand Releasing, Tyrannosaur's U.S. distributor, apparently has no mad money to spend on her campaign. And without ample funds there can't be any kind of press tour, trade ads, special industry screenings and food-and-drink events in Los Angeles and New York.

So this is the reality then. Your motion-picture performance might be devasating...it might soar...Read More

Congratulations offered to DreamWorks/Disney, Hugh Jackman, Angry Films' Don Murphy and Real Steel for more than doubling the weekend tally of George Clooney's The Ides of March (even though the latter is in 2199 theatres compared to Steel's 3440) and taking the weekend's top slot with a projected $27 million.

Ides, far and away the better film, will end up at #2 with something like $11 million. I don't want to know about the third-place Dolphin Tale, which will end up doing around $8.5 million by Sunday night for a $48 million tally. And it's the third weekend for the fourth-place Moneyball, hangin'...Read More

I don't recall a single moment in any of the three Danish-made Girl movies in which Noomi Rapace conveyed this level of vulnerabiity. And I don't know if this kind of emotionality is in Rooney Mara's performance in David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo either. The pic was shot by Jean-Baptiste Mondino for Le Monde.

What's that white-gray stuff on her face and hair? Volcanic ash?

A guy who read my earlier Hugo post and who definitely writes well has conveyed the following: "I saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo at a Chicago test screening in mid-September. Some comments on your posted expectations":

1. "Scorsese's 3D work will be '50s-style, I'm expecting. Lots of House of Wax-y pop-out shots."

Chicago comment: "Not at all. Lots of wide-angle and tracking shots. In fact, there's one tracking shot in the opening 10 minutes that outdoes the Copa shot in Goodfellas in terms of sheer technical razzle-dazzle -- it follows Hugo across and around catwalks, down a...Read More

I've been 80% to 85% persuaded by an unnamed source that Monday's New York Film Festival screening of "a work-in-progress from a master filmmaker" will be Martin Scorsese's Hugo (Paramount, 11.23). I won't attend due to travel plans that can't be changed, but if my source is correct, I can live with missing this screening. I'll see it soon enough. It's okay.

I'll feel shattered if the sneak turns out to be The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or J. Edgar even, but...we'll obviously know soon enough.

Scorsese's 3D work will be '50s-style, I'm expecting. Lots of House of Wax-y pop-out shots....Read More

In his 10.7 column, N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman has offered some of the most sensible thoughts I've heard from a boomer-aged pundit about the various Occupy happenings: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.

"When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided...Read More

Before reading Todd McCarthy's 10.6 review of Brian Kellow's "Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark", I'd never heard about the legendary New Yorker film critic having allegedly hastened the death of director Roberto Rossellini by inflicting stress on the poor man. During their mutual service on the 1977 Cannes Film Festival jury, McCarthy writes, Kael "argued so relentlessly with the aging and ailing Rossellini for two weeks that the uncharitable accused her of killing the revered director, who died the following week."

New Yorker critic Pauline Kael during a 1982 interview, when she was 62...

In 1840s Baltimore Edgar Allen Poe (John Cusack) joins forces with a stalwart detective (Luke Evans) to catch a serial killer who's apparently been inspired by Poe's writings, and whose next victim may be Emily (Alice Eve), whom Poe is in love with...Jesus! A movie can't be funded until it's ground down into genre mulch and made to closely resemble other films of its type (i.e. Sherlock Holmes, From Hell, Sleepy Hollow). 19th Century arterial splatter with lots of fog.

It's called The Raven, and it comes out of 3.9.12. Here's the Apple trailer.

The images in Pedro Almodovar's films are always luscious, sensuous, refined to perfection. Paying $200 to own 600 of them (including some never-before-published personal photos) to have and hold seems like a good deal to me. Taschen's "The Pedro Almodovar Archives", edited by Paul Duncan and Barbara Peiro, will hit stores on the same day that The Skin That I Live In (Sony Classics, 10.14) opens.

Yesterday media theorist and cultural pulse-taker Douglas Rushkoff posted a piece on CNN.com called "Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it." He was subsequently interviewed by an obviously skeptical, not-getting-it CNN anchorperson.

Rushkoff's points are that (a) mainstream media types are having a hard time understanding the groundbreaking nature of the protests because they're thinking in 20th Century street-protest terms while Occupy Wall Street is a "patient" internet phenomenon and (b) the discussions heard in Liberty Park about the 1% vs. 99% economic inequities have been, he feels, "more profoundly intelligent"...Read More

My decision to fly back to Los Angeles on Saturday morning now seems like a major miscalculation. Not only will I miss seeing My Week With Marilyn at the Sunday press screening, but the just-announced "work in progress from a master filmmaker" that will screen on Monday night at 7pm. "The film is due to be released in theaters this year," says the official announcement.

Not the "scariest, snarliest bulldog in the pen" but "the most powerful man in the world"? When Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan called the .357 Magnum "the most powerful handgun in the world", I believed him. But the Hoover description seems grandiose.

Early last July ESPN's Bill Simmons confided that he'd seen Jason Reitman's Young Adult (Paramount, 12.9), and that Charlize Theron 's lead performance was a career landmark for her. Trailers always lie but this one suggests, at least, what Theron's performance might be. Is anyone getting a sense that Simmons may have been right?

"Remember when we said earlier about Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise and how he needed Jerry Maguire [to do that], and how you watched for two hours...?," Simmons said. "And this is Tom Cruise throwing 98 miles an hour? Charlize Theron...Read More

No superhero movie can work if it appeals only to ComicCon fanboy types. It has do that deep-theme, double-intelligent, heavy-lifting thing (like Captain America did) to attract skeptics and haters like myself. I don't see this happening with Joss Whedon's The Avengers (Disney/Marvel, 5.4.12) because Whedon is an unregenerate, comic-book-worshipping, fanboy-servicing journeyman -- not an art-visionary director like Cameron or Fincher or Del Toro, strictly a fantasy-realm clock puncher.

And after all the X-Men movies, who wants to slog it out with another superhero ensemble piece?

The problem with Douglas Rain's HAL voice being Siri'ed, of course, is that he no longer has that voice. His 2001: A Space Odyssey dialogue was recorded 44 or 45 years ago, when Rain (born in '28) was in his late 30s. He's now 83, and his voice surely has that vaguely fluttering, higher-pitched old man timbre. Apple needs to find a Rain-sounding guy to pinch-hit. (Thanks to HE reader Mark Frenden.)

If an opener has an under-60% Rotten Tomatoes rating, it's probably a wash. If it's under 30% it's a must-to-avoid. But if it's at 10% or lower, some kind of exceptional chord has clearly been struck. (Note: as the RT rating will change as the day wears on, I'll re-adjust and rephrase.)

Movieline's latest Oscar Index is a typical example of how clubhouse, path-of-least-resistance spitballing manifests when you're tasked with reconfiguring these charts week after week. It's all about familiar emotional default. Take your standard Spielberg kowtowism, ignore the tendencies on view in his last war film (i.e., the one about Martians, particularly the happy finale) and throw in the recently-dropped War Horse trailer, the horse all but crying in close-up...obviously the Best Picture contender to beat. Simple, easy and who's to dispute?

In my somewhat more real-worldish Oscar Balloon chart Moneyball and The Descendants share the top two...Read More

Almost a month ago I ran my review of George Clooney's The Ides of March (Sony, 10.7). It opens tomorrow so here it is again: "[This] 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. Plus it packs a stiffer 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...Read More

13 and 1/2 months ago I wrote that "something's wrong, it appears, with William Monahan's London Boulevard, a Graham King-funded crime drama which finished principal in August '09 and has long been presumed/rumored to be a fall 2010 release. That seems unlikely at this stage." It did open in England in late November of last year, but it got killed by most critics, earning a 32% rating.

I speculated in my piece that "Monahan's superb screenwriting talent" -- his script for Martin Scorsese's The Departed won an Oscar -- "hasn't fully translated over to directing, and that his inexperience combined...Read More

I'm sure this trailer deceives in ways I haven't yet discerned. I've heard so-so things, but within these two minutes and 7 seconds, My Week With Marilyn looks fairly okay. It has poise, snap, craft. And a convincingly conservative yesteryear quality. And Michelle Williams' performance as Marilyn Monroe, you can sense, might eventually be regarded as a head-to-head, playing-a-famous-person comptetitor of Meryl Streep's Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

As noted, I won't see it at the New York Film Festival this Sunday due to flying back to LA on Saturday.

Two details from tonight's announcement about Universal intending to release Brett Ratner's Tower Heist on-demand only three weeks after it opens in theaters on 11.4, or on 11.25. One, the viewing price, according to L.A. Times's Ben Fritz, will be $59.99. And two, it will only be offered to Comcast subscribers in Atlanta and Portland. But exhibitors know what this means -- the thin end of the wedge.

"Where Tyrannosaur's Peter Mullan has previous experience in playing self-destructive types (i.e., My Name Is Joe), Olivia Colman has a dramatic blank slate -- and she smashes it. Best known for her Peep Show persona, Colman is the most disarming of presences -- an outwardly jolly woman who hides a well of sadness within her. [Director] Paddy Considine's punishing close-ups frequently see her friendly veneer wobble; the mask slips, the voice breaks, the eyes well up.

"She gives a heartbreaking performance, swathed in sorrow, free of grandstanding and full of nuance. There's no doubt it's worthy of awards. I simply have no...Read More

My bad for going to a 6 pm screening of London Boulevard and then visiting a little Italian place on West 50th for 90 minutes and not hearing about the death of Steve Jobs until I walked by a bar on Tenth Avenue and saw the ticker-tape news on a TV. Needless to say my life has been made easier, smoother and immeasurably enhanced by the innovations that Jobs and his Apple guys brought to our world. A thousand "thank you's" on my knees.

I'm sorry that Jobs had only 56 years on the planet, but damned if...Read More

Take this with a grain, but Whatculture's Matt Homes is reporting that the title of James Bond #23 may be Skyfall. "Sony recently registered a bunch of URL's with variations on 'Bond film-Skyfall'," he writes, "and with the naming of the film to come imminently, it really does feel like Skyfall is just days away from being announced as the official title.

"You might remember Quantum of Solace's name was figured out one day early when websites spotted Sony had taken out the domains Quantum of Solace." He says that "Sony has ignored our verification emails (it's been 6 hours since...Read More

Once again, a '50s and early '60s TV series that currently means absolutely nothing to anyone except aging boomers who watched it on black-and-white Sylvania TVs as kids is being made into a feature film. Variety's Jeff Sneider is reporting that Warner Bros. and Robert Downey are trying to assemble a Perry Mason movie with the idea of creating a franchise.

Earth to creators: the heyday of the Perry Mason TV series happened between 50 and 54 years ago. Who under the age of 50 gives a hoot now? And with so many popular cop...Read More

I said this yesterday in a comment thread but it needs front-page exposure: "Do you know a motion picture score that is just right and doesn't try to blatantly touch the heart and stir the soul, but does so all the same? That settles right inside the heart of a film and conveys the essence of the key emotional moments with wonderful subtlety? Mychael Danna's Moneyball score."

Siri is a highly intelligent, HAL-like talking software inside the iPhone 4S. It not only understands sentences and phrases and commands but assesses and reports back to you, like a personal assistant. Will it have different voices? I'm not sure I want my personal Siri to sound like some middle-aged lady at the DMV. I'd rather talk to some guy who sounds like Pee Wee Herman. I'm probably going to have to repeat things to Siri, and I may sometimes lose my temper with it. "Yes, asshole...I just said that!"

Harkness Screens will be previewing a new Digital Screen Checker, a low-cost hand-held digital cinema device for accurately measuring foot lamberts, at ShowEast (10.24 through 10.27 in Miami). There's a similar device being sold in England. I'd love to have one of these things at the ready for those times when I've noticed low screen-light levels, as I did on 9.25.

I saw the first half of Martin Scorsese's 208-minute George Harrison doc during the Telluride Film Festival, and was only somewhat impressed. It covered the first 23 or 24 years of Harrison's life, or '43 to '69...and I felt I knew all that going in. But the second half, which I finally saw at a New York Film Festival screening, is highly nourishing and affecting and well worth anyone's time.

Yes, even for the guys like LexG who are sick to death of boomer-age filmmakers and film executives endlessly making movies about their youth. It's...Read More

Fox Searchlight acquiring Steve McQueen's Shame meant that it would be out sometime in November or December, so yesterday's FS announcement that the film, which costars Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, will open is on 12.2.11 was...well, it was fine but it didn't exactly quicken my pulse because I knew it was coming.

"Even with a relatively small amount of debt, decent health insurance, and a decent paying job, my family lives month to month. Treading water is the best anyone I know can seem to hope for. I believed I was voting for a president who would rein in Wall St. and reverse Bush's aggressive foreign policies. What I got was more of the same and worse. I am the 99%."

If you want to feel fairly good about your job and quality-of-life situation, even if you're not doing as well as you'd like, spend 10 or 15 minutes reading...Read More

War Horse is a Steven Spielberg film, all right. Sound and fury, emotion on its sleeve, very handsome photography, first-rate actors conveying sensitivity and compassion. But beware of any shot of any young actress with a tear running down her cheek. Beware of dolly-in shots of handsome young farm lads. Beware of title cards that say "touched by kindness" and "hope survives." Beware of French horny orchestral music that tries to melt you down.

I've been meaning to post this since yesterday afternoon. I know a lot of the HE regulars are going to slap this Luc Besson film around. It's obviously a film about enshrining portraying Aung San Suu Kyi, a tough, progressive Burmese politician, as a martyr. Which she certainly was during her ten years of house arrest. There's a reason I didn't make a big effort to see this in Toronto. I don't respond well to stories about keeping the faith despite oppression and punishment.

Cohen Media Group will open The Lady on 11.30.11.

In my 9.5 Telluride Film Festival review of Steve McQueen's Shame (which will have its NY Film Festival screening on Thursday morning) I called it "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 light of any kind. The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. [And] this is what an art film does -- it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do."

I felt all alone for a...Read More

As I'm flying back to Los Angeles on 10.8, I won't be seeing Sunday's NYFF showings of Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn. The tweets will of course address question #1: is Michelle Williams' performance as Marilyn Monroe a Best Actress Oscar contender? On 8.15 I ran a quote from a credible fellow who had seen this Weinstein Co. release. "There is absolutely, positively no doubt that Williams is right alongside Meryl Streep and Glenn Close at the very front of the Best Actress race," he said.

My Week With Marilyn is opening domestically on...

Two days ago the Guardian published a pro-Occupy Wall Street piece by Mark Ruffalo, who recently spent two days with the protestors. "99% of us have paid a dear price so that 1% could become the wealthiest people in the world," he wrote toward the end. "It's time to check ourselves, to see if we still have that small part that believes in the values that America promises. Do we still have a shred of our decency intact in the face of debasement?

"If you do, then now is the time to give that forgotten part a voice. That is what...Read More

Lars von Trier's Melancholia (Magnolia, on-demand 107, theatrical 11.11) screened last night at the New York Film Festival, and then the stars of the cast -- Kirtsen Dunst, Charlotte Ginsbourg, Alexander Skarsgard -- attended an after-party at the Stone Rose Lounge inside the Time Warner Center. It boiled down to free wine and beer and Deleon Tequila, and a sadistic deejay playing house music that put me in a bad mood and kept me there.

Melancholia star Kirsten Dunst during last night's after-party at the Stone Rose Lounge.

After catching Melancholia at the Cannes Film Festival...Read More

As talk persists that Woody Allen's universally loved Midnight in Paris will probably land a Best Picture Oscar nomination, there's also no denying that Corey Stoll's hugely enjoyable, spot-on performance as young Ernest Hemingway is a Best Supporting Actor contender. Okay, maybe not up there with Max Von Sydow and Christopher Plummer, but definitely duking it out with Albert Brooks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Andy Serkis.

Corel Stoll in front of Luce (B'way at 69th) -- Tuesday, 10.3, 2:05 pm.

Stoll is on-screen for maybe ten or twelve minutes in Midnight in Paris, and it doesn't...Read More

You're dead if you fall from a height of...what, 50 feet? 75 feet? Something like that. But theoretically falling from the 124th floor of Dubai's Burj Khalifa Tower, which is 2717 feet high, is, like, an abstraction, man.

Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala will now open on January 12, 2012 rather than the previously announced date of 10.14.11. This date isn't posted on Coming Soon, the iMDB or even on the film's own website. But Bala's marketing consultant David Dinerstein has just informed me of this.

"January 12th is a great date because it'll give us more time for long-lead press and the ability to focus on a better awards campaign for the film," Dinerstein said. "The Oscar nominations will be announced a few days later, and it's already opened in Mexico, making it eligible for a Best...Read More

Sony Home Video's The Guns of Navarone Bluray streets on 10.18. It'll look more robust and detailed than the various DVD versions, I'm sure, but according to a 9.29 Home Theatre Forum riff by restoration guru Robert Harris, this 1961 war film can only look as good as its appalling preservation history allows.

"To the best of my knowledge, The Guns of Navarone was photographed on the new Eastman 5250 stock, the first to have high level anti-dye fade characteristics," Harris writes. "My comments are personal opinion, and some may disagree, but here goes.Read More

This New York Observer-captured clip of an Occupy Wall Street protestor making mince meat of a Fox News stooge never aired. The guy is easily as sharp and well-spoken and spot-on with his arguments as Cenk Uygur, if not more so. He should be on Young Turks or MSNBC or Current TV. And that Civil War-era Union army cap is a nice touch.

You'll recall that 20th Century Fox had its first press screenings of Rise of the Planet of the Apes very late in the game, only days before it opened on 8.5. When some suggested that the film might have built up more opening-weekend steam if early positive reactions had circulated earlier, Fox reps said that a demanding post-production schedule kept them from showing it any sooner.

"I know for a fact it was about effects delivery," a rep told me. "It was down to the wire as this was originally going to be a Thanksgiving release."

Now it turns out the real...Read More

Lars Von Trier's Melancholia plays tonight at the New York Film Festival. (I couldn't get there in time but I'll attend the after-event.) I'm fairly certain that 90% of the questioners speaking with Kirsten Dunst on the red carpet asked her about Von Trier's Nazi comment that he made in Cannes. That has always been an oppressively lame thing to dwell on. It's a shame that it won't go away.

Less than an hour after Von Trier blurted out those idiotic remarks, I urged readers to forget it. Von Trier "has turned into a very dry and clumsy kidder," I...Read More

I'm glad that John Cameron Mitchell and Melanie Laurent got nice paychecks for doing this newish Hypnotic Poison commercial, but cinematically it's nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Aren't all perfumes about trying to "put a spell" on someone? Isn't it redundant to hear Nina Simone sing these actual words? Isn't it a bit redundant to use the word "hypnotic" in the first place?

This Star Wars family portrait painting has been commented upon elsewhere, but I wanted to show it to those who haven't bought the Star Wars Bluray set (which I still haven't seen, being without a Bluray player or large high-def monitor during my New York visit) and just say for the record that this is the most concise visual expression of the 21st Century mind of George Lucas that I've ever seen.

The six-film Star Wars family, as found inside the multi-disc Star Wars Bluray book.

The ruthless, power-mad dark side vs. the serene and illuminated...Read More

Here's Press Play's final chapter of the Roman Polanski series, which began last week. Cut and commented upon by Matt Zoller Seitz along with Kim Morgan.

Seitz update: "Mr. Peel is correct. This video essay is a collaboration between me and Kim, but the text is a slightly rewritten version of a column Kim originally wrote for her blog Sunset Gun. If you watch to the end you will see that the first credit after the final shot is 'written and narrated by Kim Morgan,' followed by my editing credit."

...

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I recorded Oscar Poker 50 yesterday morning. I have to say that it's essential for good chatter to talk about films that have moved us, period, and not to always reduce the equation to "is it Oscar-worthy or not?" Let the chuckleheads come to us, and not vice versa. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

"It's a drag how late-summer, early-fall festivals like Telluride and especially Toronto are now too often seen as warm-ups for the Oscars. Both events solicited that attention, and grew more influential as a result. Yet is that what we want from film festivals? This isn't as true of Cannes...because it takes place in May and remains a showcase for world cinema and French cultural patrimony. It's where Brad Pitt can work the red carpet, but also where filmmakers as dissimilar as Terrence Malick and Apichatpong Weerasethakul can be talked about without that chucklehead, Oscar, sucking up all the air in the room." --...Read More

Rooney Mara's eyebrows are too dark, but I can let that slide.

In a 10.2 N.Y. Times column, Frank Bruni is arguing that it's "ludicrous" to bring up Gov. Chris Christie's weight as an indicator of character issues that might conceivably get in the way of being a fully effective President. Unwise and unfair, says Bruni. "Mettle has better measurements than the number of scoops in your post-dinner sundae or miles in your pre-breakfast run," he claims.

I'm sorry, but that's really not true. A person who can't say no to french fries or ice cream or a bucket of KFC is in the same predicament as a compulsive gambler or alcoholic or...Read More

If someone could please send along a PDF of Charlie Kaufman's Frank or Francis, I'd be much obliged. Just for the pleasure of it. Update: I've been sent a copy, thanks.

From Awards Daily: "Steve Carell will play Frank, a Kaufman-esque writer/director who's on the Oscar track at the beginning of the script. His nemesis is Jack Black's Francis, an online film blogger/commenter who pretty much hates everything and everyone but especially Frank's work.

"No one comes out of this thing unscathed. Kaufman shines the cruel light of irony on the whole Oscar dog-and-pony...Read More

Sometimes the simplest things provide the most profound pleasures. I'm not the cologne-wearing type but my father used to slap this stuff on when I was a kid, and I remember liking the aroma when I passed by him in the upstairs hallway when he was about to leave for work.

So two or three days ago I bought some, and it's made me very happy on some level to slap it on after all these decades. Aqua Velva has been a staple of American regular-guy culture since the 1930s, I believe. It's like Burma Shave.

Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala (Fox Int'l, 10.14) seemed unbowed and undiminished during my second viewing last night at Avery Fisher Hall. It's a very rare art film that delivers edge-of-your-seat popcorn thrills, but Bala does that and then some. All fans of grade-A action thrillers and/or the classic film language of Michelangelo Antonioni are required to see this Mexican-made masterwork as soon as possible.

It's easily on my personal ten-best list of 2011, and is certainly the best Mexican-beauty-queen-coerced-into-becoming-a-criminal-accessory-by-drug-gangsters movie ever made. It's a flat-out triumph, and 23 or 24-year-old Stephanie Sigman, whose resume...Read More

Whoever was hired to screen the digitally restored Ben-Hur this morning at a New York Film Festival screening messed up big-time. It wasn't the fault of the Warner Home Video guys, who have reportedly produced a stunningly exquisite Bluray. (Every Bluray reviewer has said this.) But I do know the following:

(a) The sound this morning was ridiculously out of synch, and it got worse and worse until someone finally found the projectionist (who had left the booth and was out having coffee or something) and told him to stop the film and re-synch it. It...Read More

Early this afternoon Living in the Material World director Martin Scorsese was asked to explain the cultural significance of the Beatles and George Harrison in particular becoming advocates of Eastern-style meditation and mysticism and notions of Godhead satori or enlightenment, which began to happen in mid 1966 and picked up serious speed in '67 and '68 and then bloomed in various related ways during the '70s and beyond.

"The man who gives Moneyball its soul as well as, at times, its drive and exuberant energy is Brad Pitt, which surprises me, since I had written him off as a good-looking guy without much temperament," writes New Yorker critic David Denby in his 10.3 review of Moneyball.

"Pitt was fun in such films as Snatch, in which, playing an Irish bare-knuckle boxer, he throws himself around the set and speaks in a brogue thicker than the head on a pint of Guinness, and he was exciting as the unpredictable, mock-fascist underground leader in Fight Club....Read More

Is there general agreement with my view that Jonathan Levine's 50/50 is an affecting, honestly configured drama ribbed or seasoned with occasional Rogen laughs (which you really need to call "yuks") but is hardly a comedy, or do some feel that the term "comedy" actually, literally applies? What did the room feel like as it played? How old did the audience seem to be?

Last night's New York Film Festival opener for Roman Polanski's Carnage went nicely, I thought. But it began raining fairly hard before the film began at 9 pm and was still coming down when the film ended just shy of 10:40 pm. There were no cabs in the rain, of course, so everyone took the IRT down to Times Square then walked four blocks over to the Harvard Club -- slightly crouching, no umbrellas, somewhat exasperated expressions. My back felt as if someone had poured a glass of water onto my sport jacket. The party was great. The bull elephant head on the...Read More

Last night's numbers (as reported by Deadline's Nikki Finke) had Moneyball in the #1 slot on its second weekend with a projected $12 million by Sunday night and a grand cume of $38 million. These days a 45% drop is considered a reasonably good second-weekend hold, but a mid 30% decline would have been more to my liking.

Dolphin Tale, which nobody in my sphere cares about, might wind up on top with an estimated $13 million...maybe. Courageous is being projected to come in third...blah.

If 50/50, which did $3.5 million last night, ends up with $9.5 million in 2458 situations,...Read More