Timur Bekmambetov's inability or refusal to restrain himself in the making of Wanted suggests that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (20th Century Fox, 6.22), which he's directing and co-producing with Tim Burton, will also be lurid and excessive. It would be nice if otherwise. I want to like or at least be amused by this thing, but a voice is telling me that Bekmambetov will do everything he can to prevent that.

An idea just popped into my head that I'm not sure about, but I'll run it up the flagpole. We're still in the holiday season with thoughts of providing for the afflicted, so what about an HE fundraiser to pay for a couple of rounds at the Alien Cathouse (due to open sometime in early '12) for LexG? If and when the cash is raised and LexG accepts, he'd agree to never again complain about anything personal.

I for one would gladly chip in $20 or $25 bucks. I've never patronized a brothel, but $600...Read More

It's always a pleasure when a family drama has a cranky older guy or a crazy guy hanging around. Someone who will blurt out what's really going on (and has gone on) without any restraint or regard for subtlety. Michael Shannon's crazy truth-teller in Revolutionary Road, Alan Arkin's drug-dabbling, blunt-spoken granddad in Little Miss Sunshine and Robert Forster's cranky gramps in The Descendants.

Descendants costar Robert Forster at West Hollywood's Silver Spoon cafe.

Forster's character (the father of George Clooney's comatose wife, called Scott Thorson), bawls out Shailene Woodley's Alexandra for giving her mom a rough time ("shame on...Read More

Significnt signpost: Oscar Talk's Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson acknowledge in their latest podcast that some kind of blowback reaction to The Artist is manifesting "out there." For what it's worth a filmmaker friend told me last night that he sees The Descendants pushing past The Artist and War Horse at the end of the day. "I'm glad to hear you say that," I said, "but I don't know."

The audience at Royce Hall began clapping along to a number performed by Woody Allen's New Orleans Jazz Band the other night, and it was obvious right away that many couldn't hit the exact beat to save their lives. But then clapping in a metronomically perfect way is hard even for experienced drummers. I used to drum for a couple of bands in my early 20s and I learned that hitting the snare drum at exactly the right instant, 75 or 100 times during a song, was actually kind of hard.

In a mathematical sense the perfect...Read More

I say the same two things every year. One, I haven't been to a New Year's Eve party in ages. And two, my last really cool New Year's Eve celebration happened 12 years ago in Paris. But as I have nothing new to say, it couldn't hurt to post the best-written humbug rants from the last four or five years.

The most beautiful Xmas gift I've received over the holiday...cheers! I was away in NYC until three or four days ago so I only received it last night from a Los Angeles friend.

Posted last year:...Read More

Dennis Lim's Brad Pitt interview in the 1.1.12 edition of the New York Times reads like a slightly sheepish confession of a guy (i.e., Lim) who went out on a blind date and...well, had an okay time but not a great one either. Lim is an intensely scholastic monk-dweeb and Pitt is obviously Pitt, and the twains just didn't have a chance, man.

Lim sat down with Pitt at the Waldorf Astoria in early December. "Many of his answers had the vague, scripted ring of someone determined not to say more than necessary," Lim writes. On...Read More

The broken-mirror moment in The Apartment (starting at 4:10) is a great bit because it shows a major character absorbing a major plot point (and realizing where a significant secondary character is coming from) without dialogue. Of course, the linkage between Shirley MacLaine's character and the broken mirror has been set up a couple of scenes previously. What 21st Century films have conveyed something strong and surprising about a major character in a similar way? I'm asking.

I bought a French Bluray of Brian De Palma's The Phantom of the Paradise at Kim's a couple of weeks ago. It's supposed to be an all-region disc, but it won't play the feature -- only Gerrit Graham's introduction. Thanks.

I for one have had it with Keith Olbermann's temper tirades. He used up his cards on this score when he left MSNBC in a huff. He can't do the same thing again with Current. Nobody likes a self-destructive prima donna. Suck it in and do the job.

By my sights the two biggest Bluray embarassments of 2011 were (a) the Great Ishtar Delay Saga (which I explained in detail on 4.26.11) and (b) the Great West Side Story "Fade to Black During the Overture" MGM Home Video Snafu (which I reported on 10.25.11).

For the first time in my professional life I'm thinking I could squeeze in (i.e., afford) the first four days of the Palm Springs Film Festival (1.5 through 1.16). I've submitted my press credential application and have found a motel that rents rooms for $65 per night. I'd like to attend from Thursday, 1.5 through Sunday, 1.8. Salmon Fishing in Yemen, Turn Me On Dammit, The Flowers of War, Cafe de Flore, The Island President, Elite Squad and a George Clooney chat.

An excerpt from a 12.30 article by Matt Brennan on Anne Thompson's Indiewire page: "More than The Artist, the Oscar frontrunner, Alexander Payne's The Descendants -- the only other legitimate contender -- presents emotion as complicated, world-worn, human.

"Don't get me wrong; The Artist is a lovely little film. It's a nostalgic blast from the past and impeccably made, the very kind of perfect that The Descendants is not. But whereas The Artist is a slip of a film, a shiny bauble without much weight, The Descendants takes on the heft of life's messy actualities. Though my...Read More

In an intro to a video interview with The Artist costars Jean Dujardin and Bernice Bejo, Sasha Stone wrote the clip "gives you an idea of what it's like to interview them, lovely people that they are." Well...what else are they going to be? Are they going to be sullen or snippy or evasive? Are they going to channel Tommy Lee Jones (whom I love for not doing the usual gushy-smiley during junket interviews)?

Dujardin and Bejo may be the nicest people in the world when they're not being interviewed by entertainment journalists. I've spoken to Dujardin and he's a very likable...Read More

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, which opens today in NY and LA, still has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and a 92% rating from Metacritic.

"When admirers asked Mack Sennett how he went about creating his classic silent comedies, he would describe the basic principle as 'one thing leads to another.' Far from being a comedy, A Separation is an enthralling drama -- with some kinship to Kramer vs. Kramer -- and the subtitled Persian dialogue is fluent and copious. All the same, one thing leads to another with such ease and inexorable logic that the script could have been...Read More

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg posted a "contender castoffs" piece last night -- a look at 13 of the films "that many thought, at one time or another, would factor into this year's awards race but never did." But there are only two...no, three...okay, four that have my interest.

Obviously a crap-quality pic that appears to show Garret Hedlund, Kristen Stewart in Walter Salles' On The Road. It looks like them, they're in the back seat of a period car and there are reportedly scenes of this nature in the film.

These are (1)...Read More

Tonight I caught a two-hour performance by Woody Allen & His New Orleans Jazz Band at UCLA's Royce Hall. I'm so used to hearing this kind of music behind the closing credits of Allen's films that I didn't know what to do with it live on-stage. It's loose and joyous and at the same time too sedate and regulated. But it was fun overall. Thanks to 42West, but no thanks to the Royce Hall usher who stopped my video recording in the middle of a song.

John Williams' score for War Horse is relentless. It doesn't just tell you what to feel at every turn -- it browbeats you into each new emotional moment like a schoolyard bully. "Feel this...and now that...feel it!" And yet Dimitri Tiomkin's High Noon score does exactly the same thing, and I have no problem with that. It's one of my all-time fave scores, and Williams' War Horse score is one of my all-time peeves.

Tiomkin's score is so consistent with that melody ("Do Not Forsake Me," etc.) and persistent and all over you that it almost turns High Noon into...Read More

Criterion's Bluray of Luis Bunuel's Belle du Jour streets on January 17th. Could this be remade today by an American director? Would there be an audience for it, or have the seeds of intrigue and/or receptivity for this sort of thing passed? I don't want to hear about this photo being NSFW -- don't even go there.

Imagine that award-season bigmouths like myself received report cards for their efforts to gather or diminish support for this or that contender during Phase One. Here's how mine would read right now:

Effort to push Moneyball for Best Picture: C-minus. A BP nomination looks good but a win is out of the question -- let's face it. The best that Bennett Miller's masterwork can hope for is to place among the Best Picture nominees. The more I've pushed Moneyball the more people talk about the unstoppable strength of The Artist and War Horse. There are only so many times you can register disgust...Read More

I've taken another look at the various Sundance 2012 offerings and rated them 1 to 10 in terms of interest. I've only got 23 films listed here, which is a little less than what I usually wind up seeing at this festival. I'm thinking there must be another five that I'm overlooking, and perhaps more than that.

Lay The Favorite / U.S.A. (Director: Stephen Frears, Screenwriter: D.V. Devincintis) -- An adventurous young woman gets involved with a group of geeky older men who have found a way to work the sportsbook system in Las Vegas to their advantage. Cast: Rebecca Hall, Bruce Willis,...Read More

So it's settled, then, that Andy Serkis (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and Patton Oswalt (Young Adult) are out of the Best Supporting Actor race? That doesn't seem right. Christopher Plummer, Albert Brooks and Jonah Hill deserve their slots. But Kenneth Branagh's Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn was just sufficiently good, and Nick Nolte's ex-rummy dad in Warrior played the same note over and over.

Shamelessly stolen from Movieline's latest Oscar Index.

L.A. Times staffer Amy Kaufman has reported on the gradual mongrelization of Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese plex by its sleazebag owners, Donald Kushner and Elie Samaha. They're not high priests of cinema, these guys, so they're after the dough, of course. And that means lowering the value of the place by inviting various downmarket types to leave their handprints and footprints.

(l.) Elie Samaha, (r.) Donald Kushner.

Okay, not all the changes are for the worse. Kaufman writes that "plans are in the works to relight the forecourt and restore old theater signs to resemble their 1930s appearance."...Read More

A 12.28 article by Robert Reich offers an interesting prediction: "Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden will swap places. Biden becomes Secretary of State -- a position he's apparently coveted for years. And Hillary Clinton, Vice President. So the Democratic ticket for 2012 is Obama-Clinton.

"Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that's been disillusioned with his cave-ins to regressive Republicans. Hillary Clinton on the ticket can do that.

"The deal would also make Clinton the obvious Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 -- offering the Democrats a shot at twelve (or...Read More

"Driving Miss Daisy was The Help of 1989." -- thanks to HE commenter "Alexander" for spitting this out at 11:03 this morning. I'm sure someone else has said this somewhere, but it had to be posted.

Indiewire's Anne Thompson posted earlier today about the return of New Yorker Films with the forthcoming release of Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's Turn Me On, Dammit!, a Norwegian teenage sex comedy which won the Best Screenplay Award when it played at last spring's Tribeca Film Festival. But there's a holiday hitch, I soon found out.

Seconds after reading Thompson's piece I wrote marketing exec Reid Rosefelt, who'd urged her to write about Jacobsen's film. "When can I see it in Los Angeles?," I asked. "And where's that Saul Bass-styled release poster that Anne mentioned?"

An L.A.-based...Read More

Three passages from Jamie Stuart's 12.28 Indiewire piece about "Why 2011 Marked a Shift In the History of Cinematography":

(a) "2011 was the year in which the Arri Alexa, the first significant digital camera released by leading equipment developer Arri, was put to wide use. Three wildly different examples of the new camera can found in Drive, Hugo and Melancholia.

(b) "Somebody needs to slap Steven Spielberg in the face and tell him to wake up, because he cannot move forward as a filmmaker by holding so tightly to the past (he even wishes he could return to cutting on...Read More

Talent reps have to come down to earth and adjust their thinking. The best solution, passed along years ago by longtime Republican Robert Evans, is for talent to take modest upfront fees and share in the risk. If the movie hits big, the partners will be rolling in dough. If it doesn't, everyone shakes it off and moves on. That's the American way.

According to Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet, the five likeliest nominees for Best Director are The Artist's Michel Hazanavicius (but of course! obvious front-runner!), Hugo's Martin Scorsese (a pass to Brother Marty for indulging himself to the tune of 127 minutes and $175 million), War Horse's Steven Spielberg, The Descendants' Alexander Payne (deserved) and Midnight in Paris's Woody Allen.

I not only disagree -- I strenuously object. But what's the point of repeating myself? The top three slots belong to Moneyball's Bennett Miller, Payne and (I don't care about any eligibility roadblocks) A Separation's Asghar Farhadi.

Six days ago Bad Robot released Action Movie FX, an app that allows the user to insert nutter action effects inside videos shot with their iPhone. Two free effects -- Missile Attack! and Car Smash -- are in the free version. Four more effects -- Chopper Down, Tornado, Air Strike and Firefight -- are purchasable.

One of the best musically-driven openings of a dramatic film ever. Far richer in spirit and wit, and so much more enjoyable than any sequence or scene in Hugo. Side benefit: Scorsese's use of "All The Way to Memphis" made me realize that Mott the Hoople wasn't as irksome as I'd thought. Agreed -- "All The Young Dudes" has aged well.

Notice that three of the memory-bubble films in the just-released Oscar poster are (a) the reprehensible Forrest Gump, (b) the 1989 Best Picture-winning embarassment that is Driving Miss Daisy, and (c) The Sound of Music, which needs no adjective.

I don't agree with many of the Austin Film Critics Association's year-end choices, but I respect them. Best Film: Hugo; Best Director: Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive; Best Actor: Michael Shannon , Take Shelter; Best Actress: Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin; Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks, Drive; Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter, etc.

Countless War Horse reviews have described the drenched-in-orange sunset finale (i.e., when Joey returns to the Dorset farm) as a near-copy of the famous red-sunset scene in Gone With The Wind when Rhett tells Scarlett he's leaving to join the Confederate army. But the more likely inspiration comes from a romantic scene in Stanley Kubrick's (and dp Russell Metty's) Spartacus.

In response to today's news that Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump has been added to the National Film Registry, here's a reposting of a piece I wrote in October 2008:

"I have a still-lingering resentment of that film, which I and many others disliked from the get-go for the way it kept saying 'keep your head down', for its celebration of clueless serendipity and simpleton-ism, and particularly for the propagandistic way it portrayed '60s-era counter-culture types and in fact that whole convulsive period.

"Every secondary hippie or protestor character in that film was a selfish loutish asshole, and every...Read More

You know what 2011's award season lacks? A film that ends with a big, blustery rant with the lead protagonist explaining exactly what's wrong and right with the world. A strong sermon, in short. The only 2011 film I can think of that has a "this is who I am and what I believe" scene is Crazy Stupid Love (i.e., the school graduation confessional), and that was awful. Have screenwriters decided that sermon scenes are too on the nose and need to be retired? I'm asking.

I was looking at footage of the Hollywood premiere of Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis, which opened on 4.20.57. One of the celebrity arrivals is Charlton Heston, whose hair is noticably darker than normal. Then it hit me. Of course...that's his dyed Miguel Vargas hair for Orson Welles' Touch of Evil , which was shooting at the time. Before today I'd never seen Heston-as-Vargas without the spirit-glue moustache.

You're dying in coach on a NY-to-LA flight. You can't sleep, you've read all the periodicals and your battery is almost gone on the iPhone. So you go to the movie-rental options and this is what you find. And they want $8 per viewing .

Every so often an ad campaign will blend really nicely with HE's general design scheme and dark gray background. This has happened, I feel, with the arrival of Sony's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ads. The best looking of 2011's award season.

A couple of hours ago Awards Daily's Sasha Stone declared that The Artist has peaked in the Best Picture race and that War Horse is now the one to beat. She's guesstimating by way of insect antennae, but she's good at that. I also agree with her boilerplate observation: "The best films usually don't win...the majority [wins] and emotion rules the day."

But I don't agree with saying War Horse is "in the Titanic realm as maybe the worst movie and the best movie at the same time." However War Horse plays for this...Read More

I always ignore these Hollywood Reporter talkathons because they post them so long after-the-fact. You have to post material quickly on the web. But this is interesting. Gary Oldman, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Christopher Plummer, Christoph Waltz, Nick Nolte. Originally posted on 12.5.

Best bit: Plummer's recollections about making The Sound of Music. Second best: His admission that he only began to have fun playing characters in film when he reached his drunk stage in his 40s (i.e., The Man Who Would Be King ). Second best: Clooney saying "we're all on this journey [but] it's...Read More

Yesterday a captivating Spanish-language teaser for Juan Antonio Bayona's The Impossible (Summit, 10.11.12) surfaced on YouTube. I haven't yet found an English-language version but it hardly matters. It feels spooky and mystical, and looks fantastic. Summit's decision to wait until the fall obviously means they think it's much more than an FX popcorn film about the '04 Asian tsunami.

A little more than four months ago I passed along information about The Impossible straight from Bayona.

"I can only say that we're on schedule and working really hard on the editing and visual effects. We finished...Read More

In Richard Curtis and Lee Hall's screenplay of War Horse, there's a scene prior to the British cavalry charge upon German troops that didn't make the cut. It's a three-way conference between Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), Major Stewart (Benedict Cumberbach)and Lieutenant Waverly (Patrick Kennedy). An HE regular e-mailed it during my flight to Los Angeles.

Major Stewart: Are the men ready, Captain?

Captain Waverly: Those kraut bastards will taste British steel!

Major Stewart: England's pride!

Captain Nicholls: Sir?

Major Stewart: And so thrilling!

Captain Nicholls: There are pragmatic considerations, sir. British soldiers attacking with...Read More

It's 7:05 pm Pacific -- beginning my sixth hour of confinement on my NY-to-LA Virgin flight. Another full hour to go. Not hellish, exactly, but coach is never pleasant. You endure it. To experience a little private air space...well, soon enough. My Macbook Pro's power cord was lost at JFK during security scanning so no power and no filing.

The sounds coming out of this toy monkey remind me of the gaiety generated by a table of middle-aged out-of-towners who were sitting next to me at a Second Ave. cafe in late April 2010. It led to a short piece called "The Worst People in the World." I can let that memory and essay go, but the monkey brought it back.

Now that the Dragon Tattoo and Extremely Loud embargoes have expired and I've seen Margaret and Mission: Impossible 4 -- Ghost Protocol, here's my final revised rundown of HE's bests, favorites, almost favorites, mezzo-mezzos and worsts of 2011. And I've found a place for Margin Call, which I omitted in the initial posting.

My top ten met the usual pick-of-the-litter characteristics -- quality, audacity, originality, personal satisfaction, stylistic excitement, something strong and central that said felt new or bold or extra-cool. Aesthetic judgment, personal delight, etc.

If you include the "decent, not half bad" category the...Read More

On 12.22 The Hollywood Reporter's Pamela McClintock posted a summary listing of 2011's worst box-office performers. And yet for some reason she declined to name the worst performer in terms of production cost-to-earnings.

The worst wipe-out wasn't Cowboys & Aliens or Green Lantern or Anonymous. And it wasn't Arthur or Sucker Punch or The Thing or Conan The Barbarian. No, the movie that lost the most money in proportion to what it cost (according to McClintock's figures) was David Frankel's The Big Year (20th Century Fox).

The bird-watching comedy costarring Steve Martin, Jack Black...Read More

"This weird mashup of The Zookeeper (with Matt Damon instead of Kevin James as the suddenly single guy who talks to the animals) and The Descendants (a man grieving for his wife and taking his two kids on a journey of discovery) might seem an odd detour for Cameron Crowe, who in his early 20s wrote the Rolling Stone article that became the 1982 teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

"Crowe graduated to writer-director and made three good movies: Say Anything..., Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. That last film came out more than a decade ago, yet such was our pleasure...Read More

I'm not quite down with the punctation of Mr. Clooney's first sentence. The "quite honestly, I am" isn't necessary. The second passage should read "Democrats eat their own -- they find singular issues and go, 'Well, I didn't get everything I wanted.''' And the third passage should read "Republicans are always better at this. If Obama was a Republican running," etc.

I'd been meaning to re-watch Melancholia, but putting it off at the same time. Then I saw this still and decided to watch it again without fail.

Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Jerome Simpson leapt over Arizona Cardinals linebacker Daryl Washington for a touchdown yesterday. Jamie Foxx did the same thing in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday...but he didn't land on his feet.

You can never foresee a fall-holiday lineup a year or ten months ahead of time. Winners are always concealed. Surprises always happen. That said, 2012's award season seems undernourished. September through November, I mean. December looks decent. This is only a first-glance, cut-and-paste spitball list. A mere 16 films. HE conveys special interest.

September 2012: Argo (9.14, HE), d: Ben Affleck, cast: Ben Affleck, Alan Arkin, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Kerry Bishe, Kyle Chandler; Looper (9.28, HE), d: Rian Johnson, cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano, Jeff Daniels, Piper Perabo; Savages (9.28, HE), d: Oliver Stone, cast: Taylor Kitsch, Blake...Read More

If We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox) winds up with $11.7 million for the four-day holiday, as projected by Deadline's Nikki Finke, it will have averaged $3753 at 3117 theatres, or $938 per day. That's not good. One reason is that guys like my 23 year-old son Jett, who's now sitting next to me at a sports bar on First Avenue and 7th Street, smelled "Disney family shit" and wanted no part of it.

If a movie poster is defaced more than once on New York subway walls, it indicates that on some level "the people" are not happy with the idea of the film in question. They're irritated or pissed off about it...something. Don't ask me to explain; I just know that poster defacement can be a bad omen.

Saturday, 12.24, 2:35 pm -- Myrtle-Willoughby stop, G line.

Late December is always a time for summing things up and connecting with core values. And one sure way of understanding or revealing those values is to play the "clap three times" game. If you could magically erase some aspect or manifestation of human nature by clapping three times, what would that be? Obviously an ugly thought in one respect (i.e., humanitarian tolerance is a virtue), but imagine what a blessing it could be for the planet to eliminate venality and ignorance in one fell swoop.

It's not an attractive thing to admit, I realize, but if with three claps I could...Read More

Four years ago I ran a piece about the most pleasing and nourishing Xmas movies you can watch. I thought I'd re-rerun it because (a) it contains elements of profound truth, and (b) I have to catch a train back to NYC in an hour or so and haven't time to write a fresh article. Maybe a new thought will occur as I re-format.

Okay, here's one. The best Christmas holiday flicks are ones that you know backward and forward and agree with wholeheartedly, and which basically say "you the watcher are an okay person...you believe in decency and fairness and...Read More

Kim Kardashian tweeted this about ten hours ago. Imagine having a dad who shares so little of himself on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis that he gives you a Christmas gift guaranteeing four hours of daddy face time -- heart-to-heart intimacy, counsel, advice, hugs. That is truly venal

Paramount Home Video will release a Bluray of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch A Thief on 3.6.12. This will be one of the eternals. The most recent DVD version (the '09 Centennial Collection) is one of the few DVDs I own that is dense and sharp enough to look really great on my 50" plasma. There's no way the Bluray upgrade won't be at least mildly breathtaking.

(l. to r.) The initial '02 To Catch a Thief release; the '07 Special Collectors editon, and the '09 Special Centennial edition.

The Awl's Choire Sicha has physically compared Mission: Impossible 4 -- Ghost Protocol's Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner Paula Patton and Simon Pegg. He seems to be saying they're all too short or something.

Here's last night's Charlie Rose show featuring three principals behind In The Land of Blood and Honey -- director-writer Angelina Jolie, star Zana Marjanovic, costar Rade Serbedzija. Jolie's film doesn't wallow in the horrors of the Serb-Bosnian conflict -- it portrays them plain and straight, each scene cut to the essence.

Paul Rudd at the bottom of the pile-on means 50% of this Judd Apatow Xmas pic is a plug for This Is Forty, which doesn't even come out for another 12 months, and the other 50% is real holiday mirth.

As much as I admire the real Armond White, I'm a more ardent fan of the tweetin' Fake Armond.

Yes, Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire will look somewhat better on Bluray. Harry Stradling's cinematography is big on deep shadows and light bulbs with paper Japanese lampshades and cigarette smoke and a spooky lowlands atmosphere in the streets. On top of which the latest DVD version looks a bit pixellated on my 50" plasma so this will be an improvement.

Who am I kidding? I'm buying this/wangling a freebie no matter how good it looks. Come what may, I'm a total black-and-white Bluray hound. Guys like myself will bend over for any classic title that comes...Read More

According to a Deadline report filed this morning, Paramount's The Adventures of Tintin is projected to earn $16 million by the close of the Christmas holiday, or the evening of 12.26. It opened Wednesday in 3087 theatres and took in $2.3 million, and then $2.4 million on Thursday. If it actually tallies $16 million over six days, that'll mean an average of $5183 per situation. Divide that by six and the daily per-screen comes to $863.83.

In other words, it's tanking. And yet Tintin is doing quite well in Europe and other foreign territories with a projected $239 million haul due...Read More

"Spielberg is making a movie for young children," writes Vanity Fair film critic Paul Mazursky, referring to you-know-what. "No Schindler's List, no Munich, no Amistad. In War Horse, there is quite a bit of ET, a film that I loved. The epic moves on (and on), and I found myself increasingly itching for resolution. Come on, Steven, wrap it up, get the kid back with the pony.

"Is it bad? No, sir. It was clear I should've brought my 10-year-old grandson Tommy to see this film with me. I think he would have loved it. Spielberg is a master, as we...Read More

This morning I asked some people I know about the fate of the long-gestating film version of August: Osage County, the Puitzer- and Tony Award-wnning drama by Tracy Letts. Producers Harvey Weinstein and Jean Doumanian have, I gather, been trying to assemble a film version with director John Wells (The Company Men), but nothing seems to be happening with it, "seems" being the operative term.

I don't know anything firm, but I haven't heard a damn thing for months and that always means something. My insect antennnae tells me it's a flounder on the beach, gasping...Read More

This is two years old and perhaps not the cleverest thing in the world, but it's late and I'm tired and I laughed.

Thomas Horn, who plays the excitable Oskar in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, "is an attractively real-looking boy with an impish smile and a natural-feeling directness, and he holds his own just fine, even against a scene-stealer like Max von Sydow," says N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. "But it's an impossible role in an impossible movie that has no reason for being other than as another pop-culture palliative for a trauma it can't bear to face.

"In truth, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close isn't about Sept. 11. It's about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it...Read More

Gerard Depardieu had one of his most glorious moments in this scene from Andrzej Wajda's Danton. As Georges Danton, his climactic rant against the paranoid mindset of Maxime Robespierre and his brethren is electrifying. It's easily the equal of Paul Scofield's final speech against his accusers in A Man For All Seasons.

This is my idea of good Christmas-holiday viewing...seriously. You can have It's A Wonderful Life.

"No one wants to pay money to see fat old men chasing ghosts." Whether or not Bill Murray actually wrote this comment in a note to Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis regarding a recent draft of Ghostbusters 3, it's an accurate and perceptive statement. (And it sure sounds like Murray.) The National Enquirer's Mike Walker has also reported that Murray shredded the script before sending it back.

I've read several reviews of Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23). They all expound on the usual-usuals with about two-thirds approving and one-third saying ixnay. But so far no reviews have mentioned my big complaint, which is that whatever you might think of the script or the acting the film rests upon a fundamentally rancid notion that zoos are cool. Which of course they're not. They're kindly penal institutions with animals doing life sentences.

How would critics respond, I wonder, to a spiritually wholesome film about a Southern family in the 1840s growing cotton and lording over...Read More

"It's no mere coincidence that the states responsible for putting the most Tea Party representatives in the House are all former members of the Confederacy," says Robert Reich in a 12.21 Alternet column piece. "Of the Tea Party caucus, twelve hail from Texas, seven from Florida, five from Louisiana, and five from Georgia, and three each from South Carolina, Tennessee, and border-state Missouri.

"Others are from border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. The four Californians in the caucus are from the inland part of the state or Orange County, whose political culture has was shaped by Oklahomans and Southerners...Read More

A little more than two years ago I wrote about a moment that happened (or more precisely didn't happen) in a West Hollywood bar on Santa Monica Blvd. in June or July of '81. I was with a girlfriend, and the first thing I noticed after entering the main room and ordering a drink was actor Scott Wilson, sitting at a table with a friend.

Wilson played murderer Dick Hickock in the 1967 film version of In Cold Blood, and this was foremost on my mind. After mulling it over I told...Read More

The just-released teaser for Ridley Scott's Prometheus (20th Century Fox, 6.18.12) shows the giant horseshoe-shaped space ship everyone remembers from Scott's Alien ('79)...but no elephant-trunk space jockey.

Respect and tribute to the Dublin and Utah Film Critics for voting their own minds (i.e., resisting the wave of critics-group capitulations to The Artist) by handing their Best Picture trophies to Nicholas Winding Refin's Drive. The Dubliners also awarded Winding Refn their Best Director prize, and they awarded Drive star Ryan Gosling as Best Actor. The Utah guys also gave their Best Cinematography prize to Drive's Newton Thomas Sigel.

The latter is double applauded for stepping outside the box and giving their Best Supporting Actress award to Win Win's Amy Ryan.

Moviefone's Christopher Rosen: "You got to work with Andy Serkis on Tintin and he gives this wonderful performance, his second of the year after Rise of the Planet of the Apes. There has been some Oscar chatter for his work in Apes, but there's always that push-back against digital performances. Do you feel performance capture work should be looked at next to traditional acting with regards to awards consideration?"

Steven Spielberg: "I don't know. I don't ever get involved in the conversation about what should be eligible and what shouldn't be eligible."

Of course he "knows." Of course he has an opinion. Spielberg...Read More

"Traveling around North America and Europe this year for festival showings of A Separation, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi and his cast have discerned a pattern. Audiences arrive skeptical, anticipating something exotic and unfamiliar, and leave pleasantly surprised that they understand and can identify with the film's characters.

David Friend to Jeffrey Wells: "Earlier this week I received a legal notice from the studio that owns most of Ingmar Bergman's films, trying to halt a YouTube series I'm doing on his career called Breaking Down Bergman.

"A little background on myself -- I'm a reporter by day for The Canadian Press news wire and a longtime movie fanatic. I recently launched this Bergman series with a friend. We intend to watch all of Bergman's directorial efforts in chronological order, and discuss each one in a 10-minute video using our opinions, comments and brief...Read More

I'll telling you right now that Woody Harrelson's performance as McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt in Jay Roach's Game Change (HBO, March 2012) is going to be very good, and maybe great. Between this and Rampart, Woody's on a roll.

In a recently-published Elle interview, We Bought A Zoo star Matt Damon says that "a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of this country, much better" than what we got with Barack Obama.

"If the Democrats think that they didn't have a mandate...people are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off," Damon explains. "Imagine if they had a leader. I've talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of...Read More

I finally got a chance last night to watch that DVD I was handed of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, and I now completely understand and agree with the rave notices it's been getting. New Yorkers are urged to see it at the Cinema Village, where it'll be as of Friday, 12.23.

It's a bit lumpy and awkward here and there (although not as much as I'd been led to believe) and perhaps a wee bit too long, but Margaret -- shot in '05 and stuck in some kind of post-production indecision and lawsuit hell for...Read More

"Everyone is really enjoying Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. The feedback I've been getting is super positive. That's why I started doing this to begin with. I'd so much rather be doing this than some little indie movie that everyone says is fantastic and it kinda sucks, and it's boring." -- Robert Downey, Jr., speaking for a Holmes EPK video posted by the Guardian.

Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo opens on Friday, 12.23. I'm re-posting the review I wrote nearly four weeks ago after catching the nationwide Thanksgiving sneak. Here, also, is a side piece called "We Bought A Jail."

The first two thirds of Cameron Crowe's We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23) 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....Read More

"Yet here comes Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, bound and determined to transform the mildly humorous adventures of an intrepid boy reporter into a big-budget computer-animated hit," writes Marshall Fine. "Unfortunately, they find themselves trapped on the Road to Hell, paving furiously.

"Perhaps Spielberg and Jackson (who produced) simply made The Adventures of Tintin (Paramount, 12.21) to amuse themselves. So, hopefully, at least two people will come out entertained."

From my 11.11 review: "If you have a place in your moviegoing heart for an empty synthetic entertainment that will delight your inner nine-year-old,...Read More

14 months ago the New Zealand Herald reported via news.com.au that Peter Jackson's The Hobbit -- a two-part prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy that began filming last March -- "is expected to cost $500 million (US) and has already racked up legal fees believed to exceed $100 million.

"The most expensive movie to date was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which cost $300 million (US)," the story continued. "The soaring Hobbit costs are mostly due to settlements with rights holders, whose wrangles with Warner Bros/New Line Cinema could have delayed shooting...Read More

"Following a dumb brute on its arduous journey from master to master (most of whom perish), War Horse has an unavoidable similarity to Robert Bresson's sublime Au hasard Balthazar," writes Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman in a 12.21 posting. "Indeed, the sequence in which Joey -- like Bresson's donkey -- is adopted by a willful, unlovable French peasant girl suggests the parallel might have occurred to Spielberg.

"The difference is not solely a matter of Bresson's ascetic restraint and Steven Spielberg's shameless schmaltz, or Bresson's tragic sense of life and Spielberg's unswerving belief in the happy ending. Suffering witness to all...Read More

MTV.com's Josh Horowitz has posted an above average q & a with Girl With The Dragon Tattoo helmer David Fincher. Here's the audio, and here's the text version. Fincher obviously has a cough, and to judge by the sound of it I wouldn't want to be in his vicinity without gloves and a surgical mask.

In my initial review of Mission: Impossible 4 -- Ghost Protocol I should have given it points for being very well cut, engineered and choreographed. It's a shallow and steroid, but nicely mechanized. It's shrewd, tight and hard. But another thought hit me as I watched it for the second time last night at the Zeigfeld. It's a kind of sequel to T2: Judgment Day.

The action stunts in that landmark 1991 thriller were extreme and out there, but this was logically allowed by the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator and Robert Patrick's T-1000 were cyborgs...Read More

Brad Pitt's Moneyball performance isn't just a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination but a likely winner, I believe. The reason is Pitt's other big 2011 performance -- an unhappy, frustrated, dictatorial suburban dad in Terrence Malick 's The Tree of Life. It's been touted by many (including Grantland's Mark Harris in a well-hidden 12.20 post) as the better of the two, and yet Pitt's awards heat is all about Moneyball. Bottom line: No other potential Best Actor nominee has a similar two-for-one equation going on

"Given a role with such wrenching father-son dynamics, it must...Read More

Movieline's Louis Virtel has posted a piece titled "50 years Later, What's The Greatest Scene in Judgment at Nuremberg?" That's easy, and the answer has nothing to do with any performance. I'm referring to a moment of "pure cinema" that happens in an early courtroom scene, or roughly between 6:05 to 7:11 in the clip below.

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German defense counsel Maximillian Schell is delivering his opening remarks in German. We listen to him speak a line or two and then translators providing the English version, back and forth, two or three times....Read More

I've found (i.e., been sent) a quote from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo extra Donald Josephson in a recent article in Sweden's Dagens Nyheter. Here's a crude Google Translate version, and here's the excerpt:

"The most fun was to keep up with Rooney Mara in the green room, where the actors wait between shots...and [to] hear her anxiety over whether she would be better than Naomi Rapace. She had lots of those 'mirror mirror on the wall' moments in there. Mara asked her assistant all the time, 'Do we not do better when we...Read More

Deadline's Pete Hammond doesn't write articles that report about this or that film teetering or losing steam in the Oscar race. He writes articles that ask "is this or that film teetering or losing steam in the Oscar race?" But combine Hammond's piece with a similar one from TheWrap's Steve Pond, and you have "a situation", I'd say.

The bottom line is that however Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud & Extremely Close (Warner Bros., 12.25) fares in a commercial or award-winning realm, it began showing too late (and DVD screeners were sent out too late) to stir sufficient conversation as the...Read More

I can't imagine anyone in my circle having the slightest interest in sitting through Underworld: Awakening (Screen Gems, 1.20). Apart from the black-leather default geek-eroticism radiated by Kate Beckinsale-as-Selene, blah blah. I always think "hmm" when a film has been directed by two guys (in this case Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein). But the poster looked great as I waited for the R train last night at B'way and 49th.

My curiosity about Baz Luhrman's 3D version of The Great Gatsby hasn't abated. I've suggested before that the coolest thing in the world would be for Luhrman to just shoot F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel plain and straight and not go all wackazoid like he did on Australia. Maybe if I read Luhrman and Craig Pearce's screenplay I could get a sense of what's being prepared. A recent draft would be appreciated.

Philip Dorling and Ron Nyswaner's Predisposed has joined the Sundance 2012 premiere slate. Piano prodigy Eli Smith (Jesse Eisenberg) is coping with his troubled mom (Melissa Leo) and "enlisting help from a hapless drug dealer on the day he has an audition for a prestigious music program. Events spiral comically out of control, etc. Facing the mistakes of the past, the challenges of the future, and the possibilities of love." This sounds so effing Sundance-y I can't stand it. Costarring Tracy Morgan, Sarah Ramos, Isiah Whitlock Jr.

Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I kicked it around yesterday morning, focusing particuarly on The Artist and War Horse. I was in a cranky mood, kind of. Here's a stand-alone mp3.

Wrath of the Titans (Warner Bros., 3.30) was directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Battle: Los Angeles). Shot in 3D as opposed to 3D transferred. Sam Worthington's hair has grown out. Paychecks for Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, Danny Huston, Edgar Ramirez, Bill Nighy, Toby Kebbell and Rosamund Pike.

I don't like trailers that begin with a kid singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Because any and all uses of that song in movies are always meant to deliver irony. The all-too-familiar kind. So right away there's a deja vu vibe, and a general lack of distinction.

To watch more, visit tag

I may not agree with all of the 2011 Chicago Film Critics awards, but I respect all but one. Which is more than I can say for the SAG nominations. Best Picture: The Tree of Life. Best Director: Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life). Best Actor: Michael Shannon (Take Shelter). Best Actress: Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn). Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks (Drive). Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life). Best Original Screenplay: The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius). Best Adapted Screenplay: Moneyball (Steven Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin). Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezski (The Tree of Life).

We all want smart, quirky, neurotic Cage (Adaptation, Matchstick Men) or serious wackadoodle Cage (Vampire's Kiss), but nobody wants mythical horseshit CG flaming-motorcycle Cage.

Variety's Steven Gaydos pointed out this morning that the recently published Film Comment best-of-the-year poll of 120 top critics has Hugo at #9, The Artist at #27 and Moneyball at #38.

My response: "Well and good, but much of that relentless Hugo love stems from an impassioned conviction-belief on the part of most big-city critics, and summarized as follows: "Marty is our guy, a Film Catholic Extraordinaire, and we'll stand by him to the end, no matter what." So whatever and however and even with a film as oppressive or agonizing as Kundun, Marty gets a pass -- that's simply how...Read More

Is David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo "entertaining and well-made?," asks critic Marshall Fine. "Absolutely. For the audience that would never dream of seeing a foreign film, this movie will be the last word in Dragon Tattoo movie-making. And they'll get a quality product.

"Aside from a few visual fillips, Fincher has not cracked Stieg Larsson's novel in a new way or plumbed it for previously undiscovered depths. His visual approach is different, but not so much that the material seems newly revealed.

"Is Fincher's film better than Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 Swedish-language version? Not really. I'm not impugning Fincher's...Read More

The biggest "what?" in Oscar Talk #74 (posted Friday, 12.16) is Anne Thompson's remark that Moneyball's Bennett Miller may not make the DGA and Academy Best Director finals given competition from Hugo's Martin Scorsese, War Horse's Steven Spielberg and...The Artist's Michel Hazanavicius?

Reality check: Enjoy The Artist and vote for it if you must, but the efforts of a director of "a cute gimmick stretched to feature length" (in the words of N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis) cannot be ranked above Miller's immaculate Moneyball finessing. The Godz will simply not have it.

On...Read More

The recent announcement that Lawrence Kasdan's Darling Companion will open the 2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival stirred a "hmmm" reaction. 20 years ago a Lawrence Kasdan relationship drama starring Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest and Sam Shepard would have been released during award season, and Kasdan's fans (i.e., 30-and-older quality seekers) would have been wetting their lips. It would have been at least a moderately big deal.

But Kasdan's last truly tasty film, Mumford, came out 12 years ago. I will never stop respecting or believing in his craft and vision, but over the last decade he's...Read More

This apparently posted two or three hours ago -- an allusion to "Safe Sheep Haven."

I'm too whipped to write my review today of Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey, but I can tell already that my generally positive reaction, which I wasn't expecting to have, is a minority view among critics who've posted today. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy is at least somewhat admiring.

"It's clear within the first few minutes of In the Land of Blood and Honey, a blunt and brutal look at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, that this is a serious piece of work and not...Read More

I regret to say that, for me, Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Warner Bros., 12.25) doesn't work as well as it should, although many with whom I saw it on December 8th leapt to their feet when it ended, clapping and whoo-whooing. I was impressed and touched by aspects of this melancholy 9/11 tale -- particularly by a third-act scene between 12 year-old Thomas Horn, who plays the lead, and a supporting character played by Jeffrey Wright -- but too often I felt unengaged and at times perplexed.

Thomas Horn, Max Von Sydow in Extremely Loud &...

My admiration and affection for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ ('88) means I'll have to buy the Criterion Bluray version when it comes out next March. I first saw Scorsese's Biblical drama 23 years ago in L.A.'s Century City Plitt plex. I remember the barking of Christian hooligans in the plaza outside the theatre, and my being interviewed by one of the local news stations, and seeing the clip later that night.

I've always loved the way Scorsese creates a simulation of ecstatic release in the final seconds. (It begins at 14:20 in the...Read More

There's nothing especially revelatory in JoBlo's 12.16 posting of an official Warner Bros. synopsis of Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity. It's roughly the same information passed along by costar George Clooney six weeks ago.

The interesting thing for me is a comment from JoBlo's Mike Sampson: "There have been rumors that the film will be shot, or at least presented, in one take, which would be fascinating to experience."

In July 2010 a posting allegedly from Framestore's website reported that "Cuaron's long and fluid style (the opening shot alone is slated to last at least 20 minutes) leaves no cut...Read More

"The Artist has taken the lead in this year's Best Picture race, according to the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby handicappers," a spiritually resigned Sasha Stone wrote yesterday morning on Awards Daily. "There is always that point in the year when you just know. And there is no stopping this movie. If there were any doubts before, there are no doubts now."

Like any half-attuned, half-perceptive film lover out there, Stone knows that The Artist isn't necessarily the best of anything. It's the leading cave-in consensus choice among the under-inspired and easily led....Read More

A 12.17 Wall Street Journal article by screenwriter Derek Haas (co-writer with Michael Brandt of 2 Fast 2 Furious, Wanted, 3:10 to Yuma) offers a rare look into the soul and the mindset of a successful Hollywood hack.

I don't know Haas and therefore have nothing against him personally. The piece makes him sound like a nice enough guy. But Wanted was torture, and it wasn't all the fault of Timur Bekmambetov -- the script surely pointed the way. The shootout at the end of 3:10 to Yuma was ludicrous, and so was the...Read More

If an alternate version of Michael Mann's The Insider had been made with different actors (but ones just as good as those who acted in the 1999 version, and if it was directed by Mann and written by Eric Roth) and released in 2011, it would win the Best Picture Oscar...hands down. 2011 has been a good-but-not-great year, and I don't think there's any question that Mann's film would sweep aside The Artist, The Help and War Horse like so much seaweed.

Especially if it had a distributor smart enough to throghly explain to everyone that...Read More

Absurdist, steroid-injected action thrillers like Mission: Impossible 4 -- Ghost Protocol are over. They're obviously thriving commercially as we speak, but they have nowhere to go except in the use of more powerful steroids and more CG ridiculum, and that's a dead end. There's only one kind of thriller that can work these days -- i.e., the human-scale, back-to-basics-and-believability model found in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire and Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive.

Action nerds born in the '70s, '80s and '90s will disagree, of course, but they're running around with a kind of ComicCon myopia, which amounts to a kind of poison in their veins....Read More

If I was a Republican, being on the cover of Success would fill me with satisfaction. Ditto my latest film, Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows, being projected to earn $42 million and change by Sunday night [3,703 situations = an average of $11,450].

And I could roll with it badly trailing" the opening-weekend tally of the original (i.e.,$62.3 million). Ir'll do well enough to justify a third installment, and then the Holmes franchise can diversify (TV series, video game, clothing line) and my portfolio will continue to expand with all kinds of investment and stock...Read More

I reported last July that Ron Dassa's Laser Blazer, the once-great DVD/Bluray store on West L.A.s Pico Blvd., was on its last legs. And now, sadly, the store's website is announcing a 12.25 shutdown.

"After 23 years of business, we have decided if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," the statement reads. "You can still shop with Laser Blazer at LDDB.com for LaserDiscs and our Amazon store for Blu Ray and DVDs. Starting January 31, 2012 you can visit our rebuilt site here to purchase Blu Ray, Laserdisc and DVD collectibles. We are sad to close our doors,...Read More

Two days ago as I was running around and preparing to fly to Manhattan I read Claude Brodesser Akner's New York piece about how David Fincher's The Girl With The Dagon Tattoo isn't tracking all that well with women. This, Brodesser reports, is why Sony has moved the opening day up to 12.20 -- i.e., to get a little jumpstart on the word-of-mouth.

My immediate thought was, "Wait...it's not tracking well with women? Under-40 women are supposedly the core audience for this film, no? Aren't they the the ones who've been reading the Dragon Tattoo books for the last three years?...Read More

I'm sorry but my 12.12 phoner with Albert Brooks is generally easier and more enjoyable than this Brooks-Poland chat. But Poland gets some great stuff about the particulars of financing and the various frustrations and roadblocks that Brooks suffered through in the '70s and '80s.

I presuming this was recorded before the SAG nominations, as Brooks seems to be in a relatively good mood.

What a great relief and comfort it is that a significant portion (though not a majority so far) of the elite critics are giving War Horse the slapdown that it deserves.

The Playlist's Todd Gilchrist says Steven Spielberg's film "comes to us overloaded with nostalgia [and] a joylessly persistent sense of nobility...Spielberg dials up the sentimentality to almost unbearable levels [as] War Horse is the type of film for which the term 'Oscar bait' was invented, precisely because it feels like there's no motivation for it to exist except to win awards."

And Variety's Justin Chang says it's "beautifully composed"...Read More

Dark Knight Rises star Christian Bale and a couple of homies and a cameraman were roughed up yesterday by plainclothes Chinese thugs. Bale was trying to visit Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese lawyer and civil rights activist who's been under house arrest in China for over a year, blah blah, same old, etc.

They goons chased the Bale gang in their van for an hour after the altercation. If I'd been at the wheel I would have gone all Ryan Gosling on their asses. I would have suddenly stopped, shoved the van into reverse...Read More

A friend has described this trailer for Dario Argento's Dracula 3D as "unintentionally hilarious." But I'm getting an agreeably classic Hammer vibe, particularly a recollection of Terence Fisher's The Horror of Dracula (1958), the first Hammer film in which Lee played the immortal seducer.

Yes, the praying mantis is a problem. And yes, most 40-and-under connoisseurs of horror will find Argento's film comical. Perhaps most 40-and-over connoisseurs will agree. But I'm intrigued.

The death of Christopher Hitchens, the barbed and brilliant essayist and anti-religionist and enjoyer of drink and tobacco, was announced last night. Hitchens' departure point was the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston after an 18-month bout with esophegal cancer. He was 62.

"You can tell a man who boozes by the company he...Read More

"The word 'serious' typifies the intellectual arrogance of elite media publications," CityArts' Armond White writes in a 12.14 post. "'Serious' now replaces what journalists in the '80s more honestly -- cravenly -- termed 'sexy.' In aesthetic terms, the Dragon Tattoo remake is no more 'serious' than Cars 2 (and less enjoyable).

"What journalists now consider 'sexy' is getting as close to the film industry process as possible -- as in seeking to influence the Academy Awards race and angling for quotes in ads which, essentially, was the essence of [David] Denby's advance rave.

"His opening line, 'You can't take your...Read More

The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help,The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help,The Artist, The Help, The Artist, The Help, etc.

These and War Horse and another I could mention are basically CHILDREN'S MOVIES. Simple tales, simple strategies, dark forces vanquished, etc. What is wrong with many of the critics out there and most SAG members, etc.? Do they need emotional assurances and hugs and shiatsu massages this badly?...Read More

The GoGo in-flight wifi that I paid $12 bucks for sucks so I can't really watch this, but right off the top I have a problem with the title "Cinematic Joy," and especially if the editor is a guy named "MrBenZuk."

Wait...the wifi is working better now. I've seen about 55 seconds worth. The best year-end montages express interior stuff -- themes, moods, unspoken things. Mmmm...I'm not sure Zukky is after that.

There are so many things in Asghar Farhadi's A Separation that attract admiration or delight, but one of my favorite parts is the finale. I'm not giving anything away by saying it doesn't end with a definitive answer but a question, and particularly with a choice not yet made. For me it's nothing short of brilliant. The audience that I saw A Separation with in Telluride was clearly delighted. I'm trying to think of an American film that has played its cards this way.

A Separation director Asghar Farhadi -- Tuesday, 12.13, 4:40 pm at Beverly Wilshire hotel....

TheWrap's Steve Pond has suggested that Golden Globes emcee Ricky Gervais could make a joke or two about Angelina Jolie's In The Land of Blood and Honey being nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Film GG nominee because the HFPA just wants her to attend, etc. I honestly don't think there's a joke there. Jolie's film is entirely solid and 100% respectable. Jolie could be fat and homely and unmarried and it still could have been nominated.

Our LAX-to-JFK Virgin flight just passed over Republican City, Nebraska. Is there a town in Oregon or Northern California called "Liberal Corners" or "Leftyville"?

Somewhere over New Mexico about 30 or 40 minutes ago.

The guy in front of me has a little extra leg room because he's sitting right behind the plastic, blue-tinted panel that divides first class from coach, so he's doing pretty well. But with that extra comfort he just had to go for a little more and lean his seat back, right into my 18 inches of private space and my 13" Macbook...Read More

Drive's awards consultant on the "seemingly monumental oversight" that resulted in Albert Brooks not being included among SAG's the Best Supporting Actor nominees, by way of Movieline's (and more particularly Oscar Index's) Stu Van Airsdale: "Thank you for all of your shout-outs to Albert Brooks on Twitter and in your analyses of the SAG nominations in regards to his not being recognized today. We remain confident that the Supporting Actor race still boils down to a two-man showdown between Albert and Christopher Plummer." In other words, calm the fuck down.

Update: This isn't working. The Globe producers took forever to finally get started and the cab for my flight is waiting outside. But the most nominated contender is apparently George Clooney with multiple Ides of March noms on top of his expected Best Actor nom for The Descedants.

The Ides elbow apparently resulted in the Best Motion Picture, Drama nom tally rising to six instead of the usual five. The six are The Ides of March, The Descendants, War Horse, Moneyball, The Help and Hugo.

And I'm pretty sure I heard Rooney Mara's name mentioned this morning.

My Virgin flight leaves...Read More

This Fandor video -- produced, written and cut by Kevin B. Lee -- explores a persistent Steven Spielberg signature that has been used, over and over and over, for close to 40 years. For me it provides an understanding of a kind of hacksmanship. I fell in love with Spielberg's awe-face when I first saw Close Encounters in '77 -- we all did -- but after a decade or two I got sick of it. Haven't we all by now? No, argues Lee -- "Spielberg face" is our own.

Note to chronic complainers: Lee's video was...

The top-of-the-page reaction to this morning's SAG nominations from The Guardian's Sarah Hughes: "The Screen Actors Guild exists in an entirely different reality from the rest of the world. This is the only explanation for their frankly bizarre nominations. [The organization] seems to be going out of its way to reward the mediocre or well-known at the expense of the interesting."

Megan Fox: "A ruby? Is this is a joke? Am I a Kardashian?" Sasha Baron Cohen's bearded dictator: "Of course not -- you're much less hairy."

Fox Searchlight's L.A. publicists didn't invite me to their recent Margaret screenings on the lot, and they're not sending out screeners and it's not playing theatrically in New York or Los Angeles but somehow or some way I'll eventually see it. Hey, Kenneth Lonergan -- I'm in NYC from 12.15 (tomorrow) through 12.26. Let me know if you hear of any showings.

Everyone knows the background but for those who don't, here's a just-posted Margaret summary from N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis: "To recap briefly, Mr. Lonergan had a difficult time finishing the movie; received editing help from [Martin] Scorsese;...Read More

Yesterday the Richmond Times Dispatch posted a Thomas Hoffman photo of Daniel Day Lewis in costume and makeup as Abraham Lincoln, walking on or near an outdoor Lincoln set with director Steven Spielberg. The shot was taken near the Richmond state capitol on 12.8.

Slashfilm's Russ Fischer posted the same earlier today.

The new 100th anniversary Paramount logo uses the same old Paramount mountain, of course, except at a much higher altitude, as indicated by extra clouds hovering at the base. It's now a remote K2 or Everest-like peak surrounded by sub-arctic air, accessible only to professional climbers. The previous incarnation indicted a similar realm but with higher oxygen levels. The Gulf & Western logo of the '80s was a mountain you could climb and maybe have a nice picnic on the way up the slopes.

What does it say about the awards-prognostication racket when nobody except yours truly (and, okay, Sasha Stone and Kris Tapley to some extent) was even toying with the possibility of A Better Life's Demian Bichir winning any kind of official Best Actor recognition, and then all of a sudden the Screen Actors Guild hands him a Best Actor nomination this morning?

A Better Life's Demian Bichir at a Los Angeles Film Festival party last summer, and as the "illegal" tree surgeon in Chris Weitz's drama.

I'll tell you what it means. It means that the Oscar-predicting...Read More

This morning's Screen Actors Guild nominations delivered ecstatic career boosts to a few surprise nominees (especially A Better Life's Demian Bichir...a longtime HE guy!) as well as to the highly deserving Jonah Hill for his supporting performance in Moneyball. Hooray! Hats in the air! But the noms also delivered stunning setbacks to critically favored contenders who were presumed to be all but locked.

Drive's Albert Brooks was blown off for a Best Supporting Actor SAG nomination and yet Armie Hammer and his seven or eight pounds of old-man makeup in J. Edgar got in?...Read More

Bert Schneider, the last producer to semi-successfully micro-manage Terrence Malick and keep him from his own self-indulgent tendencies by somehow persuading him to keep Days of Heaven down to a managable 94 minutes, died Monday at age 78.

After Heaven, Malick never made a lean, well-honed movie again. When he returned to filmmaking in the '90s it was all pretty photography and leaves and alligators and voice-over and scrapping dialogue and expansive running times. Mister, we could use a man like Bert Schneider again.

An avowed leftie, Schneider was a renowned, down-to-business producer of late 1960s and '70s classics such as Easy...Read More

I predicted this, and now it's spreading like a virus. The lemming mentality has taken hold, and there's just no stopping regional critics groups from giving The Artist their Best Picture prizes. Too many big-city groups (New York Film Critics Circle, Boston Film Critics Society, New York Film Critics Online) have already tumbled, and everyone wants an easy choice that Joe Schmoe can appreciate. The Las Vegas Film Critics Society is the latest to blindly follow the path of least resistance.

Almost a quarter of a century ago Lethal Weapon used a funny jumping-off-a-building gag. Ragged-edge cop Mel Gibson is sent to the top of a four-story building to talk an unstable guy out of making a suicide leap. Gibson winds up cuffing himself to the guy and jumping off the building, and they're both falling to their deaths...not. They land on one of those huge inflated tent-sized bags...whomp!...that cops and firemen use to save people. All is well.

Flash forward to another jumping-off-a-building scene in Brad Bird and Tom Cruise's Mission: impossible 4 -- Ghost Protocol, which I saw last night. An American...Read More

"Like most great films, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo gets better with the second viewing," writes Awards Daily's Sasha Stone, "and probably even better with the third and fourth viewings." In other words, Stone blew off last night's IMAX screening of Mission: Impossible 4 -- Ghost Protocol for a second gander at Tattoo. Life is choices.

"The Stieg Larsson books are densely detailed. Once the names settle in and the plot somewhat becomes less complicated, the film breathes. Fincher is well known for his exactitude and one simply cannot get everything that's going on the first time through -- especially...Read More

Late yesterday afternoon Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and I lurched from topic to topic, but mostly focused on (a) acting nominations and (b) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here's a stand-alone mp3.

It hit me several weeks ago that Seth Rogen would be a good guy to have on my side in a street fight. He's fairly tall and broad-shouldered and on the beefy side, and...well, I'm just flying on a whim but something tells me he wouldn't fool around. He'd probably kick and gouge and get guys into a hammerlock and bite off a piece of their ear. So it's good news that Rogen has been hired to host the 2012 Film Independent Spirit Awards.

No, I don't see a connection either. None whatsoever. I'm kicking this around as we speak. Wait...I've...Read More

On the afternoon of Friday, 12.2 -- hours after seeing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo at Sony -- I posted a Best Actress evaluation piece that began with my enthusiastic response to Rooney Mara's performance as Lisbeth Salander. She was so fierce and penetrating, I figured, that she had to be a late-inning Best Actress contender. In my own book that's still true, but things have changed over the last 11 days, and now...who knows?

Mara Rooney in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

The tight embargo enforcement and the general feeling that Sony doesn't see Dragon Tattoo...Read More

There are two significant omissions among the Broadcast Film Critics Association's nominees, which were announced this morning. One, Albert Nobbs' Glenn Close wasn't nominated for Best Actress despite there being six slots. And two, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's Gary Oldman was given the go-by for Best Actor. BFCA picks have generally tended to reflect default preferences among the schmoozy guild and Academy set, so this may (I say "may") be cause for concern among the Close and Oldman camps.

All along the unspoken Close-for-Best-Actress argument has been "even if you're not knocked out by her Albert...Read More

Is there anyone over the age of three and under 75 who doesn't know that David Fincher's The Girl With Dragon Tattoo (Sony, 12.21) is a remake of Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 Swedish-language film of the same title, and that both are based on the late Stieg Larsson's 2008 novel? Is it therefore likely that anyone will be surprised to read that Fincher's film looks, plays and feels exactly like a remake, albeit one that's costlier, punchier, gloomier and more vigorous?

Boiled down to basics, that's what this film is -- a highly...Read More

Universal Citywalk is truly the Speed Racer of hell malls. I used to bring the kids here when young, but there really would have to be something wrong with you to bring a date here. And of course, none of the restaurants offer wifi. The local Starbucks is closed for renovations, but none of the waiters who recommended that I go there for wifi even knew that.

But it's cold and rainy outside and I need the warmth so I'm sitting in a wifi-free Chinese joint, morose and resentful.

Why am I subjecting myself? Paramount's M:I4 all-media IMAX screening.

About three hours ago I had a nice easy chat with Albert Brooks, whose sardonic and malevolent performance as a former exploitation film producer-turned-"bad guy" resulted yesterday in three Best Supporting Actor awards from the Boston Film Critics Society, the New York Film Critics Online and the San Francisco Critics Circle. Add these to his New York Film Critics Circle win in the same category two weeks ago, and he's surely a lock for an Academy Award nomination. Right now it's Brooks vs. Christopher Plummer, I'd say.

Albert Brooks (photo not taken by yours truly)

Seriously -- we...Read More

If anyone has PDFs of the following Blacklist scripts lying around, please send this way. I can read one or two on my Thursday, 12.15 flight to NYC. (Thanks to L.A. Times reporter Nicole Sperling for listings and descriptions.)

Evan Susser and Van Robichaux's "Chewie" (WME) -- "A satirical, behind-the-scenes look at the making of Stars Wars through the eyes of Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca."

Matthew Aldrich's "Father Daughter Time: A Tale of Armed Robbery and Eskimo Kisses" (CAA) -- "A man goes on a three-state crime spree with an accomplice, his 11-year-old daughter."
...Read More

The funniest bit in this relatively new Battleship trailer is a moving shot of the sea followed by a title card that says "the ocean." And the funniest line is spoken by Liam "paycheck" Neeson: "I want to have this thing thoroughly investigated." Hasbro usually means submental.

During a Manhattan q & a last Tuesday night, Meryl Streep explained that The Iron Lady is "three days in the life of a little old lady who just happens to [have been] the longest-serving prime minister in the 20th century and the only female in the western world to rule a nuclear country. I mean, pretty interesting stuff, to look at a life in its ebbing and in its diminishment...our movie is about her history through her eyes.

"We took things from three days of a life -- things that would be called up...Read More

Will Smith wants to entertain. He wants to be loved, and to be rich. And right now and for the foreseeable future, I'm done with him. His being in a film is persuasion enough that I probably won't like it, or that I'll feel bored or distracted. Plus the moustache doesn't work -- too dark, too punctuated.

The awards chosen this afternoon by the 2011 San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards are more independent-minded than those handed out by the Boston Film Critics Society and the New York Film Critics Online a few hours ago. The top SFFCC choices: Best Picture, The Tree of Life; Best Director, Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life; Best Original Screenplay, J.C. Chandor, Margin Call; Best Adapted Screenplay, Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Best Actor, Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Best Actress, Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin; Best Supporting Actor, Albert Brooks, Drive; Best Supporting Actress, Vanessa...Read More

It's been about 13 years since the last newly mastered DVD of John Frankenheimer's The Train was commercially released. It was re-issued two years ago but wasn't even re-scanned for 16 x 9. MGM needs to issue a Bluray, and within the same 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio that it had on the old early '90s laser disc and DVD.

This is one of the most brilliantly choreographed, all-natural, CG-free adventure thrillers ever made -- an ace-level thing top to bottom, loaded with grease and grit and verisimilitude. And several Scorsese-level tracking shots. Shot in...Read More

On 11.30, or a day after the New York Film Critics Circle voted to hand The Artist its Best Picture prize, I got down on my rhetorical knees and pleaded with the nation's critics not to "tumble for The Artist like dominoes...please, I'm begging." But that's exactly what's happening, to judge by this morning's critics award voting. The Boston Film Critics Society has given The Artist its Best Picture trophy, and so has the New York Film Critics Online.

Update: Thank God on bended knees that the Los Angeles...Read More

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has stopped the Artist sweep in its tracks (for the time being at least...thank Jehovah for small favors) by handing its Best Picture award to Alexander Payne's The Descendants. LAFCA's Best Picture Runner-Up was Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Here are the group's final picks:

Best Picture: The Descendants.

Best Director: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life. (Runner-Up: Martin Scorsese, Hugo.)

Best Actor: Michael Fassbender, A Dangerous Method, Jane Eyre, Shame, X-Men: First Class. (Runner-Up: Michael Shannon, Take Shelter.)

Best Actress: Yun Jung-hee, Poetry. (Runner-Up: Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia.)

Best Supporting Actress:...Read More

Following in the footsteps of the NYFCC, the Boston Film Critics Society has handed its Best Picture award to The Artist. Shame! Once again a reputable critics group has gone for a soft compromise-consensus choice -- a light silvery bauble that contains nothing thematically, narratively or stylistically of its own, and a film that is entirely about backwards reflection and reconstitution and sparkly "entertainment."

The winners:

Best Picture: The Artist.

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Hugo.

Best Screenplay: Steven Zallian, Aaron Sorkin and Stan Chervin, Moneyball.

Best Actress: Michelle Williams for My Week with Marilyn.

Best Actor: Brad Pitt...Read More

Team Obama couldn't have dreamt for a more advantageous scenario with Newt Gingrich, who if nominated can't and won't win due to his checkered ethical past and his too-bulky physique, beating down Mitt Romney in the debates and out-pointing him in both Iowa and national polls.

With no regard whatsover to awards handicapping (and thank God for that), here are my rankings and classifications for over 210 films released in 2011. My top ten met the usual pick-of-the-litter characteristics -- quality, audacity, originality, personal satisfaction, stylistic excitement, something strong and central that said "whoa, that's new or bold or extra-cool." Aesthetic judgment, personal delight, etc.

If you include the "decent, not half bad" category the bottom line is that 2011 delivered around 65 films that ranged from excellent to very good to respectably passable.

I'm sure I've pasted a title or two...Read More

Repeating Sasha Stone's alert: The L.A. Film Critics Association, the Boston Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Online will vote for their awards tomorrow. The NYFCO will start around 11 am Pacific/2 pm Eastern, and I'm guessing that the Boston guys will...actually, I'm expecting that Boston Herald critic James Verniere will fill me in before long. LAFCA will begin deliberations around 10 am Pacific and finish between noon and 1 pm. They'll all be announcing via Twitter.

"I can't say I was bored, but I think Shame is borderline absurd," the recently notorious New Yorker critic David Denby posted on 12.7, "and I'm amazed that so many people seem to be taking it seriously, or not seeing the film for what it is.

"The overall coldness -- the indifferentism, the emptiness, mixed with a quasi-religious purity of self-defilement -- are hardly the result of creative uncertainty or failure. The icy style and alienated tone, I'm sure, are exactly what the British writer-director Steve McQueen was aiming for. Before he turned to feature filmmaking, McQueen did art...Read More

I should have paid attention to last Wednesday's news that Joe Farrell, former chairman-CEO of the National Research Group, died at age 76. NRG, which started in 1978, invented a new vocabulary when it came to advanced, in-depth, early-warning movie marketing. NRG introduced the concept of research screenings, tracking (I've heard the phrase "it's not tracking" for the last 20 or 25 years), and the notion of audience quadrants (the first time I heard the term "all four quadrants" was in 1982 regarding The Pirates of Penzance).

Farrell, whom I never once saw in person, was...Read More

Last July I ranted against the wearing of silver-gray cross-training shoes, "especially ones with a kind of woven-stitch texture and a slight color accent, like pink or violet." The other absolute-never-wear in my book is anything maroon, but especially maroon sweaters. I'm mentioning this because it just hit me today that John C. Reilly wears the bad shoes and the bad sweater in Roman Polanski's Carnage.

I once spoke briefly to Angelina Jolie on the set of Salt, and I remember having to fight these odd feelings of unworthiness that arose from her being stunningly beautiful and my being...well, what I am. This happened again yesterday for a minute or two when she walked into room #1414 at the Four Seasons hotel to chat about In The Land of Blood and Honey, her Serb-Muslim love story-war drama that opens on 12.23. But I eventually won the battle and was able to focus on her words.

Here's what she was asked and what she...Read More

Here's last Tuesday night's Charlie Rose show with Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Bennett Miller talking Moneyball. Here's Pitt: "I'm getting older, Charlie, and I'm longing to challenge myself [and do] something designy...something that is completely autonomous, and which I'm completely 100% responsible for....not writing [which] I don't have the talent for....something, something else, something else in the arts."

There was an older, somewhat heavyish, non-industry woman sitting behind me at last Wednesday night's screening of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. And when an impressionistic 9/11 conveyance was shown she reacted very emotionally. She moaned, I mean. Then she moaned again when another 9/11 echo came up. And then she cheered and whooped wildly when the filmmakers came out at the end.

EL&IC is going to be a very moving film for a lot of people, I suspect, if this woman is at all representative. And that's fine. But her presence divided my attention throughout...Read More

During last March's South by Southwest I wrote a highly positive appraisal of Cindy Meehl's wise and winning Buck. I called the piece "Horse Sense." Next Tuesday the Sundance Selects team is having a screening and an after-party at a West Los Angeles venue so I thought I'd repost. It's easily one of the year's finest, most spiritually soothing docs so why not...right?

Buck "seems at first like a straightforward portrait of Buck Brannaman, a renowned horse-trainer who was the real-life inspiration for The Horse Whisperer (both the book and the Read More

Last August Press Play's Matthias Stork posted a landmark two-part essay called "Chaos Cinema," which, as I wrote on 8.22, "articulates and clarifies a lot of things that many of us have been feeling for a long while."

Today a third "Chaos Cinema" essay was posted, primarily intended to answer a few onliners who criticized the original two essays. (I would post the video but the embed code is ridiculous.)

"Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action films, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload," Stork wrote/narrated last summer. "[It's] a film style marked by excess, exaggeration, over-indulgence, a never-ending crescendo with no...Read More

I was going to write that no one with a sliver of taste would pay $12 or $14 to see Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve....brrnnng! It's an absolute certified stinker with a 5% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and it's being projected by Nikki Finke to end up as #1 this weekend with $19 million at 3505 theatres for a per-situation average of $5420.

I wrote Marshall off about ten years ago, but he used to be okay. The Flamingo Kid ('84) wasn't too bad. I loved his cameo in Lost in America. I found ways to tolerate Beaches ('88), Pretty...Read More

What nudie-hound with a decent-sized PDA (or just a simple iPhone) would shell out for the Lindsay Lohan pics in Playboy? They appeared all over the net today -- free. Hugh Hefner's publication paid Lohan something close to $1 million to pose for a nude photo spread, which was shot as a tribute to the original 1949 Marilyn Monroe calendar photos.

The photos, for which Monroe was paid $50 some 62 years ago, later turned up in Playboy's 1953 debut issue.

Hefner announced today "that the leak had prompted him to rush the...Read More

In a 12.9 Oscar-race article focusing on producer Scott Rudin (Extremely Loud & Extremely Close, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes writes that "the buzz from the few people who have seen Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close so far? Superb, but emotionally harrowing -- one box of Kleenex might not suffice."

Barnes also quotes a high-ranking studio executive as saying that Rudin "knows exactly what he has" in Stephen Daldry's 9/11 drama, "and it's a jewel."

And then a friend who's seen Extremely Loud said something today that others may agree with: "It's a better...Read More

I have to leave in a few for round-table interviews at the Four Seasons for Angelina Jolie's In The Land of Blood and Honey. Everyone is looking to get what they want from these things, but whenever an object of tabloid fascination like Jolie sits down at the table, it's highly likely that some ninny is going to go "off-topic" and ask some idiotic, inane, downmarket question. This is always cause for major eye-rolling, and is one reason why I hate these occasions. Hell, sometimes, is other journalists.

1:25 pm Update: Then again surprises happen from time to time. I've just returned...Read More

John Williams' War Horse soundtrack is about calculated symphonic dictation. It's one of those scores that goads you, like an overbearing, baton-waving music teacher, into feeling this or that emotion on cue. Williams + Spielberg have been pushing the same buttons and working the same levers since Jaws. I once listened to an orchestra perform a summation of Williams' best known movie themes at the Hollywood Bowl (with Williams conducting, of course). Well plowed and well trod, to put it mildly.

Mychael Danna's Moneyball score is more of a subtle, half-spooky weaver...Read More

Indiewire's Amy Dawes attended last night's Dark Knight Rises prologue IMAX press screening, and has this to say about the big-screen debut of Tom Hardy's Bane character: "You'd have to know in advance [that] the villain was Hardy, given that he's muscled up and puffed up, has a shaved head, and wears a disturbing-looking gas mask that hides all his features save his eyes - kind of a Hannibal Lecter hockey mask-look on steroids."

On top of which Hardy's "voice behind the mask is metallic and muffled -- another cause for concern."

The effect, says Dawes, "is more likely to...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere will not be among the elite press people (including a fair number of fanboy types) who will be attending an IMAX screening this evening of Chris Nolan's seven or eight-minute Dark Knight Rises prologue. Reps for Deadline, Indiewire and other mainstream entertainment press will be at the Universal IMAX Citywalk event at 7:30 pm (with a reception to follow), and Nolan is hosting an earlier screening at the same venue at 5:45 pm for filmmaker friends.

I guess Warner Bros. publicists feel I'm not fanboy enough, but where is the logic in that? This wll be...Read More

In the Gurus of Gold view, the top ten Best Picture contenders are, in this order, these: 1. The Artist; 2. War Horse; 3. The Descendants; 4. Hugo; 5. Midnight in Paris; 6. The Help; 7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; 8. Moneyball; 9. The Tree of Life; 10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

The Gurus and the Gold Derby gang are continually estimating and revising their predictions, and I must confess I'm starting to weaken as far as the Artist onslaught in concerned. Or at least, I'm feeling weaker today.

The Zeligs have apparently decided where the safe havens are,...Read More

One For The Money (1.27) is obviously another broad, lightweight, formulaic Kathryn Heigel romcom -- a perfect late-January release aimed at none-too-bright women. The standout thing, of course, is the casting of a relatively low-profile TV guy, Jason O'Mara, in the Gerard Butler role.

Brian Lowry's Variety review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows says that the upcoming Warner Bros. release "has the significant advantage of featuring Holmes' preeminent adversary, Professor Moriarty, as played with reptilian charm by Jared Harris. So while director Guy Ritchie's excesses and modern concessions -- among them a lot of explosions -- remain intact, the parts of this second Sherlock Holmes are considerably more rewarding

"For purists, of course, there's almost certainly too much gunplay and noise (including Hans Zimmer's bombastic score), but this is a Holmes designed to appeal as much to the Transformers generation as those steeped...Read More

The more you predict that Academy members will cast their Best Picture vote for a lightweight bauble or whorey manipulative schmaltz, the more likely it is that the Academy Zeligs will be inclined to vote for same. I can repeat this over and over into mid-January. Write it 100 times on the blackboard: "Oscar predictions tend to perpetuate easy-emotional-default mediocrities."

The Stooge babies and the nun gag is unfunny, awful, forget it. You'd have to be an idiot to laugh at it. But the rest of the trailer...I don't know. Partly, yeah, kinda. It feels too shiny and overproduced; shoulda have been shot in 1.33 monochrome. And who are Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes and Will Sassol? I would have preferred Russell Crowe or Benicio del Toro as Moe, Sean Penn as Larry and Jim Carrey as Curly.

Indiewire's Todd Gilchrist had judged Mission: Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol to be "a fun but mostly empty adventure story that operates with the rote predictability of a middling '90s James Bond movie rather than a benchmark-setting actioner or even seasonal 'event movie.'"

The film "is constructed as a series of sequences in which Cruise reads a description of something they all have to do together, observes how freaking impossible it's going to be, and then tells everyone to get to business. Afterward, they recap their successes and failures, engage in a bit of emotional banter, and...Read More

I was all set to savor Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the third time last night, but the Arclight Cinerama Dome was under-heated (management looking to save on heating costs?) and I was under-dressed to begin with so I escaped. The after-party at the Chateau Marmont was plenty warm, though. Spirited chats ensued with Tinker helmer Tomas Alfredson (who said he still hasn't seen Let Me In), Doug Urbanski and screenwriter Peter Straughan.

(l to r.) Gary Oldman manager and brilliant Social Network actor Doug Urbanski, Oldman and Tinker Tailor costar Mark Strong during last night's Chateau Marmont...

Here's to Harry Morgan, who died this morning at age 96. His long-running TV roles on M.A.S.H. and Dragnet never mattered much to me. But his three best performances did. They were (a) Henry Fonda's trail homie in William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, (b) one of the many small-town cowards who abandon Gary Cooper in his hour of need in High Noon, and (c) and an officer who goes off his gourd after getting lost in a maze of underground tunnels in Blake Edwards' What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? ('66).

How many half-decent Drive parodies have surfaced over the past two and a half months? Apologies for missing this one when it first popped up. The actress is 29 year-old Erin Foster. Apparently shot and cut by Justin Coit. (Thanks to Matt Mazur for the link.)

Time has chosen Jamie Stuart's Idiot with a Tripod as the #3 creative video of 2011. Valerie Lapinski took the top two slots -- Mourir Aupres de Toi (To Die by Your Side) and My Water's On Fire Tonight. Congrats to one and all.

I don't know who "Scott is NOT a professional critic" is, except that he claims to be a screenwriter and he thinks/dreams/obsesses about sex and '70s cinema a lot. I do know that he sounds like a highly energized LexG without the morose gloom and self-pity, and a little bit like Warren Oates in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia if Oates' character in that Sam Peckinpah film was an alcoholic USC film professor and a raving, saliva-spewing chauvinist dog.

I also know that on 11.10.21 he posted a lucid, sharply written (like...Read More

There aren't enough films with this level of writing, I mean. Here's part #2.

I've been a Separation loyalist since Telluride, and I intend to ride it home all the way to the end of the trail. What's important right now is to launch a respectful but adamant counteroffensive against those Academy schmoes (one of whom I was told about a couple of weeks ago) who have said "meh" after seeing it. These are the same people who said "meh" to Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.

The BBC will produce The Girl, a 90-minute TV drama about Alfred Hitchcock's creepily obsessive relationship with Tippi Hedren during the making of The Birds ('63) and Marnie ('64). Too-short Toby Jones will play Hitch and Sienna Miller will play Hedren.

Herdren was an early '60s personification of the icy blonde type that Hitchcock always had a thing for, going back to Grace Kelly. ("There are hills in that thar gold," he reportedly said upon spotting Kelly in a gold lame gown.) He spent much time and effort grooming Hedren into a big-name star (at least...Read More

As Grantland's Mark Harris sagely explains, half of the 2011 Best Picture contenders are about faux-nostalgia (sentiment, storybook gauze, the way we were) and the other half are actually about real adults (and particularly parents) grappling with life in the 21st Century...whoa!

The Faux Nostalgies (which I'm calling the Soft Sappies) are The Artist, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, War Horse and The Help. (I don't agree with Harris's opinion that The Tree of Life belongs in this group.) And the Slapped-In-The-Face-With-Reality contenders include Moneyball, Margin Call, The Descendants, Contagion, Ralph Fiennes' contemporized Coriolanus and Extremely Loud...Read More

Boiled down, Dave Itzkoff's 12.4 N.Y. Times piece about duelling Arkansas murder case documentaries reports how producer Peter Jackson and director Amy Berg's West of Memphis, a doc that will screen at Sundance 2012, has muscled in on the investigative territory that documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have been mining for 15 years.

Berlinger and Sinofsky have made three docs -- Paradise Lost: The Murders at Robin Hood Hills ('96), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations ('00) and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (due to premiere on HBO in January 2012) about wrongly convicted Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and...Read More

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director David Fincher spoke this morning with Miami Herald critic-reporter Rene Rodriguez about David Denby's embargo-busting review of his film in the current edition of The New Yorker. Tattoo producer Scott Rudin responded by banning Denby from future press screenings of his films, including "the Daldry."

"I think Scott [Rudin]'s response was totally correct," Fincher said. "It's a hard thing for people outside our business to understand. It is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. But as silly as this may all look from the outside -- privileged people bickering -- I think it's...Read More

In the view of Michael Morpurgo, author of the '80s War Horse children's novel, Steven Spielberg's War Horse delivers "a wonderfully paced story." He admits to N.Y. Times "Carpetbagger" Melena Ryzik that "it's quite slow to begin with, and I'm sure it will be criticized for that. But it should be, because you have to establish the relationship between the boy and the horse, the boy and the landscape.

"And then you find, rather like the walk of a horse, the story begins to trot. And it trots when the horse joins the army and goes off to...Read More

"Wow! I'm shocked, shocked that the elections in Russia are a fraud. That's so much worse than an election where, with the complicity of the Supreme Court, a moron was put into the White House. And certainly worse than a group of corporate-owned candidates who are each trying to prove he or she can out-hate the others." -- "Markk" from Seattle, responding to David M. Herszenhorn's 12.6 N.Y. Times story about reported election-rigging by the Vladimir Putin gang. The story is titled "Jailing Opposition Leaders, Russia Moves to Quell Election Protests."

Sandbagged again by another militant liberal! Elijah isn't projecting from the diaphragm when he speaks to Representative Bachmann, but he's saying that his mom is gay and she doesn't need fixing.

Gary Oldman's performance as George Smiley, John LeCarre's legendary British intelligence maestro, in Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 12.9) is, I submit, a classic less-is-more performance. Oldman is muted and subtle and keeps his range of facial expressions to a minimum, but his silences and contemplations and (very) occasionally raised eyebrows are beautiful.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy star Gary Oldman -- Monday, 12.5, 3:05 pm.

Oldman and I sat down for about 19 minutes late this afternoon at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Here's the mp3.

I'll be seeing Oldman again...Read More

In the old days the star of a film was sometimes introduced by stealth. The camera would show a portion of his/her anatomy -- a behind-the-head shot or an insert of his/her hands or a shot of walking shoes, say -- but the face wouldn't be revealed until 10 or 20 or even 30 seconds had elapsed. This told the audience, of course, that the person being concealed was at the very least a major costar, and most likely a romantic figure. And they wanted to know more.

Sean Connery was introduced this way at the beginning of...Read More

Congrats again to Tyrannosaur's Olivia Colman for winning the Best Actress award at the British Independent Film Award ceremony the other night, and apologies for never getting around to posting our chat at L.A.'s Hotel Standard, which happened on 11.18. Time flies and I'm sorry, but here it is.

Please listen to this There Will Be Blood-like dialogue between New Yorker critic David Denby and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo producer Scott Rudin. It's on a site called Oscar Speak Podcast. The actors are Ryan Santor and Brian Ariotti.

The only weak part is when co-host Karen Nagle hesitates and slightly stumbles while saying Denby and Rudin's names, suggesting that she doesn't know who they are.

No time to comment due to my impending Gary Oldman interview but here are the Sundance 2012 premieres and premiere docs, which were sent out a few minutes ago.

PREMIERES:

A showcase of some of the most highly anticipated dramatic films of the coming year from new and established directors. Presented by Entertainment Weekly. Each is a world premiere.

2 Days in New York / France (Director: Julie Delpy, Screenwriters: Julie Delpy, Alexia Landeau) -- Marion has broken up with Jack and now lives in New York with their child. A visit from her family, the different cultural background of her new boyfriend,...Read More

I've watched this early '80s High Point coffee commercial four times over the last half-hour. I find it mesmerizing in a "so bizarre it's great" sense, but it's easy to look back on old ads and snicker. I have all this work to do and an interview with Gary Oldman in 65 minutes and I'm looking at this over and over. There's something wrong with me.

High Point coffee, advertised as "97% caffeine-free," was discontinued in 1993.

Gena Rowlands' performance in A Woman Under The Influence was an early influence upon Kristen Stewart. So when exactly is she going to deliver a tour de force like that? Because she really needs to do something difficult and noteworthy to counterbalance the Twilight onslaught of the last three years plus her Snow White and the Huntsman role....a medieval CG paycheck role with a sword, a shield and a chestplate.

I used to think KStew might be evolving into Sean Penn. Now I'm not so sure.

That said I've admired her work in The Runaways,...Read More

Indiewire's Anne Thompson has posted a very tangy and candid q & a with Young Adult director Jason Reitman. It very precisely articulates the nature and character of Young Adult. Here's my favorite part:

Anne Thompson: "Diablo Cody has a very strong voice. Did you ever want to mute or delete or say, 'you went too far here?' Or did you say, 'let's go for it?'"

Jason Reitman: "No, no. I love Diablo's voice and I love how gutsy she is in her writing. It's gutsy to sit down and write this script. The script is basically un-makeable. You know what I...Read More

The first portion of this clip (up until 1:14) contains John Wayne's best scene ever. The resolve mixed with fatigue and resignation, the perfect phrasing, the way he turns to Montgomery Clift when he says "one time you'll turn around and I'll be there" and then turns away for the final line: "I'm gonna kill ya, Matt." God, he was good when he was good! And then Dimitri Tiomkin's music kicks in with just the right feeling and emphasis.

I don't care how many people follow David Denby into the abyss of expediency and post their Girl With The Dragon Tattoo reviews today or tomorrow or whatever. I will not because I pledged in writing that I would not, and that's that. The "olly olly in come free" is only seven days from now. Yes, I'd like to re-post that thing I wrote (and then took down) about Rooney Mara being in the Best Actress race now, but that piece didn't convey any views whatsoever about the film so it's a different deal.

In his The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review, David Denby says that Rooney Mara's performance as Lisbeth Salander is mesmerizing, and that she basically owns the film and that costar Daniel Craig is okay with that -- he lets her carry the ball. Another interesting point in the review is that while David Fincher's Tattoo says that everything can be discovered if you drill deeply enough, Zodiac, Fincher's masterpiece, says pretty much the opposite.

The Playlist has posted an e-mail exchange between New Yorker critic David Denby and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo producer Scott Rudin about the ethics and motives behind Denby and his editors breaking the 12.13 Tattoo embargo by posting Denby's review today.

Denby says he regrets breaking his word but he and his editors felt they had to review Tattoo now because almost all of the good films are jammed into December, and to cover them all would necessitate mini-reviews in the New Yorker's year-end double issue. But he felt more or less okay with running it, he adds,...Read More

Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur led the winners at the just-concluded Moet British Independent Film Award ceremony, taking trophies for Best Film, Best Debut Director (i.e., Considine) and -- this wams my heart -- Best Actress for HE's own Olivia Colman. Wells to indifferent American moviegoers who couldn't be bothered to see Tyrannosaur during its brief theatrical exposure: how do you feel now?

Screenwriter and film critic F.X. Feeney has written an eloquent but unusually blunt piece about the late George Hickenlooper, with whom Feeney collaborated on The Big Brass Ring, a political drama starring William Hurt. The article, in the L.A. Review of Books, appears 13 months after Hickenlooper's death in Denver on 10.30.10.

George Hickenlooper (r.) and Kevin Spacey (l.) during filming of Casino Jack.

Whenever a collaborator of a deceased filmmaker writes a recollection piece about him/her, the tone is always admiring and warmly affectionate, and often swoony. This is not one of those, and yet...Read More

N.Y. Post film critic Lou Lumenick has read David Denby's controversial early review of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which Sony's Andre Caraco is hugely pissed about because it's appearing eight days before the embargo date) and has offered a summary:

"As for Denby's review, which apparently won't go up online until tomorrow morning, I'd characterize it as positive to mixed, though he begins with a pull quote that Sony's marketing department and awards spin doctors will find useful: 'You can't take your eyes off Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander...'

"He concludes by stopping short...Read More

Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy has posted what appears to be the first formal review from a NY-LA veteran of Jason Reitman's Young Adult (Paramount, 12.9 limited, 12.16 wide) as compared to those drive-by riffs (including my own) posted after that New Beverly early-bird screening on 11.1.

"A tart, abrasive character study of a seriously messed up writer who pens a twisted new episode to her own life, the pungent Young Adult feels like a chapter in what by rights should be a longer film or novel" McCarthy begins. "As if deliberately setting out...Read More

I knew there was something, no offense, that I didn't like about Robert Downey, Jr. And it wasn't just those franchise films he's been making since '08 (Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes, Avengers) and those would-be tentpolers (like that Perry Mason project) he's developing. I hate the Holmes brand and that whole corporate steampunk CG bandwagon asthetic, but people with no taste feel otherwise so what can I do?

In any event Downey has appeared in a pair of subversive comedies within the last three years, Tropic Thunder and Due Date, so it's not like he's...Read More

Sony's exec vp publicity Andre Caraco has issued a letter to critics that admonishes New Yorker critic David Denby (and by extension his editors) for ignoring Sony's strict review embargo policy concerning David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo -- i.e., no reviews before 12.13. Denby's review, says Caraco, will appear tomorrow morning, on 12.5, which Caraco calls "completely unacceptable."

The thrust of Caraco's letter is a warning to critics that Denby's "violation" in no way constitutes a green light for everyone to break ranks and post their own reviews tomorrow morning, or before 12.13. The cat...Read More

In my book Shame director Steve McQueen has been inspected and identified to a fare-thee-well by New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. I would go so far as to say that for readers of Lane's 12.5 review, which first appeared six days ago, the McQueen mystique is no more. He will continue to create and make films and whatnot, but from this point on he has no clothes.

"McQueen, a Brit who attended art schools and worked in visual installation before turning to feature films, was lauded for Hunger (2008), and rightly so, although even that movie, about an I.R.A. hunger-striker"...Read More

Here's hoping that Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur -- easily the most critically respected commercial dud of 2011, at least in the U.S. -- receives some love tonight at the Moet British Independent Film Awards, which happens tonight at London's Old Billingsgate. (Chris Dalrmple says the live stream will be on lovefilm.com) At the very least Tyranny's Olivia Colman needs to win for Best Actress...right?

Tyrannosaur is up for Best Film, Best Director (Considine), Best Debut Director, Best Actress (Colman), Best Actor (Peter Mullan), Best Supporting Actor (Eddie Marsan) and...is that it? I heard somewhere that...

A good movie, said Howard Hawks, is one that has "three great scenes and no bad ones." It shouldn't be too much to ask that a Best Picture Oscar winner should live up to this, right? A day or two ago I asked the readership to answer how the current Best Picture candidates measure up to Hawks' law. Nobody bit so I'm trying again.

(l to. r.) Bennett Miller, Howard Hawks, Alexander Payne.

Most of us know what "great scenes" are but I'll define them anyway. Great scenes are ones that...Read More

"I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction and hurt upon me and my family....the impact upon family, the impact upon you, my supporters...and the impact upon the ability to continue to raise the necessary funds to be competitive."

"L'audace, encore de l'audace, tourjours de l'audace!" Did this become an oft-quoted French proverb because Georges Danton said it, or because Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell and General George Patton repeated it? I don't know the origin of "Who dares, wins...who sweats, wins...who plans, wins" either. Nor do I have any idea who coined the phase "he who hesitates, masturbates." But they're all phrases to live by.

Who was the first to use the phrase "four o'clock in the morning courage"? The first time I read it was in Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast.

I guess there's something to be said for Martin Scorsese's Hugo having only dropped 56% from last Friday compared to Arthur Christmas plummeting 64% and The Muppets nose-diving 77%. The lesser Hugo drop is related, I guess, to its playing in 1840 theatres compared to 3376 Arthur houses and 3440 Muppet situations. And is due to the fact, I suppose, that it's a good 3D storybook film with a great ending.

Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino says he's thinking Hugo will make "around $50 million" at the end of the day, "but it could be less if Sherlock Holmes 2 and Alvin and the...Read More

In a certain sense this is how certain favored films in the current award season (you can guess which ones) make me feel. Not that I see myself in any sense as agitated or starved or crawling on the ground with exhaustion.

The recently arrived-upon view of several critics and columnists -- including Vulture's Kyle Buchanan, CNN's J.D. Cargill, Coming Soon's Ed Douglas, Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale, EW's Dave Karger, Deadline's Pete Hammond, In Contention's Guy Lodge, The Wrap's Steve Pond and Indiewire's Anne Thompson -- is that The Artist is a more likely Best Picture winner than The Descendants.

On one level I understand. They're saying that the Motion Picture Academy is very easily impressed and a cinch to win over with "entertainment." They're saying that a generally pleasing silver-screen bauble and a really cute yappy dog...Read More

Comicbookmovie.com has run a quote from legendary comic-book writer Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, From Hell, Watchmen) about Frank Miller's notorious quotes about the Occupy movement.

"Well, Frank Miller is someone whose work I've barely looked at for the past twenty years," Moore begins. "I thought the Sin City stuff was unreconstructed misogyny, 300 appeared to be wildly ahistoric, homophobic and just completely misguided. I think that there has probably been a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller's work for quite a long time. Since I don't have anything to do with the comics industry, I don't have...Read More

"I am best friends with George [Lucas] and I'm very obedient to the stories that he writes," War Horse director Steven Spielberg says in a new Entertainment Weekly article. "I'll fight things I don't believe in but ultimately if George wants to bring interdimensional beings into Crystal Skull, I will do the best job I possible can to acquit George's idea and make him proud."

He creatively defers to a man who's been renowned since the late '80s as one of the worst, most hackneyed story conceptualists in movie history? The guy who created Jar-Jar Binks and built a large...Read More

Bill McKinney, who died yesterday at age 80, was a hard-working, well-liked character actor whom many remember for his supporting roles in several Clint Eastwood films of the '70s and '80s -- Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Pink Cadillac, etc. But let's face it -- McKinney's biggest claim to fame is for playing the hilllbilly rapist in Deliverance ('72), more specifically as the guy who sodomized Ned Beatty in the woods while going "wheeeee!"

Bill McKinney (1931 - 2011)

I mean, I'm sorry to put it crudely (if that's what...Read More

Yesterday afternoon I saw Angelina Jolie's In The Land of Blood and Honey, and liked it a lot. I asked for permission to say a little something and was told nope, the embargo holds...fine. This morning I saw David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and I liked that too. But I can't write about it until 12.13. And now I'm sitting in a food court and not arguing with anyone about seating. All is well. Just saying.

Steve McQueen's Shame opens limited today. It demands a spinach-eating looksee from all non-Eloi viewers, but hoowee, it's a bucket of bleak. Here's my 9.5. Telluride Film Festival review: "Steve McQueen's Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that's entirely about a malignancy -- sex addiction -- affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light.

"Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He's into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the...Read More

The Station Agent, The Visitor and Win Win persuaded everyone that director-writer Tom McCarthy is a skillful provider of the same kind of adult relationship or family dramedy, more or less, that Alexander Payne churns out. For my money Win Win, which I first saw at Sundance 2011, is in the same class as The Descendants. They're both about families in transition, and about ethics, character, parent-child relations and working through hard stuff.

Win Win director-writer Tom McCarthy -- Thursday, 12.1, 12:35 pm, Four Seasons hotel.

The reason Win Win isn't in the current award-season "conversation", of course,...Read More

Paula Patton is the brunette and Lea Seydoux is the blonde, but I had to research that. Anyway, who cares? This Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol fight sequence is cut too fast. It's all little pieces; no follow-through. Gina Carono's fight sequences in Steven Soderberg's Haywire (Relativity, 1.20) are much cooler and far more believable.

Fans of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil never mention something that has always seemed odd and repugnant to me. Welles plays a cynical, unshaven and obese police captain named Hank Quinlan...but his appearance is a bit much. He looks like a 60 year-old homeless guy who's been chain-smoking, guzzling straight whiskey and eating french fries and Haagen-Dazs his entire life, and yet Welles was only 42 when he directed Touch of Evil. 42!

I've never read anything about Welles inhaling pasta dishes for two or three months before shooting Evil in 1957 so...Read More

Sometime between now and May I'm going to visit Monument Valley for a couple of days, and stay at Goulding's Lodge. I've also decided that however long the drive turns out to be, I'm going to listen to mostly movie soundtracks. Particularly, I'm thinking, Phillip Glass's The Fog of War score, which I find curiously soothing. This track especially.

Soundtracks go well with driving because they don't demand your attention. They're meant to flavor and complement, not dominate.

Judy Lewis, the secretly-born daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, died six days ago at age 76. Young refused to admit to Lewis, whose last name came from Young's husband, Tom Lewis, that her father was Gable until 1986, when Lewis was 50 or 51 and Young was 73.

(l.) Judy Lewis, (center) Clark Gable, (r.) Loretta Young.

Lewis was conceived during the making of Call of The Wild, when Young was 22 and Gable, married to Maria Langham, was 34. Lewis was quietly born and sent...Read More

The Hugo-is-beautiful gang (Sasha Stone, Glenn Kenny, et, al.) is rejoicing and texting and whooping it up and taking the day off work to celebrate the National Board of Review having given its Best Film of 2011 award to Martin Scorsese's 3D fable. And why not?

Will this award help Hugo at the box-office, where its been doing fair to so-so business? Maybe. Hopefully. I'm not Hugo's biggest champion, but I don't want to see it go under. It's a decent film in many respects, and a lovely one during its final act.

The NBR handed out two acting awards to...Read More

Cheers to Girl With The Dagon Tattoo's Daniel Craig for underlining the basic take on reality shows and the Kardashians and the end of the world: "It's a career. What can I tell you? Look at the Kardashians, they're worth millions. Millions! I don't think they were that badly off to begin with, but now look at them. You see that and you think, 'What, you mean all I have to do is behave like a fucking idiot on television and then you'll pay me millions?'"

Here's my 5.11 Cannes Film Festival review of Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty, which opens tomorrow (12.2): "SB is basically a highly refined, carefully poised erotic mood piece with oodles and oodles of milky nudity. I only know that all through it I was saying, 'This thing is candy for guys like LexG...a bag of Halloween candy. But that's not what you're supposed to think.'"

Emily Browning's Lucy is a student who does this and that to make ends meet -- high-end prostitution mostly, but she also holds down jobs at a copy shop and a...Read More

There's "a bit of a movement afoot" to get Fox Searchlight to send DVD screeners of (or otherwise make available) Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret for top-ten lists and whatnot, says critic/essayist Bilge Ebiri. A online petition was launched online yesterday.

"Searchlight is already responding, apparently," he writes. "There are reports that they've set up additional screenings in Chicago and Boston in response. Hopefully we can keep this going and inspire them to make Margaret available to more people. Obviously the Searchlight staffers are good people, but I'm not sure they realized how much interest there is in this film (which...Read More