FBI agent Gregg Schwarz's belief that former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was utterly straight "is based on the notion that Hoover condemned extra-marital affairs and anyone who was homosexual was considered a "security risk," writes Time's Melissa Locker.

Neither Clint Eastwood nor Dustin Lance Black "were told there was no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Hoover was homosexual," Schwarz says in the video. "They took the historical facts, twisted them to their own personal agenda, which is purely profit and sensationalism, and now it ls out there...for you to evaluate. It's a smear campaign."

Schwarz...Read More

I'm as good as the next guy at spotting the likely hot tickets at an upcoming Sundance festival, but I'm effing brilliant at missing at least one or two of these films when I actually hit the festival and try to cover it. Old story. Let's just focus for now on the Sundance 2012 competition films that have that certain "yeah, this might be something" factor. Here's the whole kit 'n' kaboodle so far.

The First Time (Director/screenwriter: Jonathan Kasdan) -- Two high schoolers meet at a party, discover what...Read More

A Richmond-residing government guy named Michael Phillips took this snap of Daniel Day Lewis at the Arcadia restaurant, and Richmond.com posted it earlier today. On 11.28 Variety's Jeff Sneider tweeted a report that he "hasn't broken his Lincoln accent since March" and his "real name doesn't even appear on the call sheet." (First glimpse via Movieline.)

Lewis will take the 2012 Best Actor Oscar, Meryl Streep (who might well lose out this year Michelle Williams or Viola Davis) will take Best Actress for August: Osage County, but Steven Spielberg will...Read More

What's with the attention given to all these friggin' animals in this year's awards race? What does it say about us, the audience, that so many sharp, accomplished people are saying "I like The Artist a lot but I really love that dog" and "boy, that horse sure can act up a storm in War Horse!" and "whadja think of that goose in War Horse...whuck-whuck!" What would the late Michael O'Donoghue say?

(l.) Uggie the wonder-dog, costar...let's just call him the star of The Artist; (r.) One of the biggest-selling National Lampoon covers ever, or...

With The Artist having taken yesterday's New York Film Critics Circle Best Picture prize, there will be a natural tendency for critics groups around the country to regard this Weinstein Co. release as a safe and likable default choice for Best Picture in their own balloting. Plus any critic voting for an entertaining black-and-white silent film is sending a message to colleagues, editors and especially readers that he/she is willing to embrace the novel or unusual, which indicates a certain integrity.

Most Joe Schmoe readers are going to say "what?" at first. And the critic will be able...Read More

Yesterday afternoon NY Post film critic/blogger Lou Lumenick explained how the New York Film Critics Circle balloting (and its "arcane weighted system") actually went down. And guess what? Melancholia was dead even with The Artist, the Best Picture winner, in the first round, and its director, Lars Von Trier, was just a notch behind Artist helmer Michel Haznavicius in the initial Best Director balloting,

"The Artist was tied with Melancholia (27 points each) for Best Picture," Lumenick reports, "followed by Hugo with 16 points. The Artist finally won on the third ballot with 44 points.

From novelist Bret Easton Ellis: (a) "Steve McQueen's Shame would have been so much more disturbing if Brandon (Michael Fassbender) had actually enjoyed the sex"; (b) "Watching Shame I just kept thinking about the Woody Allen joke in Annie Hall: the experience of empty sex being better than no sex at all." That line about "my worst orgasm was right on the money"? That's from Manhattan.

Sometime yesterday Nerve's Jett Wells explained why Drive won't be nominated or awarded, and then got a decent-sized shout-out from Movieline's Jen Yamato.

I thought I'd write you regarding Tyrannosaur since you're such a supporter of the film," a publicist friend just wrote. "I've learned that this Thursday is the last day it'll play in NY and LA. In NY it moved over from the Angelika to Village East after the first week where it is now playing only one screening a day, at 11am. And it has two daily matinee showtimes at the Sunset 5 thru Thursday. I'm told that the film won't be playing at all in NY/LA after Thursday.

"I found this surprising/disappointing and wanted to share the news in case you...Read More

A special pleasure often results when high-aspiration filmmakers sink into the commonality of genre. Those who've made their bones doing ambitious, high-reaching dramas or super-cool high-style pieces...whose natural inclination is to crank out critical favorites or award-winners or arty-farties for their own sake...when the elites sink below their station, it's always a huge kick.

The upshot is that the best kind of popcorn genre films are usually those made by those who don't live in the neighborhood, so to speak, and are demanding high achievers.

"Meh" reactions ricochet when Jason Statham, say, makes an action film with some journeyman director, but the...Read More

It can be a perfectly natural thing or an extremely clunky thing when a character in a film says the title...when he/she just spits it out. There's a moment in Steven Spielberg's War Horse when a soldier standing next to Joey and discussing him with another soldier actually calls him a "war horse." Right away that struck me as odd. Why did he have to actually say it? Couldn't Spielberg have left well enough alone?

It felt the same to me as if Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven character had said to Morgan Freeman's, "You and me, we're unforgiven...by most people, I reckon, and by...Read More

"I would love to do a musical," Steven Spielberg said last weekend during a War Horse q & a in Manhattan. "I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I'm going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That's what I would really like to do when I grow up."

Does anyone have a suggestions along these lines? What unshot musical plays or potential remakes of old movie musicals would be a good match for Spielberg?

I have one. Spielberg should make a present-day musical...Read More

10:14 am Update: This is the final ignominious straw for the NYFCC -- they've just given their Best Picture award to The Artist. God! All right, calm down...a little grace and dignity here. This will obviously help Harvey Weinstein's effort to get more under-40 nabobs to check out this perfectly delightful diversion (and then tell their friends about it), and that's fine. The Artist should be seen and enjoyed. But this is otherwise wrong, wrong...not cool.

Repeat after me for the 17th or 37th time -- The Artist is all about re-creation, backward visitation and reflective surfaces. It possesses and radiates nothing...Read More

In the interest of fairness towards Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo, which I wasn't entirely sold on, I'm told that it sold out all over (New York, Philly, Boston, Kansas City, Memphis, Detroit, Orlando, Salt Lake City, L.A., etc.) during last Saturday night's nationwide sneak, and that the Fox team did some polling and found that it scored excellent with 70% and highly favorable with 94%. 82% said they'd give Zoo a definite recommend. Even if you knock those numbers down to account for a general reluctance to speak bluntly to strangers, the film still did pretty well. So I get...Read More

Before it was Times Square theatre marquees from the '40s, '50s and '60s. Now I'm on the hunt for high quality color publicity stills (or color film footage) of actors during the shooting of black-and-white films. Except for color production shots of Some Like It Hot during filming -- I have plenty of those.

Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra during Oahu filming of From Here To Eternity.

The results of Sight & Sound's annual film critics' poll will be online next week, but In Contention's Guy Lodge has posted the top 11. 100 elite film critics (Peter Bradshaw, "Harmin' Armond" White, etc.) were asked to tally a list of 2011's five "best, favorite or most important" films.

Lodge says it was "a foregone conclusion" that Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life would be #1, and that it got way more votes that the runner-up, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation.

1. The Tree of Life (d: Malick). Wells comment: First hour is deeply moving, beautiful, and at times astonishing....Read More

The Jonah Hill transformation story is a one-two punch. He's broken out of comedies by nailing a good dramatic part (i.e.. baseball player analyzer Peter Brand) in a great film, Moneyball. And he's slimmed down with a healthier diet and (presumably) a more moderate lifestyle. He's a walking metaphor for "you can up your game and change your life."

Jonah Hill in Toronto last September. (For some reason I forgot to take a closeup during our chat.)

Some have said that Hill's thinner shape makes him somehow less funny. I don't think it's the weight. I think...Read More

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill sat for a q & a last night with Entertainment Weekly's Dave Karger after a screening of Moneyball at Sony Studios. I'm not ignoring what they said or the still-potent pleasures of the film, but the standout moment was Pitt's gentle handling of a strange, inappropriate confession from a gloomy guy in the left-front row who said he'd been feeling depressed and was "contemplating suicide." Everybody in the room whispered "what the fuck?" but Pitt took it in stride and offered a nice brotherly reply.

Brad Pitt at Sony's Cary Grant...

Each and every time a job-appointment release is sent out, the new hire is quoted as saying that he/she is "excited" by the upcoming task or challenge or opportunity. They never omit that word...ever. And I can't remember the last time an appointee has said they're enthused or aroused or elated or intoxicated or intrigued or enthralled or charged or throttled or invigorated, or that they're humming or tingling with anticipation.

They never convey an inkling of any particular passion, and in fact go to some lengths to suggest that particularity of any kind is not something they intend to even consider,...Read More

The New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review are sitting down today for a screening of David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which, given what Fincher has been saying about it, may be more of a critics pick or a Fincher fanboy fave than what most of us regard as an "Academy film."

A select group of Fincher fanboys (Hitfix's Drew McWeeny, First Showing's Alex Billington, etc.) are now watching Tattoo at Sony Studios. I thought my incessant Social Network and Zodiac ravings quaified me as a Fincher fanboy, but I guess not.

The dates...Read More

Hundreds of lefties were milling around the Occupy Los Angeles encampment last night when a friend and I visited around 10:30 pm. The city had announced an intention to evict the squatters for sanitation (and no doubt irritation) reasons, and so the word had gone out for people to join the protest and possibly dissuade the bulls from making their move. The cops surrounded the encampment early this morning but then backed off. No one was forcibly removed save for a few arrestees. But sooner or later the Occupy-ers will be gone.

I was there strictly as...Read More

I'm sorry if this annoys fans of the late, great Ken Russell, but he never made a better film than...you thought I was going to say Song of Summer, right? I mean Women in Love ('69), the last and only theatrical Russell film that got it more or less right -- sensually crafted, high-toned, erotic, impassioned -- without going over the top. I love his artist-bio wacko period (Mahler, Savage Messiah, The Music Lovers) and I'm a huge fan of Altered States, but Women in Love was/is the pinnacle.

My last encounter with the great Ken Russell happened on 7.30.10 at Manhattan's Walter Reade theatre: "I regret to report that last night's Film Society of Lincoln center showing of Ken Russell's The Devils -- a kickoff of a seven day, nine-film Russell tribute -- was a disappointment in some respects. Russell attended with Devils costar Vanessa Redgrave, and it was, of course, delightful to see them sitting together, and to share in the love.

Legendary director Ken Russell, Vanessa Redgrave following last night's FSLC screening of The Devils -- Friday, 7.30, 9:55 pm.

"But FSLC showed...Read More

It began with In Contention's Kristopher Tapley triggering a major flabbergast by saying, "Speaking for myself, I think War Horse wins the lion's share. Including pic/dir." Awards Daily's Sasha Stone: "You think it's going to WIN Best Picture???" Tapley: "I do, yes." Wells insert: "Double whoa."

And then MSN's Glenn Kenny joined in: "I haven't even seen War Horse (and may not!) but will bet real money right now it will not win Best Picture." Tapley: "Why's that?" Kenny: "Unlike Saving Private Ryan, its antiwar fervor doesn't tap into a resonant zeitgeist theme (in Ryan's case, 'greatest generation')." Tapley: "Hmmm, that's debatable." Kenny:...Read More

That same densely forested Bourne Wood, Surrey location that we've all seen in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (that big fireball battle sequence between the Romans and those hairy Germanic guys), Scott's Robin Hood (castle-attack scene with Russell Crowe's troops advancing) and Children of Men (attack on the van) makes yet another appearance in War Horse.

The instant I saw that big muddy field bordered by those telltale pine trees in War Horse, I went "c'mon...this place again?" Tim Burton's forthcoming Dark Shadows uses it also; it was also seen in Captain America.

During this afternoon's MSN live chat between War Horse director Steven Spielberg and Grantland's Mark Harris, "War Horse has no deliberate homages to any director -- not to John Ford, not even Gone With The Wind with the red sky." (Not a precise quote but close enough.)

I've never understood odds or point spreads (i.e., kind of but not really), but Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil is reporting that War Horse has dropped in terms of Best Picture racetrack odds, obviously because of reactions to WH screenings over the past two or three days. On 11.1 the top predicted favorites were The Descendants (36%), War Horse (20%) and The Artist (17%) and now it's The Artist (37%), The Descendants (35%) and War Horse (13%). For what it's worth. O'Neil says he'll be running a piece tomorrow about "how far War Horse has fallen since we've [all] seen it."

The first two thirds of Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23), which had a nationwide sneak last night, tries too hard to be endearing, or so it seemed to me. For 80 minutes or so it's a not too bad family-type movie that works here and there. In and out, at times okay and other times oddly artificial. And then it kicks into gear during the last third and delivers some genuinely affecting sink-in moments and a truly excellent finale.

Matt Damon, imprisoned Bengal tiger in We Bought A Zoo.

The smarty-pants Twitter...Read More

A nice-guy widower dad named Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) decides he needs to uproot and refresh his life, partly for himself but especially for his kids, Dylan and Rosie (Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth), who are half-coping and half-shell-shocked by the recent death of their mom. They all need a sense of renewal and adventure, a feeling that they're moving on. So Benjamin uses an inheritance from his dad to buy a rundown, privately-managed penal institution in Missouri that's been threatened with foreclosure.

"We can make this jail into a better, happier place, and make ourselves better for it,"...Read More

Speaking of miserable, I was at one of my lowest ebbs in the early fall of '78. Living in a Soho tenement and writing reviews for free, pitching freelance articles to people who thought I was marginally competent as a writer (if that), working at restaurants as a host for chump change, barely able to pay the rent at times, borrowing money from my father when it got really awful, occasionally taking a train to Connecticut to work as a tree surgeon on the weekends. Feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, futility and despair.

But one fairly warm day I...Read More

The combination of this video being of such bad quality plus the temporary titles indicates that this might be a genuinely early cut of a teaser for Ridley Scott's Prometheus (20th Century Fox, 6.8.12), which is some kind of Alien prequel. We all remember the Alien scene when three Nostromo crew members enter the huge, horseshoe-shaped ship and come upon a dead giant with big shoulders and a big head and an elephant trunk. I've watched this trailer twice and haven't spotted any of those elephant-trunk guys walking around.

Prometheus stars Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Michael...Read More

Notice that the biggest...well, the only laugh comes when Allen says the words "grim, nightmarish, meaningless." The riff is somehow better and funnier now, on YouTube, than it was during the live Cannes Film Festival press conference, which I attended, in May 2010. This is good also.

There's a story in today's Telegraph about the War Horse buzz; Deadline's Pete Hammond and some crabby sourpuss who doesn't agree with the awesomeness are quoted. I think it's time to back off for a while, but if anyone attends the public sneaks tomorrow morning I'd love to hear reactions. Especially if they're...well, anyone.

Paramount's decision to open Hugo on 1277 screens last Wednesday indicated (to me at least) that they were hedging their bets and hoping that critical raves and a word-of-mouth groundswell might materialize. As of last night Hugo had pulled in $8,545,000 after three days (having opened on 11.23) in 1277 theatres. That works out to a $6691 per-screen average...not bad, could be better. But it was fifth-placed after Breaking Dawn, The Muppets, Happy Feet 2 and Arthur Xmas (none of which I give a damn about).

Let's spitball and say Hugo, which yesterday earned $4,532,000, ends up...Read More

The legendary Tom Wicker, who "brought a hard-hitting Southern liberal/civil libertarian's perspective to his column, 'In the Nation', which appeared on the N.Y. Times editorial page and then on the Op-Ed Page two or three times a week from 1966 until his retirement in 1991," died today at age 85. His obit was authored by Robert McFadden.

"On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Wicker, a brilliant but relatively unknown White House correspondent who had worked at four smaller papers, written several novels under a pen name and, at 37, had established himself as a workhorse of The Times's...Read More

I thought this was supposed to be screening by now. For guys like me, I mean (and not super early-birds like Pete Hammond). I'd be surprised if it doesn't show by Thursday or Friday. The Girl With Dragon Tattoo begins screening Monday morning for select press. We Bought A Zoo has its nationwide sneak tomorrow night. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close starts showing on or about Friday, 12.2. Almost everything is being let out of the cage.

If you listen to recordings or newsreels of people speaking to each other during the 1930s and '40s, they don't sound like people do today, for the most part. They sound a bit more naive or hee-hawish or more rigid and formal in their phrasings, like they've just come out of an elocution class. I've heard two or three voice recordings from the '20s (one of them of Clarence Darrow speaking at the Scopes trial) but I'm presuming it was the same if not more so. A certain starched-shirt, stick-up-your-ass tonality.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire during...

This War Horse rave is not just another arising of the Poland curse. Others have told me that Steven Spielberg's film choked them up also, and who am I to say that's lame or invalid? It isn't wise or considerate to rag on anyone for succumbing to an emotional film. We all have our weak spots. I melt down every time I watch the last acts of Carousel and The Best Years of Our Lives and three or four others I could name.

But I know whore-ish, patently phony, cornball filmmaking aimed at families and kids when I see it. As I...Read More

You know what I hate about girlfriends or close female friends? We'll be talking about seeing a DVD/Bluray and I'll mention a really good one and she'll say "okay, sounds good, I haven't seen that, let's watch it" and then I pop it into the player and ten minutes later she says, "Oh, I've seen this."

In Contention's Kris Tapley has seen War Horse, and he's saying "it most certainly can" win the Best Picture Oscar. He also hedges by saying "we'll have to see if the season is kind to it" and that "critics will be mixed on it, I imagine" -- you may be right about that, Kris! -- "so it won't get the boost of their awards circuit, but it won't need it.

"And really, after last year's Social Network orgy, can we stop overstating the importance of critics' awards, at least for films that have an eye toward Best Picture? What matters...Read More

I'm getting sick and tired of HE commenters saying I'm such a Steven Spielberg basher that I have no credibility when I write about his films -- that I'm blinded by some blanket aesthetic contempt or whatever. Even Sasha Stone has suggested this. An hour ago I answered a couple of guys who threw this charge at me ("you have zero credibility when it comes to judging a Spielberg movie") as follows:

I have no credbility because I'm convinced that Spielberg is a high-end journeyman hack with an all-but-incorrigible sentimental streak? There is ample...make...Read More

Steven Spielberg's War Horse was indeed "out of the bag" as of 4 pm earlier today, as Deadline's Pete Hammond noted at 3:43 pm Pacific. Press/guild screenings were held in LA and New York around the same time today (1 pm on this coast) and lots more are happening tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday (including some public sneaks).

Which means, as I understand it, that it's now permissible to write about it but not to formally review it. Got it.

Hammond's headline asked if Spielberg "Can Win Another Oscar?" Yeah, he could. Definitely. Not for this...Read More

Anything to distract from the sitting-around-and-eating-too-much-and-watching-TV part of this annual ritual works for me. Steven Spielberg's film will sneak here and there at commercial venues on Sunday (including New York City), and be screened for the L.A. stragglers on Monday, 11.28. I don't know when the review embargo date is, but War Horse won't open until 12.25 so who knows?

I disagree with Stu Van Airsdale's latest Movieline/Oscar Index assessment of the Best Supporting Actress race. The back-and-forth political weathervane stuff is bullshit. All that matters is whether or not a supporting actress's performance has sunk in...period. Not if she's been charming or funny or histrionic or anguished, but whether you felt her soul or not. Nothing else.

In this regard the only contenders are Vanessa Redgrave (Coriolanus), Shailene Woodley and Judy Greer (The Descendants), Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs), Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter) and Keira Knightley (A Dangerous Method) for a total of six.

Octavia Spencer has...Read More

"I firmly believe that any man's finest hour -- his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear -- is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle -- victorious." Take out the "victorious" and boldface the "exhausted" and that's how I feel at the end of a good column day. And for the skill or luck or divine guiudance that led to my having reached this satisfaction, I give genuine thanks on this day. Thanks to those who helped me along and gave me encouragement, and no thanks to a...Read More

In my 11.23 Iron Lady review I included an impression that "at least 45% [is] about octagenerian Maggie (superbly played by Streep and assisted by a first-rate makeup job), 45% about Maggie in her political prime (Streep again, guns blazing) and 10% about very young Maggie (Alexandra Roach) and young Denis Thatcher (Harry Lloyd)."

It turns out I was wrong, especially on my old Maggie estimate. A few hours after my review appeared a publicist for the film said she'd asked the filmmakers for a precise mathematical breakdown and got this answer: "60% of The Iron Lady...Read More

"I'm reminded of the last time Martin Scorsese composed a love letter to the movies -- when, head-swollen by his Palme d'Or for Taxi Driver, he ran aground the motiveless magnificence of New York, New York. Hugo is New York, New York for the Pokemon set. My inner child sat drumming his fingers throughout." -- former London Sunday Times film critic Tom Shone on "Taking Barack To The Movies."

"While Jennifer Lopez, Fiat, the automotive firm's p.r. people, and its Detroit ad agency would have consumers believe that the star deigned to return home to film a low-speed pilgrimage through the gritty streets of her hometown, she actually never set foot in the Bronx during the filming of the Fiat spots," The Smoking Gun reported yesterday.

"Instead, the role of 'Jenny from the Block' was played by a body double, according to two sources familiar with the commercial production. While the Lopez lookalike was actually behind the wheel in the Bronx, Lopez herself...Read More

I think Ms. Jolie is talking about her druggy days in the '90s...right? "Too many dangerous things, too many chances taken, too far." What else could it be?

I don't have an explanation for having waited until today to finally post a review of My Week With Marilyn, and to voice my agreement with all the praisers of Michelle Williams' performance as Marilyn Monroe. Make no mistake: I am on the latter boat. Williams becomes Monroe in all the alluring, imitative ways (looks, voice, trembling, hurting), and she brings three characters to life -- the sexy and glamorous movie star, the unstable and insecure pill-popper who lived under the Monroe facade, and the "showgirl" Monroe played in The Prince and the Showgirl.

Charismatic,...Read More

As reported on 11.16, Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo will be sneaking nationwide on Saturday, 11.26, at 7 pm. The L.A. theatres showing it will include the Arclight, the Landmark, the Bridge and Universal Citywalk. You can't buy Fandango tickets online so there will almost certainly be long lines and a big media pile-up so I guess I'm going to have to go early.

8:43 pm Update: I've bought an Arclight ticket through movietickets.com.

My theory about the New York Film Critics Circle vote, which will happen on Tuesday, 11.29 (or six days hence), is that the org as a whole is now emotionally insecure and off-balance, and may therefore vote erratically and curiously in at least a category or two. Not overtly but subconsciously, I mean. This would be due to the loss of face recently suffered by NYFCC honcho John Anderson, which reflects to some extent upon the organization itself.

The NYFCC membership, in short, is probably feeling angry and shaken and perhaps rebellious on some level, and...Read More

Martin Scorsese is dead serious about wanting Leonardo DiCaprio to play Frank Sinatra in a forthcoming biopic. This has always struck me as a ridiculous idea. The physical shorthand for Sinatra before he hit 50 and starting putting on weight was always "short and skinny" (he was about 5'7"), and Leo is about six feet tall with moderately broad shoulders. There's not even a vague resemblance between them. Sinatra had a narrowish face with a longish nose, and DiCaprio has a wide Germanic face with a smallish nose.

DiCaprio as...Read More

Bad Thing #1: Early this evening a young Latino couple was looking at the digital lobby board inside Hollywood's Arclight plex. The guy walked forward, got into line and turned to the girl. "You wanna comedy? Or...what, action? A comedy?" The girl half-shrugged, seemed a bit bored. "I dunno...whatever," she said. He shrugged also, turned back to the board. Those clayheads, I thought to myself. Forget glancing at Rotten Tomatoes. Forget wanting to see The Immortals or Breaking Dawn. They hadn't even talked about the kind of film they might want to see. Empty Coke bottles.

Bad Thing #2: I couldn't resist slipping...Read More

I had a brief sitdown last Friday afternoon with A Dangerous Method director David Cronenberg. We had about twelve minutes, if that. Our last interview was, I think, 29 or 30 years ago to talk about Scanners. I still remember the intensity of that discussion and saying to myself as Cronenberg delivered his points, "Whoa, this guy doesn't fool around...no digressions, no bullshit." Here's the mp3.

A Dangerous Method opens tomorrow (Wednesday, 11.23).

There's always some kind of twisted perversity in Cronenberg's films. Which is what most of us, I gather, look forward to...Read More

A guy stood through most of a nearly seven-hour Anchorage-to-Philadelphia flight last July because he couldn't stand sitting next to a 400-pound sea lion whose massive girth took up half of the standing-guy's seat. The solution is simple, obvious and considerate to all parties. People who are absurdly obese (and there's a very simple way of determining who's excessive in this regard) have to pay for two seats. If they don't like it, tough.

I don't know what happened but I thought I'd posted this last night. There are several Drive parodies out there but this might be the cleverest. But only if Albert Brooks thinks so. Albert? You look at the column every so often (or so you indicated when we last spoke) so what's the verdict? Good, decent, disposable...? At least it has a theme.

I'm also a fan of this one.

I've always loathed end-of-the-year holidays because of that awful flatline feeling . Every city becomes a version of San Francisco as seen by Gregory Peck though his submarine periscope in On The Beach. Everyone stops creating and endeavoring and running around and settles into eating and drinking and zoning out in front of LCDs and LEDs. There's no joy in lying around like lazy seals. I remember feeling this way when I was eight.

But there's nothing to be done about it. Every time a four-day Thanksgiving is about to begin I say to myself, "Okay, here it comes...the world is going to...Read More

Having sat down only a few days ago with actress Olivia Colman (Tyrannosaur), I was a bit surprised by her heavily altered prosthetic and be-wigged appearance as Carol Thatcher, daughter of former Priem Minister Margaret Thatcher, in Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady. A columnist friend didn't even recognize her, he told me this morning.

(l.) Olivia Colman as Carol Thatcher in The Iron Lady; (r.) Carol Thatcher herself.

Colman during our interview four days ago at L.A.'s Standard Hotel.

There's nothing quite so depressing and deflating as falling in love with a film that you know is audacious and highly disciplined in the rockin' high style and art-film achievement realm, and then you see it again with some Joe Schmoe Academy members and they go "ehh, I don't know, it's pretty good, not bad," etc. Your spirit sinks into the swamp as you try to explain what they've all-but-completely missed.

(l. to r.) Miss Bala director Gerado Naranjo, Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni.

Outwardly you're smiling and maintaining your composure but inwardly...Read More

N.Y. Times Carpetbagger Melena Ryzik has just tweeted that she ran into Fran Lebowitz at the premiere of Scorsese's 3D, family-friendly Hugo. FL's verdict, a rave: "This film is too good for children." I'd call it half a rave. What Leibowitz seems to be saying is that Hugo will sail right over children's heads, especially the last 20% to 25%. It's not simple-minded enough to be a kid's film. If Paramount thought it was a real family flick they'd be opening Hugo on more than just 1200 screens.

You can dribble the Viola Davis basketball all over the court and shoot swish shots to your heart's content, but that won't change the fact that Meryl Streep's freakishly dead-on performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (Weinstein, 12.30) seems like a much more likely winner of the Best Actress Oscar right now. As far as I'm concerned it's a Streep vs. Michelle Williams (i.e., as Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn) contest with Davis half-elbowed aside.

Okay, maybe it's a three-way race but I'm thinking again about Davis, superb as...Read More

Toward the end of this Hugo promotion video (i.e., Jim CameronMartin Scorsese), Scorsese mentions the idea of a 3D version of Citizen Kane ...and then says, "I'm not saying do that." Well, I am. If that 1941 classic could be 3D-converted with the same demanding exactitude that Cameron has reportedly applied to creating Titanic 3D, I'd be fine with it. Really. It would be exciting if someone could really do it right. Any classic film, for that matter. Monochrome 3D is mesmerizing.

The problem, of course, is that most 3D conversions have been unexceptional. The people...Read More

Roughly three hours ago New York Film Critics Circle honcho John Anderson informed the membership that Warner Bros.will not be screening Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by this coming Sunday, 11.27, and will therefore not be meeting the org's deadline to allow it to vote yea or nay on Steohen Daldry's 9/11 drama by Tuesday, 11.29.

Anderson wrote that he's been told that the film won't be shown any time before December 2nd. "This despite my having received assurances before that they would [work within our deadline]," Anderson wrote. "Draw your own conclusions."

National Board of Review...Read More

Sometimes old songs that you haven't listened to in a long while suddenly come into your head while you're driving or showering or writing, and they hang around for a day or two and sometimes longer. Every now and then they'll stay with you for four or five days or a week even, and that's too long. It can drive you nuts. The cure is not to sing it to yourself but to download it to iTunes and just listen to it over and over until you can't stand it any more.

This happened to me last...Read More

Some fresh Chris Nolan commentary about The Dark Knight Rises has appeared in a currently-print-only issue of Empire. Details have been provided by Heisenberg, thej0ker, Zorak (what is that, a law firm?). Nolan's big reveal is that the DKR story picks up eight years after The Dark Knight -- i.e., Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne in his early 40s?

"It's really all about finishing Batman and Bruce Wayne's story," Nolan comments. "We left him in a very precarious place. Perhaps surprisingly for some people, our story picks up quite a bit later, eight years after The Dark...Read More

Yesterday morning Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I talked about Breaking Dawn, vampire sex, green-blooded erections, bleeding virgins and all that Stephanie Meyer stuff. And The Descendants, The Artist, Hugo, etc. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

In his New Yorker review of The Descendants, Anthony Lane describes the third-act encounter between George Clooney's Matt King and Matthew Lillard's Brian Speer. The latter's "little-boy grin, though ideal for selling real estate, tells of panic rather than cheekiness," Lane writes, "and Brian's encounter with Matt is not a clash of rutting males but a semi-polite standoff between two fleshy, faltering souls, striving to live up to the brazenness of their shirts.

"We have seen such leisurewear before, on Frank Sinatra and Montgomery Clift, as they toured the local bars, in From Here to Eternity. Both films are infused with the...Read More

There are only five Woody Allen films I've had a truly difficult time with, and they were all made within the last 12 years (Scoop, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, Small-Time Crooks, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger). But during the same period he also made Match Point, Midnight in Paris, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Sweet and Lowdown so what's there to complain about really?

The early aughts just weren't Allen's time. My personal solution is to put those five stinkers in a compartment in my head and say to myself,...Read More

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone said something this morning about Moneyball's gas tank being on empty, at least as far as "the conversation" is concerned. And it shouldn't be. Attention spans and media heat cycles are shorter than they used to be, and one result is that Bennett Miller's masterwork seems to be sputtering despite the Movie Godz being foursquare against this.

Moneyball is ranked higher on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic than the current Best Picture favorite, The Descendants, with a grade of 87 to 84 on Metacritic and 95 to 90 on...Read More

"Maybe I didn't explain the nest egg to you. If you had understood...you know it's a very sacred thing, the nest egg, and if you had understood the Nest Egg Principle, as we will now call it in the first of many lectures that you will get, because if we are ever to acquire another nest egg, we both have to understand what it means.

"The nest egg is a protector, like a god, and we sit under the nest egg and we are protected by it. Without it, no protection. Want me to go...Read More

The worst hurt is about sensing what might have been, and the most penetrating love scenes are those in which both parties feel this acutely but don't (can't, won't) put it into words. The finales of The Way We Were and Bridges of Madison County had this current (as repellent as this observation may be to the HE hipper-than-thous), and the finale from Elia Kazan's Splendor In The Grass had it in spades.

The less you say with dialogue and the more you leave it up to the audience, the better.

Screenings of The Artist and Miss Bala are competing in the near future. (I shouldn't say any more.) It's not a matter of seeing either film for the first time, of course, but which screening environment (and especially which post-screening environment) will be the cooler, richer one to bask in...to savor, to wear, to sniff and sip and taste and shoot shit about. Not to mention a shot at taking pictures of the filmmakers and guests. Watching and absorbing an award-calibre film is only a part of it.

A lot of year-end awards stuff will come into focus over the next nine days. Tomorrow afternoon the journos who weren't invited to see The Iron Lady at last Thursday's super-exclusive screening will get their own looksee. By next weekend the Warner Bros. guys will almost certainly be screening Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close for the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review in preparation for the following week's voting. And then comes the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo screening on Monday, 11.28, for the same two groups.

All the frontline stragglers who haven't yet seen War Horse...Read More

Four and a half hours ago TheWrap's Chris Willman posted a thorough rundown of the suddenly-on-again investigation into the death of Natalie Wood almost exactly 30 years ago. In the wee hours of 11.29.81 Wood and husband Robert Wagner argued aboard their yacht, Splendour, about a relationship she may have been having with actor Christopher Walken, Wood's Brainstorm costar. Walken was a guest that night and, according to former ship captain Dennis Davern, was sleeping in his stateroom during the argument. Soon after Wood disappeared off the yacht, and was found drowned six hours later.

The...Read More

During last night's Contagion mixer a couple of folks were taking swipes at New York Film Critics Circle chief John Anderson for moving the org's voting day to 11.28, or two days before the National Board of Review's voting day of 12.1.

A couple of days ago Anderson was forced to delay the NYFCC voting by 24 hours (i.e., to 11.29) when Sony informed him that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wouldn't be ready for screening until 11.28. This was being pointed to as a sign that Anderson had overplayed his hand. "I guarantee you that next year the NYFCC...Read More

Beware of any film that's been described by film geeks as "pure cinema." What that means, usually, is that the layered, integrated nature of any good film hasn't been entirely successful on some level, and that it's weak on narrative or structure or performance or third-act payoff...something. "Pure cinema" = chops, style, chops, style and more chops and style. Nothing puts the fear of God into me like that dweeb-favored, mubi.com term.

I'm writing this because Harry Knowles tweeted today that Martin Scorsese's Hugo is "an immaculate work of wonder and a pure shot of cinema." Holy dogshit, run for...Read More

Last night Warner Bros. publicity made a spirited, gung-ho attempt to re-launch Steven Soderbergh's Contagion among award-season cognoscenti and to put it into "the conversation," so to speak. They invited journos like myself to a pleasant, talent-populated soiree (Soderbergh, Benicio del Toro, Gary Shandling, Contagion producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, screenwriter Scott Burns) inside the Clarity lobby-rotunda, and followed this with a screening of the film.

Steven Soderbergh prior to last night's screening of Contagion.

Benicio del Toro, Contagion producer Stacey Sher.

Contagion screenwriter Scott Z. Burns.

The pitch...Read More

Most urban film wolves have by now seen Alexander Payne's The Descendants. It's been playing for three nights now so it's time for some reactions. I already know what's going to happen. 75%...no, 65% are going to fall into line with the majority of the critics (it has a 90% Rotten Tomatoes rating) and the rest are gonna trash it, or at least take potshots or say stuff like "aahh, for the days of Citizen Ruth and Election!"

Even before Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, a 20-year-old Egyptian college student, posted nude photos of herself on her blog as a protest against the country's conservative culture, I would have described Egypt as a horridly uptight, erotically repressed country that believes in subjugating and objectifying women. Remember what happened to CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square last February, and that the Egyptian men who assaulted her were the alleged good guys -- i.e., pro-freedom, pro-Arab Spring, anti-Mubarak.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy

Since Elmahdy posted the photos earlier this week I've been having these thoughts all...Read More

I walked by one of these little Fiat 500s (possibly the Abarth model) in Paris last May. It was painted bright red, and for the first time in many years I started fantasizing about dumping the beater (even though it runs fine and is 100% owned) and buying one of these. I'm kind of a MiniCooper type of guy so this was right up my alley.

But then I saw this Jennifer Lopez spot about the Fiat-Gucci 500, and the fantasy keeled right over and died. To me Lopez is...Read More

Kenyon Hopkins' delicate musical score for 12 Angry Men creates a counterpoint mood to the film's heated and acrimonious jury deliberations. It could be a score for a film about an elderly woman living in a musty old house with eight or nine cats and too much clutter. Stillness, solitude, lament. A portrait of who the jurors are within themselves, before and after the shouting.

Hopkins (1912 -1983) composed in a moody jazzy vein. His music didn't surge or cascade -- it sprinkled as if from a garden hose. He also created the scores for...Read More

I felt a curiously powerful synchronicity the first time I saw Wim Wenders' The American Friend at the 1978 NY Film Festival). I'm not fatally ill and I've never performed a contract killing, but otherwise I've long felt a kind of dark harmony between that Hamburg waterfront, cowboy-hatted, existential noir vibe and my own moods, fears and free-floating anxieties. You know...that more-corrupted-than-you-realize Highsmith thing.

I had a delightful lunch with Tyrannosaur star (and Iron Lady costar) Olivia Colman from 12:45 to 1:45 pm at the Standard. We both ordered Ceasar salad with chicken, and the time just flew. I'll run the piece tonight or tomorrow morning, but I was so taken by Colman's robust complexion, auburn hair and gleaming white teeth against the light robin's egg blue of the Standard's '50s-kitsch restaurant, etc. Had to run these right away.

Olivia Colman at Standard Hotel diner -- 11.18, 1:55 pm.

Orlando Sentinel critic Roger Moore, a "name" and a good, clever fellow, has been shown the door. Another vital, widely-read critic gone with the wind. I know because a publicist friend told me that Moore emailed a colleague today confirming he's been shitcanned. Hugs, chin-ups, condolences.

Four significant, critically hailed 2011 documentaries -- Errol Morris's Tabloid, Werner Herzog's Into The Abyss, Andrew Rossi's Page One: Inside The N.Y. Times and Asif Kapadia's Senna -- didn't make the Academy's shortlist, per today's announcement. 124 docs had originally qualified, and 15 made the final cut.

A half-hour ago a publicist pal and I discussed why this or that film doesn't make the cut, and he agreed with my observation that the doc committee often ignores docs made by big-name directors like Morris or Herzog. The committee presumes that the big-name docs "are getting or going to get a lot of attention...Read More

A New York-based critic friend just wrote me the following: "I don't know if you've heard, but Sony can't screen The Girl With Dragon Tattoo until 11.28, and so New York Film Critics Circle chief John Anderson has moved the voting date to 11.29," or one day later than previously announced. Anderson informed the NYFCC membership yesterday by email, my source says. Anderson decided not to directly confirm (or deny) the change when I wrote him this morning.

Dennis Davern, former captain of the Splendour, the yacht co-owned by Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, repeatedly refused this morning on the Today show to spit out any hard specifics surrounding the November 1981 drowning death of Wood as he knows or recalls them. But the cowardly Davern did gradually and oh-so-vaguely finger Wagner as having been responsible for her death, particularly in his reluctance to try and find Wood after she'd disappeared in the wake of a huge fight.

Madman though he was, Klaus Kinski showed true genius while delivering his legendary "I am the only free man on this train" line from Dr. Zhivago. The way he rattles the chain and pounds his chest for emphasis, and the seething anger in his voice as he says "the rest of you are cattle!" If you ask me this ranks alongside the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin as a choice filet of Russian suffering.

Let it also never be forgotten that in the late '80s Kinski authored one of the most honest and amazingly...Read More

Last night the Academy hosted a 40th anniversary screening of Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (digitally restored, "definitive director's cut"). The black-and-white classic actually opened on 10.22.71. The Texas-born Luke Wilson served as host of the event. The post-screening q & a include Bogdanovich and costars Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Cloris Leachman and Eileen Brennan.

I'm not sure what The Last Picture Show would've finally been or amounted to without the "old times" swimming-hole scene with Ben Johnson. It won Johnson his Best Supporting Actor Oscar, that's for sure.

"Almost every year in the Best Actress Oscar race, amid all the flashy biopics and box-office heavies, there seems to be one indie performance from across the pond that gets short shrift. Last year, it was Lesley Manville's hysterical turn in Mike Leigh's Another Year. Before that, Sally Hawkins' brilliant turn as the terribly cheery Poppy in another Leigh film, Happy-Go-Lucky, went criminally overlooked by the academy.

Tyrannosaur star Olivia Colman.

"And now, going up against Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Michelle Williams' Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, and The Help's Viola Davis,...Read More

During a recently-posted Hollywood Reporter directors panel video, Matthew Belloni or Stephen Galloway (not sure which) got bitch-slapped by The Descendants director Alexander Payne, Shame helmer Steve McQueen and Young Adult director Jason Reitman for saying that Ryan O'Neal is "horrendously miscast" in Barry Lyndon.

Payne: "We disagree there. I think he's perfectly cast." McQueen: "I disagree completely....

What new evidence in the drowning death of Natalie Wood -- an event that happened almost exactly 30 years ago -- could prompt the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department to reopen the case? What new fact or assertion could have possibly persuaded them to start a new investigation? That's kind of a weird thing to do, no? What could possibly come of this? Will a finger be pointed at someone for doing (or failing to do) something that led to Wood's death?

Update: This TMZ report seems to explain a lot of it. This Lana Wood interview also.

The...Read More

Criterion's Twelve Angry Men Bluray arrived today. I've never seen such rich inky blacks and delicious needlepoint detail in the fine textures of the shirts and the beard follicles and sweat beads on E.G. Marshall's face and the weave in Jack Warden's straw hat. It's the finest-looking version of this 1957 classic I've ever seen. It's like sitting in front of a movie screen, in the fourth or fifth row.

Henry Fonda in a scene from 12 Angry Men -- Bluray version.

But it's also one of the most overwhelming grainstorm experiences I've had in a long time....Read More

Six or seven hours ago I learned that The Iron Lady had screened for select Hollywood bloggers. Three or four hours ago In Contention's Kris Tapley posted his review (Meryl Streep good-great, movie mezzo-mezzo). And then Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg posted the same opinion. And then along came Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil and Adam Waldowski with the old rama-lama-ding-dong. And then Deadline's Pete Hammond posted his Streep rave.

Streep, Streep, Streep, Streep, Streepah-lah-deep, deepah-lah-deep...Streep-peep-peep.

It was an honor and a delight not to be invited along with these guys. Thank you for not trusting me, Weinstein...Read More

The two existing trailers for Steve McQueen's Shame (i.e., the Carey Mulligan 'New York, New York" songbird one that surfaced today plus the one that came out two or three weeks ago) are, I feel, more enticing on their own level than Shame itself. It's always easier, of course, to make a more captivating two-minute trailer than a 95-minute feature, but still....

I only know that these trailers have a fleetingly warm, fascinating, alluring vibe, and that the film is significantly colder, frostier and clinical-analytical. Which isn't to suggest that there's anything wrong or ineffective with...Read More

The Foreign Language Committee won't announce its list of nine short-listed Best Foreign-Language Oscar contenders for another six or seven weeks (i.e., early January). Six films will be chosen by the regular committee, per custom, and three will be chosen by the executive committee.

I'm telling you right now there are going to howls of protest if Asghar Farhadi 's A Separation (Iran) and Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala (Mexico) are not among the nine. And I'm saying this in particular because I know a guy who's spoken to a couple of Academy members who've seen it and they've been kind of "meh."...Read More

Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino is reporting that The Descendants made $39,777 from 5 locations yesterday, or an average of $7955. By comparison J. Edgar's opening day brought in $52,645 from 7 situations, or an average of $7520. He's nonetheless calling it "a solid start for Payne's film. I'm sure word of mouth will be much better for The Descendants than it is for J. Edgar. It expands to 29 locations on Friday, and we think it'll crack the top 10. We're forecasting $1.6 million over the weekend."

If nothing else, the men and women of the Criterion Collection are known for adhering to purist principles in transferring older films to DVD and Bluray. Whatever and however a film in question looked to audiences when it first came out, this is how the Criterion team will present it -- no ifs, ands or buts. But to go by information on a Criterion webpage for its forthcoming Bluray of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder ('59), the aspect-ratio brain police have wormed their way into Criterion and are imposing an Orwellian reassessment.

Frame capture from ColTriStar Home...

It would be dishonest to report that the resignation of chief Academy of Motion Pictures Arst and Sciences publicist Leslie Unger has been met with great sadness among each and every LA-based entertainment journalist. She was known for having had a combative relationship with one or two journos in my sphere. Her days were numbered when AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson brought in Christina Kounelias as the org's CMO (chief media officer), a position senior to Ungar's title of Director of Communications.

Unger's departure is "not surprising," says a journalist pal. What he meant was that it's not unwelcome. "As soon...Read More

The legendary eye chemistry between Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in the final scene of Heaven Can Wait (starting at the 6:00 mark in this clip) is all about spirit and pangs and possibility. But the eye current between Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche in this clip from Louis Malle's Damage is shamelessly carnal. They've just met six seconds earlier and it's a done deal.

This kind of instant-green-light, good-to-go chemistry doesn't happen all that often in dramas, or at least not as convincingly as it does here. But maybe my memory is faulty....Read More

Remember the days when Cameron Crowe was the eloquent hip guy, the cool guy, the ex-Rolling Stone reporter and smoothly accomplished, musically-driven director-screenwriter who made smart, rich, soulful movies (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Say Anything) that the vast majority of elite critics used to embrace with the exception of Vanilla Sky, of course, and before the absolute meltdown calamity of Elizabethtown?

I'm asking this because today's announcement about the Thanksgiving sneak of We Bought A Zoo signifies that he's now in league with the goody-two-shoes PG family crowd. This is a guy who used to hang out with degenerate rock bands...Read More

20th Century Fox's decision to do a nationwide commercial sneak of Cameron Crowe's We Bought a Zoo on 11.26 -- four weeks before the Matt Damon-Scarlett Johansson-Thomas Haden Church family film opens nationwide on 12.23 -- is brave and radical and unprecedented. In all sincerity, hats off.

Mat Damon, Scarlett Johansson in We Bought A Zoo.

This is being done, of course, in order to present the film directly to Joe and Jane Popcorn and in so doing bypass the big-city online smartass crowd, which, Fox apparently suspects, will probably piss on it. I for one admire...Read More

Cameron and his tech homies need to upgrade three problematic CG shots: (1) A little CG sailboat that Titanic passes on the way out of Southampton has always looked ludicrous; (2) there's a wide shot of Titanic pulling out to sea in which the first officer (i.e., the guy who shoots himself in Act Three) is shown walking across the deck, strolling along like a little CG playdough robot; and (3) there's a Kate Winslet face-paste used as she and Leo are running from approaching sea water that never worked...fix it.

I have to admit this seems overly broad but spottily amusing. A Snow White movie that has nothing to do with fable and everything to do with our pornographic obsession with the appearance of youth. For me, it's the very first Tarsem Singh film that hasn't seemed (emphasis on the "s" word) like an outright problem.

I tried watching The Immortals last weekend, and it gave me a throbbing headache. To me Singh is a commercial slut.

Yesterday I mistakenly ignored Pete Hammond's Deadline story about how DreamWorks had officially submitted The Help to the HFPA/Golden Globeys as a Best Picture contender in the Comedy or Musical category. That was because Hammond's lead -- "Bridesmaids, The Artist, Paris Try To Buck Oscar's Prejudice Against Comedy" -- sounded like an evergreen about how comedies can't get no awards respect.

Hammond's kicker is that two days ago (i.e., Monday) "an HFPA committee rejected The Help in comedy and determined it would compete as a drama, where it will go head-to-head with Disney/DreamWorks' other big hopeful, War...Read More

War Horse "wasn't as manipulative as I expected," a New York-based critic confesses. "But I was hoping for an emotional catharsis at the end and I didn't get it. So I'm calling it good Spielberg but not great Spielberg, and very heavy on the overdone John Williams score. If the Academy really thinks this is as good as it gets -- in a year that has given us The Descendants, Drive and Moneyball -- that would be a profound shame."

Disney screened War Horse for 10 or 12 journalists last week at the Animation screening room on the Burbank Disney lot. A guy who saw it and is a huge fan ("If you like animals...") told me it was him and 10 or 11 others. It was also shown to a bunch of Manhattan guys a short while ago -- EW's Owen Gleiberman, Rex Reed, Hoberman, etc. Not all of the NYFCC members but a lot of them.

This morning I was kicking around the reactions to War Horse and The Descendants with a friend, and he/she said that The Descendants holds...Read More

With The Descendants holding a 91% Rotten Tomatoes rating, N.Y. Post critic Lou-Lou Lumenick (who used to be friendly but over the last year or so has gone into a Poland-styled eye-contact-avoidance and glacial-polar-bear silence whenever I come within 15 or 20 feet) has given costar Judy Greer a major endorsement.

Judy Greer in The Descendants.

"Perhaps the most delightful surprise [in The Descendants] is Judy Greer, whose best-friend parts have invariably been better than the romantic comedies in which she frequently appears. Given a rare dramatic role as Matthew Lillard's cheated-upon wife, she steps up...Read More

L.A. Daily News reporter Bob Strauss has filed a story titled "This Year's Oscar Tumult Reflects Awards Show's Changing Culture." It's basically a post-Ratner, post-calamity assessment of All Things Oscar, right here and now. Oscar telecast producer Brian Grazer, AMPAS honcho Tom Sherak and Awards Daily's Sasha Stone are quoted. And me.

"It's really the awards season that people who love films live for," said Jeffrey Wells, editor of the website Hollywood-Elsewhere.com. "Finally, you get to see a lot of pretty interesting films released from late September through December. This is when your movie-lover blood is up, and the Oscars have...Read More

Descendants star George Clooney led his fellow cast members and the entire audience at the Academy theatre in a chorus of "Happy Birthday" for Descendants costar Shailene Woodley, who turned 20 today. The film began showing around 7:55 pm; an after-party in the lobby followed.

(l. to r.) Descendants director Alexander Payne, costars Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Matthew Lillard, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley, George Clooney.

Descendants costar Nick Krause (l.) as he appears in the film, and (r.) as he appeared tonight.

Nine or ten weeks ago I wrote about meeting Descendants costar Shailene Woodley at the Sheridan bar during the Tellluride Film Festival. What I didn't report was that 10 or 15 minutes after saying hello I accidentally whacked Woodley in the chin with the back of my left hand. I was telling a joke or delivering some impassioned opinion...whap! I went "oh, no...my God!" and profusely apologized and gave Woodley a slight hug, but I felt like an absolute fool.

Descendants costar Shailene Woodley at Four Seasons hotel -- Tuesday, 11.15, 3:55 pm.

Sasha Stone...Read More

Deadline's Mike Fleming is reporting that the English-language version of Angelina Jolie's In The Land Of Blood And Honey will not be released in English-speaking territories or anywhere else for that matter. Instead FilmDistrict will release the version that Jolie shot in the language once known as Serbian-Croatian and now called Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian .(It's also called Bosanski/Hrvatski/Srpski or BHS. It's also known as Splotnee-Gloob-Glooby-Slobonik, if you're from the part of the world.). The film, slated to open in NY and LA on 12.23, will obviously carry subtitles. Which means that the subtitle-averse brainiacs out there are going to take a pass...right?

"Between you and I (please don't publish my name with this): I've seen War Horse, and the Best Picture sentiments are spot on," writes a big-city critic. "The only thing that could derail it is The Artist, and only if Weinstein pulls off his usual manipulation. Also, keep in mind that 90 percent of the cast and crew on The Artist came from Hollywood. The movie was also shot there. So we could another Crash situation here." Wait...what? I'm not getting the analogy.

"But as far as traditional Best Picture winners go, you won't find a better match than War Horse. And on...Read More

A 10.30.11 N.Y. Times story by Michael Cieply states that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences "has taken in roughly $80 million a year from the Oscars, which account for perhaps 90 percent of its revenue, while spending about $30 million to produce the [Oscar telecast]." So the total revenue is around $88 or $89 million, and then you subtract $30 million to produce the show and you're left with $58 or $59 million. Subtract the usual usuals (overhead, salaries, screenings, advertising) and you're still looking at a lotta dough left over, and then the process repeats itself the next...Read More

The unfolding of the predicament of George Clooney's Matt King "is surprising, moving and frequently very funny," says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in his review of The Descendants. "Director Alexander Payne -- immeasurably aided by a dazzlingly gifted, doggedly disciplined cast -- nimbly sidesteps the sentimental traps that lurk within the film's premise. He somehow achieves the emotional impact of good melodrama and the hectic absurdity of classic farce without ever seeming to exaggerate.

"There are times when you laugh or gasp in disbelief at what has just happened -- an old man punches a...Read More

Could I suggest something? Put Patton Oswalt into the one-sheet. He's the funny guy in this film...the anchor guy, the bullshit-deflating reality-check guy, the deserves-to-be-nominated-for-a-Best-Supporting-Actor-Oscar guy. All this one-sheet is saying right now is "fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" Which is cool for people like me and Charlize Theron fans, but I don't know about Joe Popcorn.

It turns out that the Wikipedia-supplied running time of Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12/23) is pretty far off the mark. It's not 90 minutes but roughly 124 minutes, according to a Fox source. That's not an official running time, but it'll be in that general vicinity (i.e., maybe a bit shorter) when all is said and done.

Yesterday I should have posted Xan Brooks' Guardian comments, dated 11.14, on Meryl Streep's "astonishing, all-but-flawless" performance as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (Weinstein Co., 12.30). He also notes that while the film "prints the legend," it "keeps the dissent on spartan rations...it's a movie that gives us Thatcher without Thatcherism."

Streep's performance is "a masterpiece of mimicry which re-imagines Thatcher in all her half-forgotten glory," Brooks writes. "Streep has the basilisk stare; the tilted, faintly predatory posture. Her delivery, too, is eerily good -- a show of demure solicitude, invariably overtaken...Read More

It means absolutely nothing...okay, it means a little something but next to nothing, really, that seven Gold Derby "Oscarologists" -- Deadline's Pete Hammond, Fox News' Tariq Khan, WENN's Kevin Lewin, Yahoo Movies' Matt McDaniel, the Village Voice's Michael Musto and GD's Tom O'Neil and Paul Sheehan -- are intuiting that War Horse is the most likely Best Picture winner.

One of the above might have seen War Horse, maybe, but I'd rather not think about that.

11 Oscar-watching hotshots (myself among them) are standing by The Descendants, and that means something because everyone's seen it. Eight are picking The Artist and one...Read More

Robert Weide's Woody Allen: A Documentary arrived today. Tomorrow or the next day Criterion Blurays of Twelve Angry Men and Rushmore will be delivered. The L.A. press day for The Descendants is tomorrow afternoon, and the Academy screening that night. Wednesday night is either the Breaking Dawn all-media or my second attempt with Michael Roskam's Bullhead. A chat with David Cronenberg and a screening of W.E. are on Thursday; interviews with Olivia Colman and Michael Shannon on Friday.

Tyrannosaur star Olivia Colman is here in Los Angeles for a week, doing interviews and whatnot. Two significant articles about Tyrannnosaur/Colman ran yesterday in the LA Times (written by Mark Olsen) and NY Times (written by Dennis Lim).

Quote #1 from Olsen's piece: "'This is not social realism," director Paddy Considine said at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "I'm saying, 'Here are these people. These are their circumstances. There are the worlds they are from, and this is a love story about the people you walk past in the street. Those people you see at the local shop...Read More

I'm looking around for a PDF of The Longest Cocktail Party, Jesse Armstrong's screenplay adaptation of Richard DiLello's 1973 book about the gradual breakup of the Beatles from '68 to '70, otherwise known as the Apple downswirl period. Michael Winterbottom will reportedly direct it sometime next year. Actors who don't really look or sound like John, Paul, George and Ringo will most likely be cast.

It was during a Toronto Film Festival gathering for Albert Nobbs that I casually mentioned to costar Janet McTeer that her performance as Hubert the house painter is more commanding and magnetic than Glenn Close's titular performance. McTeer stiffened and said nothing, and so I shifted over to another topic. It felt impolite on some level to step on Close's toes.

But now Indiewire's Anne Thompson has flat-out said the unmentionable in a headline: "Janet McTeer Talks Stealing Albert Nobbs from Glenn Close." So I guess the cat is out of the bag now. The only problem is that you can't really...Read More

Yesterday morning Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I kicked it all around -- Tintin, Oscar-Ratner debacle, Descendants, etc.. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The new Entertainment Weekly says there are 56 significant films yet to be released this year. By my count there are 37, and if you further whittle the list down by the likelihood of a film (or a creative contributor to that film) being award-worthy, you're left with 25. Here's my list with the letters AW signifying award-worthy:

November 16 (1): The Descendants (AW).

November 18 (4): Another Happy Day (AW); The Lie (limited); The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1; Tyrannosaur (AW).

November 23 (6): A Dangerous Method (AW); The Artist (AW); Hugo (AW); The Muppets;...Read More

Comic-book illustrator and noir-style film director Frank Miller has dug himself a grave and is now lying flat in the mud and waiting for the dirt. I always thought Miller was an aesthetic lightweight and a sleazy masturbatory noir fetishist, but now that he's shown himself to be a Merle Haggard-style reactionary in terms of his views on the Occupy movement, he's a dead man.

Frank Miller

The statement that has finished Miller off is contained in a week-old (11.7) posting on his personal blog. (Thanks to TheWrap's Lew Harris for passing it...Read More

I was too lazy (i.e., way too lazy) over the weekend to post David Ehrenstein's mubi.com praising of Angelina Jolie's In The Land of Blood and Honey (Film District, 12.23). But here it is with edits:

"Beyond Gobsmacked by In the Land of Blood and Honey, which I saw at a sneak preview yesterday [i.e., presumably Friday] afternoon. It's a stark and truly shocking drama of the Bosnian Civil War of the 1990's. This was genocide on a massive scale that was rigorously ignored by the west. At one point we hear Clinton's Secretary of State...Read More

The early word on Phyllida Lloyd's The Iron Lady (Weinstein Co., 12.30), fortified to some extent by that late-summer teaser, was that it had a "light" tone, or that the film itself skirted serious drama. I'm not getting that from the trailer. I'm getting a story about a somewhat older woman who defied and defeated sexist attitudes about her potential.

"That's all fine," The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries wrote many months ago, "but that narrative trajectory risks skewing the story. This was not just a time of one woman's assault on a male bastion, but...Read More

Most appealing aspect: The voice of Donald Sutherland (as President Snow) solemnly announcing the basic Hunger Games rules. Most troublesome aspect: Wes Bentley's hair and beard stylings. Unseen (at least by me): Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy, the former Hunger Games champ with a drinking problem.

"Gay roles can win Oscars," explains Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil, "but only if portrayed by straight people who die hideous deaths." Do they really have to go hideously? I think that simple dying (as Christopher Plummer's gay character does in Beginners) is sufficient. O'Neil has included a photo gallery.

Every now and then I have to explain the rules about saving seats. There are thousands upon thousands who still don't understand the one absolute rule that applies in theatres and food courts, which is that you have to mark something to save something. It doesn't matter how or what you mark it with as long as you mark it. A napkin, a jacket, a scarf, a newspaper...anything.

Once that's done, the seat is absolutely effing saved and no one questions it...least of all myself. But you can't just point to a couple of seats (or three or four or six) and...Read More

It hit me as I was watching the M.A.S.H. Bluray the other night that a nice plotless comedy would be agreeable right about now. "Plotless" is crucial -- a film that forgoes the usual story mechanics and just ambles along on flip irreverence and attitude, and then ends about 105 minutes later when one or two of the original trio get new jobs or whatever.

I don't know what this plotless comedy would be about, but a lot of people have forgotten that the original M.A.S.H. guys (Elliot Gould, Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerritt) were a tiny...Read More

There's no telling what Yogi Berra really thinks of Moneyball, to go by Jason Gay's 11.7 Wall Street Journal article. Berra is a national treasure, but aging's definitely a bitch. Your ears and nose get larger, your eyes turn pink and bloodshotty, and your teeth either turn yellow or get smaller, or both.

During this morning's Oscar Poker chat (to be posted later tonight or tomorrow morning), Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino voiced a data-based hunch that The Artist (Weinstein Co., 11.23) is going to do "Hurt Locker-level business," or a domestic gross south of $15 million. Which is what it'll probably make if every over-40 film Catholic buys a ticket. Which is what I've been urging this crowd to do all along. But if it stops at $12 million or so, what will this mean in terms of a potential Best Picture nom...if anything?

I'm a little surprised that Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23) runs only 90 minutes. (Or so says the Wiki page.) That feels a little slender. Substantial films need to run 100 to 110 minutes and beyond, no? On top of which the poster gives me pause. It feels so Dean Jones, so family-friendly, so sunshine-smiley, so Paul Simon Kodachrome-d.

Crowe has had his ups and downs, but he's an ambitious director-writer of depth. Or at least he was the last time I checked. Why is Fox marketing his latest film...Read More

One of the more significant takeaways from Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" was a belief or theory that on their own, neither Perry Smith nor Dick Hickock would have killed the Clutter family in November 1959; but together they formed a combustible third personality. They goaded each other into a homicidal frame of mind.

By the same token I think that the popularity of bad, coarse or synthetic high-impact films happens due to groups of under-25s choosing to see them because the films are reductive and lowball and crowd-friendly and can be more readily "enjoyed" by a group of...Read More

I was dumb enough to recently buy the non-restored, public-domain One-Eyed Jacks Bluray the other day. I had this idea that it might look a tiny bit better than the version sitting on YouTube. Or perhaps in the realm of the laser disc version I owned in the '90s, which was tolerable. Well, the Bluray is awful -- positively the cruddiest-looking film I've ever seen on any home-video format, including broadcast TV.

YouTube capture #1

It's just tragic. The elements of this, Paramount's last VistaVision film, are, I've been told, in good or very good...Read More

Is there a divide between critics/bloggers and paying audience over J. Edgar? Or are most people seeing it, like I did, as a half-and-halfer -- highly impressive Leonardo DiCaprio performance and assured direction but a generally drab sit, meh subject matter, pounds of makeup, etc.?

The only half-interesting films opening this weekend are Lars von Trier's Melancholia and Willliam Monahan's London Boulevard. Interesting failures, I mean. Which I'd rather see any day of the week over stuff like The Immortals and Jack and Jill.

Boulevard starts nicely but doesn't come together. The second half is a mess, but it's the kind of floundering mess that only a person of talent and vision (i..e, director-writer William Monahan) could create. Melancholia has flashes of brilliance, but is mostly morose and enervated. But it's "out there," at least, and that's always worth a looksee.

Monahan's film "is more concerned...Read More

To me a birthday is simultaneously meaningless and a reminder that you're a little closer to death than you were at this time last year. But today's is difficult to ignore with all the Facebook greetings coming in, and with three friends (Svetlana Cvetko, Sasha Stone, Tom O'Neil) hosting a little birthday brunch this morning. Nice mood pocket.

People of interest and accomplishment who were born on November 12th include Ryan Gosling, Jacques Tourneur, Neil Young, Auguste Rodin, Tonya Harding (yeesh), Anne Hathaway, Grace Kelly, Alexandra Maria Lara (Control, Downfall), Patrice Leconte, Charles Manson (good God), Jack Oakie,...Read More

I was able to do about 20 minutes with the legendary Pedro Almodovar a bit after 6 pm yesterday, or just before heading over to the depression of Tintin. Our talk happened in a hilltop bungalow attached to the Chateau Marmont. I love talking to Almodovar because he's so open and expansive. Ask him a tiny little question and he'll give you a big sprawling answer. He's also a huge film buff and a Bluray fanatic, and can go on and on about any film, actor, director, Bluray...anything.

Pedor Almodovar --

Pedro's English is...Read More

Half of Lane Browne's Grantland analysis about the Tower Heist shortfall focuses on who got hurt the worst. Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, Brett Ratner and Universal Pictures are the top four. The quotes come from a high-level agent and a producer.

Best quote: "Between Heist's low numbers and his withdrawal from the Academy Awards, Eddie Murphy's comeback has been pretty thoroughly derailed. 'The shame of it is, Murphy would have killed at the Oscars,' the producer says. 'I was really looking forward to him as the antidote to Franco. I think he's an incredibly smart and talented guy who has had so...Read More

In an 11.13 N.Y. Times interview with Frank Bruni, The Descendants helmer Alexander Payne talks about a theory that all good directors have a magic decade. "They say you can do honest, sincere work for decades, but you're given in general a 10-year period when what you do touches the zeitgeist -- when you're relevant," he says. "And I'm aware of that, and I don't want my time to go by."

Alexander Payne

Let's apply this to various directors. John Ford's charmed decade ran from My Darling Clementine ('46) to The Searchers ('56). Alfred Hitchcock's window of deep...Read More

Bella Swan "kisses abstinence and mortality goodbye in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1 in which the vampire-loving teen gets hitched, knocked up and almost destroyed from within by her little bundle of joy." But the film, in the view of Variety's Justin Chang, "is rich in surface pleasures but lacks any palpable sense of darkness or danger.

"Though filmed with the utmost soft-focus, duvet-wrapped tastefulness, the couple's wedding night leaves Bella covered with bruises, the bed in tatters, and the audience, presumably, in a puddle of ecstasy. Surely this must be the first movie series so innately fearful...Read More

All the bullies and ignoramuses who tried to beat me up yesterday for using the satirical term "flying negro", or more particularly "negro", which they believe is and was a racist term...they all need to listen to this KPFK recording of a speech given to Berkeley film buffs in 1968 by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael.

Asked about the prospects for black filmmakers, she used the term "negro"...

If you have a place in your moviegoing heart for an empty synthetic entertainment that will delight your inner nine-year-old, Steven Spielberg's Tintin will rush in and twinkle your toes. A motion-capture adventure thriller in the vein of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the four Pirates of the Caribbean films, it showed last night at the Chinese, and I almost made it to the end. I just couldn't stand all that technical skill and pizazz and exactitude in the service of absolutely nothing, you see. It was just too much of a rousing, highly disciplined, relentlessly energetic kids movie for me...Read More

I don't have the time now to write anything about my talk earlier this afternoon with Another Happy Day star-producer Ellen Barkin and director-screenwriter Sam Levinson, or even to post an mp3...later. But the time just flew. The conversation was mostly on-point but digressions happened from time to time. Barkin and I reminisced about early '80s Manhattan, sharing anecdotes in particular about the Hellfire Club and the old Edlich Pharmacy on 1st Avenue. Don't ask.

Another Happy Day star-producer Ellen Barkin, director-writer Sam Levinson -- Thursday, 11.10, 2:55 pm, Sunset Tower hotel.

What if Michael Fassbender's sex-addict character in Steve McQueen's Shame was called "Shame"? And if everyone called him that -- all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, "I'm ashamed of you, Shame!"

The Turin Horse director Bela Tarr, director Gus Van Sant at yesterday afternoon's gathering (organized by MPRM) for Tarr and his film at...

I was interviewing Another Happy Day star Ellen Barkin and director-writer Sam Levinson at the Sunset Tower from 1:15 pm to 3 pm or thereabouts, and then we said our goodbyes and I was walking down to my car and I pulled out the phone and learned that Billy Crystal will be hosting the Oscars...wham.

My first thought was "okay, I get it...safe choice." Producer Brian Grazer had to land an experienced pro who knew the lay of the land and who would hit the ground running. My second thought was "what happened to reaching out to younger Genx and GenY?" Crystal...Read More

Besides acknowledging that Occupy Wall Street has obviously tapped into something, Brad Pitt, speaking a day or two ago in Japan, said that specifics are the thing. Occupy-ers need to hammer the points that Matt Taibbi's 10.12 Rolling Stone article spelled out: "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."

More computer-generated World War II flying-negro, orange-flameball, video-game poison from Darth Lucas. "Top Gun with black pilots" -- Terrence Howard quoted in an 8.9.11 article. Directed by Anthony Hemingway, and opening on 1.20.12.

This is an agreeably low-key, on-target poster. It doesn't quite erase my memory of that saccharine trailer (which I just re-watched) or that nightmarish association I have in my head with last month's Ohio wild-animal massacre or that subsequent PETA letter urging director Cameron Crowe to post a warning on the closing credits about the danger of keeping exotic animals as pets. But the poster works -- it's the first positive spin that We Bought A Zoo has had in a long while.

"If only he'd prepared!," N.Y. Times columnist Gail Collins wrote this morning. "I can see him now, jogging in the morning, his coyote-killing pistol tucked precariously into his sweatpants, chanting: 'President Perry knocks off three: Commerce! Education! Energy!' all the way down the trail. Really, it would have made all the difference. Rick Perry, we hardly knew ye. Farewell."

Memo to Brian Grazer: Nearly six years years ago I suggested a moderately nervy Oscar-hosting idea. "What offbeat comic team has performed the most consistently funny and inventive bits on previous Oscar telecasts and generally been the most out-there and in-front-of-the-crowd? Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Now let's go one better...make the Oscars into a three-way gig between Stiller, Wilson and Wilson's Wedding Crashers partner Vince Vaughn. Are you kidding me? These guys would kill, and again they'd get the younger viewers. Think of the level of the writing! Think of the nerve element!" Think of Stiller's Na'vi bit, the '09 Joaquin...Read More

De-ball, soften, sand it down. Last April Sony Classics, director Roman Polanski and producer Said Ben Said decided to remove "God of" and just call their film Carnage. Now the Sony Classics marketing team has apparently decided that selling Polanski's (and playwright Yasmina Reza's) dark comedy (opening on 12.16) as a chaotic or discordant experience will be bad for business. Could they have presented this film in blander terms? They're clearly trying to soothe prospective viewers, but to what end?

(l.) Sony Classics' new domestic-market poster for Carnage; (r.) French poster.

Deadline's Nikke Finke is calling J. Edgar's opening-day, five-city gross of $59,000 "strong" and "good enough." Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino doesn't disagree, but feels "the negative reviews are really going to hurt. J. Edgar is aimed at moviegoers looking for an Oscar juggernaut -- and they'll find plenty of reasons to believe that it's not. It also looks like a downer. There's no emotional uplift to this historical biopic, and, let's face it, you need that to make the big bucks. That's why Moneyball hit $70 million and not $100 million. We're going with a $12.5 million opening weekend -- good...Read More

It was announced this afternoon that producer Brian Grazer will step in for Brett Ratner and produce the Oscars. The Academy had to find someone right away and I'm sure there was a vibe of desperation on the other end when Grazer took the call and considered the offer. I'm presuming he said yes because he know they were in a jam and he wanted to help in their hour of need. Good fellow.

You know who would be good as a host if his weight is in check? Vince Vaughn. It would be great if Vaughn could come out on...Read More

Grantland's Mark Harris has joined the Gold Derby prediction gang, and he's saying that the most likely Best Picture winner is The Help, followed by The Artist, War Horse and The Tree of Life. I'm sorry but apart from Harris's choices being incredibly bland and hugely depressing, he's way off.

The Help has awards heat because (a) it's enormously popular with women and (2) because Viola Davis is the presumptive Best Actress front-runner. But it has never had genuine Best Picture heat and never will have genuine Best Picture heat because no one of any perception or integrity thinks it's any...Read More

The general feeling among those who attended last night's special Westwood screening of Wim Wenders' Pina, a beautiful ballet doc shot in 3D, is that dance comes wonderfully alive when viewed with stereoscopic depth. Germany's official submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar is not just sublime in its own right, but proof that 3D is most transporting when it captures life in natural proportion, and not when the camera is going for large brawny spectacle.

Wim Wenders during last night's Pina after-party in Westwood.

There are two reasons why Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder is...Read More

Movieline's Julie Miller has described George Clooney's harmless little anecdote about his first sensation of strong sexual arousal when he was six or seven years old as "skin crawling." It happened, says Clooney, when he was "climbing a rope." Well, the exact same thing happened to me, Julie, when I was eight or nine. And it's probably happened to tens of millions of other boys over the centuries...big deal.

If Miller is reading this, she's invited to explain how and/or why this minor Tom Sawyer-ish recollection triggered such profound disgust.

Eddie Murphy's decision to bail on his Oscar-hosting gig is unwise, to put it mildly. He got a bounce out of Tower Heist, delivering his funniest performance since Bowfinger, and he obviously could have built on that with some extra-funny Oscar-show material...but no. He just has to be the asshole. Smug indifference to anything except his own mercurial whims is his basic default position.

Eddie Murphy

The decision smacks of the old arrogant Murphy of yore. Ladies and gentlemen, the guy who bolted out of the Oscar ceremony when he lost for his nominated Dreamgirls performance is back!...Read More

Here's the formal apology and mea culpa that former Oscar telecast producer Brett Ratner released yesterday. And here's my notion of what Ratner probably had in his head as he was writing his statement:

"To my LGBT friends, colleagues, acquaintances and comrades: I'm sorry, guys. And I'm not just sorry I lost the Oscar-producing gig, which happened because of the stuff I said to Howard Stern two days ago and not because I said 'rehearsing is for fags.' But I am sorry I pissed you guys off. Really. You know I'm not some homophobic shithead. You know I'm just an amiable, marginally...Read More

Well, that was fast! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has accepted Brett Ratner's decision to resign as producer of the 2012 Oscar telecast. He probably would have survived "rehearsing is for fags" but talking about cunnilingus with Howard Stern yesterday morning did him in. Will Eddie Murphy decline to serve as host in solidarity with Rats, or will he stick? That's the question.

Ratner's statement: "As a first step, I called Tom Sherak this morning and resigned as a producer of the 84th Academy Awards telecast. Being asked to help put on the Oscar show was the proudest moment...Read More

I predicted yesterday morning that the Brett Ratner "fags" controversy would last between 24 to 72 hours. And I honestly though it might start to go away last night when Academy bigwig Tom Sherak told Deadline's Mike Fleming that AMPAS would let Ratner slide as long as he doesn't toss any more verbal stink bombs between now and February's Oscar telecast.

But less than an hour ago TheWrap's Steve Pond reported not only that "a tense silence" is seeping out of the Motion Picture Academy "as the drumbeat of disapproval grows" over Ratner's public statements...Read More

Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar currently has a lousy 45% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and my guess is that this number isn't going to rise very much between now and opening day (i.e., Wednesday). But a portion of the Friends-of-Clint Club (i.e., NY & LA elites who've generally stuck by him and have occasionally found ways to give even his lesser films a pass) are giving their approval. These include N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, The New Yorker's David Denby, MSN critic Glenn Kenny, etc. Richard Roeper is actually calling J. Edgar "one of the best films of 2011."

"It's...Read More

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network) has written a short Vanity Fair piece about the personality and temperament of David Fincher, director of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and, of course, The Social Network. Here are the portions that I like the most, in my own order and with edits:

"For three months leading up to the Oscars we'd been going head-to-head with the eventual Best Picture winner, The King's Speech, and six hours after David lost [the Best Director Oscar] to that film's director, Tom Hooper, he sent me an e-mail with his unused acceptance speech attached. It began,...Read More

Haywire proved again that Steven Sodberbergh kills every time he decides to do a crime-action movie. (Excluding the Ocean's films, of course.) I realized this morning that the same incandescent mentalities who declared that Haywire is "not very good" (air agnes) or "meh...kind of dry and slow-moving" (Alex Billington) are cousins of those who complained that the warehouse shootout scene in Soderbergh's The Limey ('99) sucked because it doesn't show anything.

Yesterday a registered letter arrived from Rome's Corpo di Poilizia, informing that I owe them 105 euros and change for a traffic violation that happened on 5.23.10. Except I was never pulled over and given any kind of ticket or verbal warning...nothing. I don't know what I did wrong (the infraction number is 13101230071/10) but whatever my crime it must have been traffic-cammed. Before yesterday afternoon I'd never been handed a special delivery letter from any foreign city or nation informing me of a traffic violation, let alone one that allegedly occured 18 months ago.

I somehow got hold of this early-stab, never-used Sexy Beast poster after catching it at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2000. I brought it home in a plastic tube and had it mounted on foam core. It felt too extreme for framing or hanging on a wall, but it does reflect the horrific madman humor in Ben Kingsley's Don Logan character.

Click here for larger version

"Retired? Fuck off, you're revolting. Look at your suntan...it's like leather, like leather man, your skin. We could make a fucking suitcase out of you. Like a crocodile, fat crocodile,...Read More

An intriguing similarity between Glenn Close's Albert Nobbs and Damon Herriman's Bruno Richard Hauptmann in J. Edgar was mentioned earlier this morning by Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet.

In response to prohibitive security conditions announced by Summit Entertainment concerning its 11.16 Manhattan all-media screening of Breaking Dawn, critic Marshall Fine has declared the following: "As a critic who takes pride in his professionalism, I object to the forced surrender of my telephone or any other device at a screening to which I have been invited in a professional capacity. I therefore will not be attending this screening or reviewing this film."

Most all-media screening publicists give special reserved tickets to journalists they know and trust so they won't have to show ID or surrender their phones...Read More

Journalist Mark Harris has joined Awards Daily's Sasha Stone in declaring that in the wake of Brett Ratner's "fags" comment last Friday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should ask for his resignation as producer of the forthcoming Oscar show.

Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil seems to be in the Harris-Stone camp also, as indicated by his soliciting responses for a poll about whether Ratner should be canned.

Update: At 7:20 pm this evening Deadline's Mike Fleming reported that "the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will not take action...Read More

Robert B. Weide's Woody Allen: A Documentary will air in two parts as a PBS American Masters presentation on 11.20 and 11.21. The measure of it, for me, will be whether it accepts and explores the things in his life that were not wonderful, that didn't go so well, that were somehow banal or involved discord or shortfalls. The less-than-triumphant stuff. Because relentless ass-kissing is not interesting.

I never said this when it was timely, but Allen's decision to abandon Bop Decameron in favor of Nero Fiddles as the title of his latest film...Read More

I finally received my Mutiny on the Bounty Bluray today, and I have to tell the truth about it, which is more than what DVD Beaver's Gary Tooze and Bluray.com's Jeffrey Kauffman conveyed in their reviews. It looks better than the 2006 DVD, but not as good as it could have, given that this 1962 film was shot in 65mm Ultra Panavision.

I don't mean to bite the hands that feeds, but the Mutiny Bluray simply doesn't have the needle-sharp detail that you'll find on the Ben-Hur or Ten Commandments Blurays. It's pleasing...Read More

Yesterday morning Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I riffed on Hugo, J. Edgar and Young Adult. Here's a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Why was I, a non-fan of sadistic kick-ass actioners in the Jason Statham-Steven Seagal mode and a rabid hater of most Asian martial-arts flicks, so delighted with Steven Soderbergh's Haywire (Relativity, 1.20.12), and the fight sequences in particular? Answer: because they're 100% believable, and because Gina Carano, an MMA champ, is the first completely credible female kick-butt star, ever.

Thirty seconds into her first duke-out and there isn't the slightest doubt that Carano can whip any guy out there, no matter how big or snarly. If she could time-travel back to '62 she...Read More

I received a spirited pitch this morning from a Rogers & Cowan junior publicist about interviewing "two amazing Christian women," Chevonne O'Shaughnessy and Cindy Bond, about their company, Mission Pictures Int'l. The publicist described MPI as "a multi-faceted, value-based film distribution, sales and production company for both the mainstream and faith markets." The plan, she said, is to deliver "trusted faith and family value-based content to the masses."

I replied as follows:

"When I hear the words 'Christian', 'values-driven', 'faith-based' and 'family content' I interpret that to mean that the movies being made by Mission Pictures...Read More

Last Friday night Tower Heist director and Oscar show producer Brett Ratner stepped into some p.c. poop, and he's now trying to wash it off with one of those "whoops!...didn't mean it that way" apologies. TheWrap's Sharon Waxman is reporting that when Ratner was asked by an audience member if he had rehearsed his cast, he replied that "rehearsal's for fags."

Ratner meant, of course, that rehearsal was for candy-asses, and that real men just get out there and hit their marks and say their lines, etc. But he wasn't smart enough to say "candy-asses" and that's...Read More

I'm too whipped to write anything about Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, which screened tonight at AFIfest to a wildly revved and delighted crowd. If the Sean Connery-Robert Shaw train compartment fight in From Russia With Love is your idea of a classic, Haywire will throttle you right down to the marrow. I've always felt that Angelina Jolie was too small and skinny to kick large male ass, but I believe in Gina Carano's aggressive abilities 110%.

Asian martial-arts films can go suck it on their knees, but this movie is the shit.

A bit more...Read More

Hollywood Reporter film critic Kirk Honeycutt, who's been with the trade for a very long time, has been cut loose. Tough break. Can't feel good. Honeycutt had been THR's first-string critic for...I can't find a decent online bio but at least since the early Bill Clinton era, no? He was demoted to "international critic" status when THR honcho Janice Min hired former Variety critic Todd McCarthy a little more than a year ago.

Here's hoping that Honeycutt, a knowledgable critic and a good writer, lands a suitable new gig in short order.

No Kirk Honeycutt recap will ever be complete without...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere's Tyrannosaur screening fund-raising campaign was kind of exciting while it lasted and I'm glad I did it, but you know what? Not that many people showed up. I was able to pay for three extra screenings on top of what Strand had booked so the people who needed to see this film would have a few more options, and at the end of the day the silence was almost deafening.

The Aidikoff screening on 10.27 lured about nine or ten journalists, the 10.31 showing at the Ocean Ave. Screening Room attracted three or four, and the third & final screening...Read More

Some kind of police-protestor standout recently captured in Oakland. Real deal, real bodies, real choreography...."owwww! arrgghhh! Fucker shot me!"

Some kind of Dark Knight Rises brawl recently shot on Wall Street. Real deal, real bodies, real choreography.

There are light or semi-frolicsome heist films like Topkapi, The Hot Rock, Sneakers or the Oceans films, and there are dead-serious ones like Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing and Odds Against Tomorrow. Obviously Tower Heist belongs in the former category. Its closet cousin, I feel, is Peter Yates' The Hot Rock. Smart chat, amusing antics, likable perps, etc,

Okay, it's good natured and even funny now and then, and yes, Eddie Murphy has definitely given his funniest comic performance since Bowflnger. I actually started liking him again after I don't know how many years of...Read More

Two weekends ago (or was it three?) I made the mistake of renting four Blurays at Vidiots. I watched them within a couple of days, took them down to the car, threw them into the back seat and forgot about them. This morning a Vidiots clerk called and said I owe them $160. That seemed excessive. I told the clerk that my first reaction would be not to return the Blurays, but to build a fire outside and burn them. More emotionally satisfying, etc. He said fine, but if I keep them or burn them they'll charge me $160 plus the cost...Read More

Steven Soderbergh's Haywire (Relativity, 1/20./12) will be shown tonight at the AFiFest under a "secret screening" heading at 9 pm. A brief q & a with Soderbergh and star Gina Carano and maybe a couple of others will follow.

The costars, as everyone knows by now, are Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Angarano, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas.

Haywire (originally called Knockout) was shot mostly in Ireland from early February 2010 to 3.25.10 at a cost of $25 million, give or take.

A full fight clip of Carano and Michael Fassbender was reportedly shown...Read More

Martin Scorsese's Hugo (Paramount. 11.23) screened this afternoon for press at the big Regal plex in downtown LA. It's a fanciful, heavily CG-ed, 3D storybook film that plays like a "family entertainment" flick during the first two thirds to 75%, which is to say with much familiarity. But the final act, roughly the last 25 minutes, is another story.

For Hugo concludes with a great excursion into filmmaking history and the first dreammakers (particularly George Meiles, director of the 1902 A Trip To The Moon and dozens of other shorts) and film preservation and all...Read More

"Hey Jeff, thought you might be interested in these pics of Ryan Gosling, recently announced as the costar of an upcoming Terrence Malick film called Lawless, doing precisely what Christian Bale was doing with Malick in Austin last month. Only this time, it was a different music festival." -- from a friend this morning.

I've got three or four more stories I could write but it's 11:30 am and I have stuff to do before driving downtown for a 2 pm screening of a film I'm not supposed to mention, which will be followed by a q & with a not-to-be-mentioned director. So that's it. To be continued, etc.

Clint Eastwood is a signature filmmaker, an auteurist. His movies have a tone, a vibe and a stamp that say "take it or leave it, but this is a Clint film." They've all delivered a feeling of wholeness and completion, certainly by Eastwood standards. The problem for some (many?) of us is that post-Million Dollar Baby and with the exception of Gran Torino his films have begun to feel a little too meditative, longish, labored and languid. And what's with the frequently desaturated color?

Letters From Iwo Jima was eloquent and affecting, but Flags of...Read More

Andy Rooney, the scintillating, bluntly honest 60 Minutes commentator with the moderately cranky manner, has died "of complications following a minor surgery." He led a rich and storied and distinguished life, and 92 years is a long run by anyone's standard. Most people depart a few years earlier on average so Rooney was doing something right, or he had good genes or whatever.

But it's interesting, I think, that he died only 33 days after his final 60 Minutes commentary was broadcast.

For some people (like myself) work is the engine and the...Read More

Late this morning Indiewire's Anne Thompson and In Contention's Kris Tapley discussed their reaction to Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar, which they saw last night at the AFIFest, on Oscar Talk. I have a chance to see it tonight, and I may do that rather than wait for Monday's "caboose" screening.

Tapley also talks about last Tuesday's screening of Young Adult ("I think it plays to a niche crowd"), which Thompson missed.

Here's Tapley's J. Edgar review on Hitfix/In Contention.

"I think DiCaprio could win [the Best Actor Oscar]," says Tapley, and Thompson agrees....Read More

I was somewhat excited about attending Summit Entertainment's shindig last night at the Bel-Air Hotel because I wanted to see what the $100 million renovation looks like. It was a nice party but the makeover is a letdown. At least in terms of those 12 newly built canyon-view suites up on the hillside. The exteriors and staircases, I mean, which have an uncultivated, hard-edged, nouveau-riche appearance, like something you might find in Riyadh or Qatar or Cancun.

The hard sharp lines that define the Hotel Bel Air hillside exteriors are icky. What person with taste decorates a stairway...

Eighteen months after abruptly departing Apparition, Bob and Jeanne Berney are abruptly leaving FilmDistrict, the GK-partnered company that was launched 13 or 14 months ago. The stated reason is that the company wants to abandon its New York City offices and move the whole kit 'n' kaboodle to Los Angeles, and the Berneys are hardcore New Yorkers and don't want to relocate.

According to math provided by Deadline's Mike Fleming, the company has generated about $163 million in revenues from five Film District releases -- Insidious, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Soul Surfer, Drive and Rum Diary. I don't know...Read More

This morning I placed a call to a New York-based company (never mind the particulars) called Reprise something-or-other. I got the usual voice message explaining the usual options. The speaker had what sounded to me like a somewhat educated New York borough or northern New Jersey accent. What got me was his pronunciaton of Reprise, which he called RE-prize -- a variation on the standard football-game prounciation of the word "defense" as DE-fense.

The second I heard RE-prize I thought of those hillbillies in Deliverance telling Jon Voight and Ned Beatty that "well, we, uh, RE-quire that you both get your asses...Read More

"J. Edgar Hoover's mystique lies in the fact that while he kept meticulous files with compromising details on some of America's most powerful figures, nobody knew the man's own secrets," writes Variety's Peter Debruge. "Therefore, any movie in which the longtime FBI honcho features as the central character must supply some insight into what made him tick, or suffer from the reality that the Bureau's exploits were far more interesting than the bureaucrat who ran it -- a dilemma J. Edgar never rises above."

Updated: Brett Ratner's Tower Heist (which opens tomorrow, and which I'm finally seeing this evening) isn't doing all that well on Rotten Tomatoes so far. 67% isn't awful, when I got a grade like that on a high-school exam it meant that I'd failed. A film has to get 70% or better to be called "critically approved," I think.

"There are heist pictures that offer careful and detailed accounts of criminal procedure, generating suspense by focusing on the precise arrangements necessary to bring a brazen and improbable crime to fruition," writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. "Tower Heist is emphatically not...Read More

Middle-class husband loses job and convinces his wife they need to leave the big city and start a simpler life elsewhere -- that's Lost in America. Middle-class people are thrown for a loop by hippie manners and appetites (like hallucinogen-taking) -- that's the last act of Flirting With Disaster. Throw those together and remove the exceptional, whip-smart writing and you've almost certainly got Wanderlust, a Paul Rudd-Jennifer Aniston comedy due in February.

A person of substance and experience has seen War Horse and isn't eating the oats like the others. He got in touch this morning. Here's his report:

"I have a fairly high tolerance for schmaltz and sentiment. I bought into The Blind Side heart and soul. And as someone who dearly wishes that Steven Spielberg would get back on his game and deliver a winner, I was rooting for War Horse, especially as a potentially high-quality family film.

"But dear Lordy...

"My guard was up immediately when the film opened with the hoariest of cliches -- a smitten lad beckoning a testy steed...Read More

Tell me this doesn't look like the latest high-style, elite-popcorn actioner from the director of Man on Fire, The Taking of Pelham 123, Spy Game and Enemy of the State. The guy who's studied the chops of Tony Scott is Daniel Espinosa. I've seen this movie. I know this movie cold. The sink-or-swim factor will come down to the script by David Guggenheim.

I don't want to go into this all half-cocked....actually, no, that's okay...I'll readily admit that this is a half-cocked notion. It's just that two initial reactions I had to Charlize Theron's Young Adult character -- that she's a cautionary metaphor for "a kind of egoistic Kardashian-like malignancy afoot in the culture right now" as well as a kind of monster in her own right -- have been somewhat refined.

We're talking about an emotionally predatory Jason Voorhees here, and yet armed with a lot of sassy, funny, outrageous-deadpan dialogue. And I'm now starting to think...Read More

I hate to admit it, but "Nordling"'s War Horse rave on AICN, which was posted early this morning, deserves respect and consideration. He's a fool for that sappy, sweeping Spielberg stuff, but he knows how to write, and that implies he may know (or at least picked up some knowledge of) other things besides.

The only thing I'm kinda half-wondering is why doesn't Nordling mention the pretty young girl (seemingly played by Celine Buckens) we've seen in the trailer with the sad, soulful eyes and a tear streaming down her cheek?

Update: I'm told that...Read More

For Leonardo DiCaprio, playing J. Edgar Hoover "meant memorizing endless monologues that needed to be delivered with Hoover's own breakneck cadence," writes N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes in an 11.2 profile. "Additionally Mr. DiCaprio, who typically comes accessorized with a supermodel girlfriend in real life, had to wrestle aggressively with a man and then kiss him. Oh, and wear a dress."

From a 4.3.10 HE posting about same: "Okay, I've flipped through most of Lance Black's J. Edgar Hoover script -- i.e., the one that Clint Eastwood reportedly intends to direct with Leonardo DiCaprio as the FBI kingpin -- and I...Read More

HE's Manhattan correspondent Jett Wells attended Tuesday night's (11.1) premiere screening of Oren Moverman's Rampart at the Sunshine plex on Houston Street. Here's his report:

Rampart star Woody Harrelson, Ben Stiller at Tuesday night's premiere.

"It felt suffocating being surrounded by a ridiculous and cluttered amount of celebrities in such a small theater. Is that Courtney Love? Yup. Martha Stewart? Yes, indeed. Oh hey...yes, Steve Buscemi and Michael Shannon looking for their seats. You couldn't talk about the iconic faces without looking like an ogling jerkoff, but that didn't stop all the turning heads in the front rows....Read More

George Clooney has told USA Today's Susan Wloszczyna (a.k.a. "Suzie Woz") that Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity "is a very odd film, really. Two people in space. No monsters. It's more like 2001 than an action film."

Clooney and costar Sandra Bullock play astronauts working on an orbiting space station. "A satellite blows up and space junk causes damage," Clooney explains. "We go out in space suits, and she and I are tethered together, floating through space. [So] it's a two-hander with only two actors in the whole film." Oh, and "Sandy is the lead."

Gravity began filming...Read More

When a wife says she can smell the whiff of betrayal on a cheating husband, people nod and go "uhm-hmm"...knowing exactly what she means. And people know exactly what Marlene Dietrich meant when she told Fred Zinneman that people could "smell" the fact that From Here To Eternity was a must-see despite there having been no publicity. But people resent others claiming they can smell what a forthcoming movie will probably be like, based on the usual indicators (including the unmistakable whiff of calculated emotional mauling).

??

Awards Circuit's Joey Magidson has posted reactions to last night's War Horse hinterlands screenings, and only two haters have popped up so far. Most of the reactions to the 146-minute film have been highly positive so maybe it's pretty good after all.

The best positive review is from @emailjnm: "This was a masterpiece. This should be one of the top two or three during Oscar season. All the hype we were hoping for was well-deserved. Outside of the first 30 minutes being a tad 'eh,' the rest of the film is the best I've seen [from] Spielberg in years. Some of...Read More

The Mutiny on the Bounty Bluray ('62 version) streets next Tuesday (11.8). I've got a comp coming in the mail, but for now DVD Beaver's Gary Tooze is calling it "quite an upgrade depending on your discerning eye or system size" and "really sweet" and "jaw-dropping with vibrancy...a higher degree of sharpness via the impressive 2.75:1 widescreen presentation....a very film-like viewing."

I've said two or three times in the past that it's not the movie (although many portions of it are quite good) as much as the resolution. This mostly-good, partly-problematic sea epic was shot...Read More

I've detected a little Lon Chaney-as-Grandfather Wu (from the 1927 film Mr. Wu) in one of the recently unveiled Young Adult posters.

Paramount held a special screening this evening of Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's Young Adult (12.16). The kicker was that it happened at the New Beverly Cinema, a beloved West Hollywood repertory theatre that has sentimental value for many but still has awful sight lines. The good news is that I wasn't the only one who admired the hell out of it, and that Patton Oswalt, portraying a blunt-spoken, half-crippled fat guy who befriends Charlize Theron's neurotic writer character, is now a Best Supporting Actor contender...definitely.

Patton Oswalt at Tuesday night's Young Adult after-party at an art gallery on...

I've just received a "Dear John" email from the AFI Festival publicists telling me that they can't slip me a ticket to Thursday's opening-night (11.3) screening of Clint Eastwood 's J. Edgar. This despite sporadic begging and pleading to all pertinent parties over the last two weeks. My next opportunity will be the all-media screening at the Grove on Monday, 11.7.

I don't know how legit this is, but a Twitter colleague of Awards Daily's Ryan Adams has forwarded an online announcement that Steven Spielberg's War Horse will play in six hinterland theaters tonight and tomorrow night.

We're talking about possible showings thsi evening in Bellevue, Washington, Leawood, Kansas and Cleveland Heights, Ohio. And tomorrow night (Wednesday, 11.2) in Beaverton, Oregon, Bethesda, Maryland and Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.

There's another screening on 11.10 in Olathe, Kansas, according to the info.

if this turns out to be real and any HE readers happen to attend tonight or tomorrow, I'd...Read More

Obviously the Masters of Cinema guys who prepared the double-disc Bluray release of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil didn't get the memo from the 16 x 9 fascists that all 1950s films have to masked at 1.85 or 1.78 to 1 because that was how they were shown from 1953 on.

Who needs the boxy headspace in this frame-capture of the 1.37 version of Touch of Evil, right? Whack it down, the fascists say. Put those actors in a 1.85 or 1.78 jail and keep them there!

In an act of stubborn,...Read More

The last HE-supported screening of Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur happens at the Sunset Screening Room on Wednesday, 11.2 (i.e., tomorrow) at 4 pm. There's one more after this at the Royal theatre on Tuesday, 11.8 at 10 or 10:30 am. So if morning screenings aren't your cup of tea you'll want to attend tomorrow's. Just saying.

Film Nation's announcement about a deal to handle sales and distribution for two Terrence Malick projects, Lawless and Knight of Cups, is somewhat surprising, yes, but it's not exactly a waffle iron knocking everyone off-balance. The films will shoot back-to-back next year with Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett costarring in both.

(l.) Terrence Malick (in hat and shades), (right-middle) Christian Bale during shooting of footage in Austin in mid-September.

Remember that video clip that was posted in September of Malick shooting some kind of footage of Bale strolling around an outdoor concert in Austin? (My post was...Read More

This American Reunion trailer helps because I've now seen the movie without having to sit through the full-length version. We all know that early 30s, "what happened to my wild and randy youth?" angst so what's new here? Nothing. Badass Digest's Moises Chiullan noted this morning that Faceboook has killed the necessity for class reunions. True?

Here's some advice for late 20something or early 30something guys. Don't get married until you're 40 or thereabouts, and when you do tie the knot make sure it's to someone who really loves you with your pants off and doesn't...Read More

I'm afraid there's something I don't quite understand, Aleksei. Are you saying that Donald Trump's rant about Jon Stewart (uploaded on 11.1) was triggered by last night's Daily Show riff about the allegations of sexual harassment against Cain? Because it didn't strike me as inappropriate in the least.

Longtime Oscar telecast producer Gil Cates keeled over last night in a UCLA parking lot (he reportedly taught at the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television) and passed into eternity. My condolences to family and friends. He was 77 years old, and very well liked and by almost every indication a fine fellow.

Gilbert Cates -- 6.6.34 to 10.31.11

Cates also directed features and TV movies, of course, and was a fairly good one in his day. His creative peak as a director happened between '70 and '74 when he made I Never Sang For...Read More