Remember the days when travelling actually interfered with the ability of a reporter to call around and write stories and self-publish them?

A couple of hours ago Sony Pictures Classics announced that they've acquired Amy Berg and Peter Jackson's West of Memphis. The acclaimed doc about the wrongly imprisoned West Memphis Three (i.e., Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley Jr.), who were finally released last summer, was screened at the 2012 Sundance and Santa Barbara film festivals.

(l. to r.) West of Memphis director Amy Berg, Damien Echols, Lorri Davis.

I was told about the Sony Classics' deal late last month in Santa Barbara. (Right before I posted this story, in fact.) I guess it takes a while...Read More

In this SNL promo, Lindsay Lohan has clearly acquired a plumper face and what seem to be (am I wrong?) surgically-augmented cheekbones. And what's with the bangs? She's definitely remade herself. I for one prefer that slightly haggard, worn-down, worse-for-wear look she's had the last couple of years. At least that was honest.

During last Monday's Oscar Poker Sasha Stone and I got into a little back-and-forth about Viola Davis's Denzel Washington/Malcolm X cut. She said at one point that 'fros are making a comeback these days, at least among teenage girls, and I said "but why?...to what end?"

Today she sent along a post from forharriet.com, and a quote that reads as follows: "Our personal guides for aesthetic liberation need not be famous women. Do you have a Viola Davis in your own life? Maybe you are someone's Viola Davis."

To which I replied, "Maybe you are someone's Angela Davis. Break out...Read More

I only got 63% of the Oscar winners right last Sunday. (In part because I was unable to absorb what I'd sensed about Meryl Streep winning Best Actress.) In any event I relate to others who are so swayed by their own determinations that their ability to gauge what the Academy is thinking is, shall we say, compromised. I feel kinship, in other words, with prognosticators like Anne Thompson, David Poland, Greg Ellwood, Mark Harris and Stu VanAirsdale, all of whom wound up with not-so-hot rankings among the Gurus of Gold Oscar-pickers.

Poland always refuses to post the final results of Gurus of...Read More

"A brutal, unapologetic comedy about the fantasy every high school kid carries around in his head about being popular and cool and beloved, Project X is an astounding, superlative movie about adolescence," declares Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez.

"This is a cinematic mix tape of every conceivable teen-film staple -- Rebel Without a Cause, Over the Edge, Porky's, John Hughes' entire body of work -- cranked up to deafening volume and given a modern spit-polish. There isn't a single thing in Project X that isn't derivative or borrowed. You've just never seen it done...Read More

This looks half-tolerable...maybe. But I'm still intimidated by the thought of watching anything with the handprint of the dreaded Joss Whedon. I also have a problem with any film in which Samuel L. Jackson uses the word "hopelessly." I'm also concerned that the film has been converted from 2D to 3D.

The architecture of any proverbial city always suffers when a superhero dukes it ou with an adversary. The hands-down winner of the Urban Destruction prize so far is Michel Bay's Transformers 3. Let's see where The Avengers takes us in this regard. Get that...

The last time I gave a thought to former Monkee Davy Jones was a year or so ago in Manhattan. I was walking south on Eighth Avenue when I happened to notice he was doing a live show in a modest venue near the corner of 42nd Street. I remember thinking to myself, "Well, it's a gig at least." The show continued, according to this interview with timesquare.com's Peggy Hogan, with an opening set for Saturday, 2.18.

It was reported about a half-hour ago that Jones, 66, has died of a heart attack in...Read More

The creators of this piece, the footage for which was captured during Rio's 2011 Carnaval, are Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutif. The process is called "tilt/shift," but it's obviously a mixture of real footage and miniature-simulating stop-motion/CG/whatever. The fascinating thing is that you can't always tell where the action leaves off and the tilt/shift tweaking begins. Take the real world and make it look fake -- what a concept!

Last night a respected critic and film journalist emailed about yesterday's article regarding Paramount's curious decision not to press-screen Titanic 3D between now and 4.3. "I've seen Titanic 3D too," he said, "and Ebert and Poland are wrong, and Lou Lumenick -- for once -- is right.

"Yes, the image is slightly darker through the glasses. I took them off several times during the movie to compare. I have no basis whatsoever for saying this, but I suspect Cameron may have brightened the image slightly for the 3D presentation in order to compensate....Read More

Can anyone explain why Ed Helms starts driving his Porsche like a crazy man in this scene from Jeff, Who Lives At Home (Paramount Vantage, 3.16)? There's one funny line -- "Porches are for normal people, you're a Sasquatch" -- and then Helms says "check this out" and it's off to Whacko City with the car slamming into a tree. Nonsensical isn't funny. Funny is when an apparently rational person tries to make something turn out right but events overwhelm him/her.

Directed and written by Jay and Mark Duplass, Jeff, Who Lives at Home is...Read More

I can't see not buying the British Bluray of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist ('70). The gauzy, dreamy lighting that makes Vittorio Storaro's lensing of this ballroom scene so special is evident even in this YouTube clip. Imagine it looking "brighter, thicker, richer and [with] more grain," as DVD Beaver's Gary Tooze has written.

Armando Iannucci's Veep (HBO, sometime in April) stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a somewhat self-absorbed, slow-on-the-pickup U.S. Senator who becomes Vice-President...and is then literally a heartbeat away from assuming the Presidency when the Oval Office occupant complains of chest pains. The tone, manner and rhythm of Iannucci's In The Loop are all flooding back into my memory.

Whitney Houston's sudden death on Feb. 11th "is expected to be officially ruled an accident, a source with knowledge of the ongoing investigation" has told E! News' Ken Baker and Natalie Finn. In other words, the cause of Houston's death wasn't much different than her slipping on a banana peel and hitting her head. Everything was hunky-dory lifestyle and health-wise, but all of a sudden an "accident" happened and she was gone...phffft.

Paramount obviously doesn't need to expend much energy to raise awareness about the forthcoming Titanic 3D (4.4). Diehards who saw and worshipped James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster 15 years ago will cough up for a somewhat darker stereoscopic version no matter what. There is, however, a second target audience -- i.e., the wait-and-see crowd who aren't sure how good the 3D conversion will be, and are waiting for buzz.

Well, guess what? They aren't going to hear any buzz until the night before Titanic 3D opens (i.e., Tuesday, April 3rd) because Paramount apparently won't be screening it...Read More

Last year the Cannes Film Festival chose a 41-year-old mage of Faye Dunaway (taken from Jerry Schatzberg's Puzzle of a Downfall Child) for their official poster. This year they've chosen a mid-1950s shot of Marilyn Monroe blowing out a candle...whatever that implies. Me? I've always wanted to them to use this famous surfside shot of Robert Mitchum. There's something sublime about his body language, and the shot was actually taken in Cannes, etc.

On the ten possible 2012 Best Picture nominees mentioned yesterday by Gold Derby's Brenden Murphy, three are candidates for instant dismissal, at least according to my yardstick: Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Marc Forster's World War Z.

The Hobbit is out because Jackson has already snagged a Best Picture Oscar for the Lord of the Rings finale and that, trust me, is the very last Oscar Jackson is going to get for any film having anything to do with Tolkien or Middle Earth or dwarves with huge ugly feet. People are on to his game,...Read More

Judging by the design of the cigarette pack, I'd say these ads were created sometime between the late 1930s and early 1940s. Just a guesstimate. Mommy is stressed out because she's working as a riveter at an aircraft construction plant near Long Beach while Daddy is off fighting the Japs and the Germans...something like that?

Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com's Phil Contrino and I kicked it around pretty well this morning. The Oscars, Viola Davis's real hair (and the return of 'fros), the box-office calamity that is John Carter, the hugeness of Hunger Games, etc. Here's a stand-alone mp3 link.

On 2.17 I summarized the reactions of Roger Ebert and MCN's David Poland to Titanic 3D (Paramount, 4.4), which they both saw at Valentine's Day (2.14) preview screenings in Chicago and Burbank, respectively. Both were disappointed by the relative darkness of the image. Ebert called what he saw "a defacement," partly due to low light levels, and Poland said "it's like watching the movie through a filter."

It appears that Ebert and Poland saw Titanic 3D, which was converted from 2D to stereoscopic for the RealD process, on either Sony or Christie 3D projectors...Read More

If I'm not mistaken, six years ago original Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx said something equally frank and snippy about Paul Haggis's Crash, the film that snatched away the Best Picture Oscar from Ang Lee's adaptation. It's always usually the writers who let go with the barbs.

I never rank very high in predicting Oscar winners because I'm psychologically unable to separate or compartmentalize my feelings about the contenders from what I've been told or otherwise led to expect will happen. Every year about two-thirds of my predictions are on the money and roughly a third are not. I could have done a little better than 63% (i.e., last night's final score) if I'd listened to Ben Zauzmer and predicted Meryl Streep to win Best Actress, but I couldn't push myself off the Viola Davis boat.

The Oscar prediction game is fundamentally naught...Read More

For what it's worth, Harvard Oscar-odds cruncher Ben Zauzmer, whose predictions I briefly summarized on 2.22, got 75% of these predictions correct, which is pretty good. (75% of the 20 categories he made predictions on, that is -- he abstained in four categories.) Among the top eight categories he batted 100%, obviously partly due to his somewhat surprising five-day-old prediction that Meryl Streep would beat Viola Davis in the Best Actress race.

"By the time of Waterworld in 1996, the press's sonar for the thrashings of a production in trouble -- in this case, a prolonged location shoot, on water, with an unfinished script and a quarrelsome star -- were so fine-tuned that reporters were virtually camped on the Hawaiian docks where Kevin Costner's post-apocalyptic extravaganza was shooting, sharpening their knives and forks.

"Here, though, was the twist: Waterworld wound up making $264 million, thanks to foreign markets, DVD sales, pay-per-view and all the other ancillary revenues with which the studios sought to insulate themselves from risk in the...Read More

"Movies, I've seen hundreds of them. How many of them stay with you? Shane, Red River, On the Waterfront, Freaks? Maybe a handful of others... I saw one the other night, as soon as it was over, I couldn't remember a thing about it. Seemed real important at the time though." -- Bob Dylan talking to Cameron Crowe, 1985.

In other words Dylan, born in 1941, had his movie-watching pores open the widest when he was young. If he caught the above in theatres he was 7 when he saw Red River in '48, 12 when he saw Shane in '53, and...Read More

One of the few surprises came before the ceremony began, when Sacha Baron Cohen approached the E! host Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet," writes N.Y. Times "Tv Watch" critic Alessandra Stanley. "The comedian was in character from his new movie, The Dictator, and carried an urn filled with what he described as the ashes of Kim Jong-il, the deceased leader of North Korea.

"The comedian spilled the ashes all over a shocked Mr. Seacrest, saying, as he was hustled off by security guards, 'When someone asks you what you are wearing, you will say...Read More

The Weinstein Co.'s post-Oscar victory party happened...well, actually it's still happening (as of 12:05 am) at the Mondrian Hotel's SkyBar. Nice gathering, nice people. Artist costar Uggie and Harvey Weinstein showed up; I left before the stars arrived. The Mondrian is just down the street (i.e., Sunset) from the Sunset Tower hotel, where the Vanity Fair party was happening simultaneously.

Uggie arrived with trainer and entourage, went right to special booth, etc.

Cigarettes were going for $15 a pack -- no lie.

8:35 pm: Tom Cruise presenting the Best Picture Oscar to The Artist. And to all a good night. I don't get Hazanavicius saying thanks to Billy Wilder three times. Not that Wilder's example isn't always worth pointing to. I'm sure there's an explanation.

8:24 pm: Colin Firth is presenting the Best Actress award with the same tributes and clips. (Rooney Mara looks so much more alluring and intriguing as Lisbeth Salander, studs, punctures and all, than the way she does tonight with those bangs....no offense.) And the Oscar goes to Meryl Streep!! Sasha Stone freaks out! The over-62 crowd says no to Viola...Read More

In a 2.24 posting that appeared in today's N.Y. Times print edition, columnist Frank Bruni compares the disappointing Oscar contenders with the season's stunningly wacko Republican presidential contenders (excepting Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul):

"Perhaps because the 84th Academy Awards fall smack in the middle of an unusually dizzying stretch of the presidential campaign, the parallels between our cinematic and political sweepstakes have come into bold relief. And though Hollywood often sees itself -- and is regarded -- as a bastion of liberalism, the kinship of the Oscars with the Republican primaries is particularly striking.

I own Criterion's Thin Red Line Bluray, but for whatever reason I've never seen this Mickey Rourke scene that never made the cut. Anything to get my mind off the revolting red-carpet coverage going on now.

The only way to keep The Artist down to six or seven wins (or less) is if the "let's be charitable and throw this or that nominee a bone" instinct has kicked in. Right? With the Big Winner locked, the compassionate voter decides that the show won't be any good it if's too one-sided so spread the love around...at least a bit.

In tribute to the late Erland Josephson, the great Swedish actor who worked with Ingmar Bergman (Hour of the Wolf. The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander) and Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalghia) before passing yesterday at age 88, I'm re-running a 2007 article about a Manhattan encounter I had with Josephson and some other Swedish actors (Harriet Andersson in particular) about 30 years ago:

Erland Josephson -- 6.15.23 to to 2.25.12

"The closest contact I ever had with Ingmar Bergman, so to speak, was a night in 1981 or '82...Read More

The refusal of Jean Dujardin's Valentin to venture into sound is due to his French accent, which he fears will be a career killer. Why not then return to France, "the home of cinema", and join Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo and Marcel Carne "who were making, or about to make, films that entrance audiences to this day?," asks The Economist's "Prospero."

This is not an option, he explains, because Valentin "is so in love with Hollywood that he would rather fail there, even to the brink of suicide, than return to ply his trade in France. If the actor's...Read More

I've been saying all along that I'd be a much more passionate Artist fan if it looked, moved and emoted like a real silent film, instead of offering a pastiche of one.

"The Artist, a likable spoof, [is] bland, sexless, and too simple," New Yorker critic David Denby wrote a few days ago. "For all its genuine charm, it left me restless and dissatisfied, dreaming of those wilder and grander movies [of the silent era].

"Jean Dujardin, with a pencil mustache, looks a little like John Gilbert, but his cavorting star is meant...Read More

It's entirely possible that Hollywood Elsewhere will be overwhelmed later today by traffic, as it was during last year's Oscar telecast. People not only had difficulty refreshing the site but I myself had difficulty posting. I'm just saying. I've just had a long, infuriating conversation with a senior-tech person at Softlayer, during which he assured me there's little I can do at this juncture.

The "Easy Rider, Raging Bull" days were in full bloom. Shampoo had just wrapped, and film rights to the unpublished All The President's Men had just been bought by Robert Redford. The air was awful. (Catalytic converters had only just been invented a year earlier.) El Cholo and Lost on Larrabee were hip restaurants. The Microsoft Corp. was eight or nine months away from being hatched by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And LexG was...what, four years old? (Photo tweeted by Shawn Levy.)

Sunset Blvd. near Chateau Marmont, June 1974.

For what it's worth, FilmJerk odds & number-cruncher Edward Havens is predicting a George Clooney win over Jean Djuardin and the other three. And Viola Davis over Meryl Streep. Beyond that I don't think we need to hear any more Artist talk.

The 2012 Spirit Awards did the wrong thing today by giving four awards to the Big Oscar Inevitable known as The Artist -- Best Feature, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography. The worst kowtow was giving Jean Dujardin its Best Actor prize instead of, say, A Better Life's Damien Bichir or Take Shelter's Michael Shannon. It wasn't an indie thing to do -- it was a "we want to be the Oscars too!" thing. Extremely bad form, dark day, etc.

Random Tweet #1: "Spirit Award for Best Actor goes to...Jean Dujardin? At the Spirits? People in the...Read More

I have to get over to the 2012 Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, which Seth Rogen will be hosting. The show begins at 1:30 pm, but the best part is the 90 minutes of schmooze time before it kicks off. Most of the indie community shows up every year. For me it's a picture- and video-taking orgy. As long as the weather isn't chilly and blustery like last year, everything'll be jake.

Now that Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh's critically-dismissed Act of Valor has emerged as the weekend's #1 film with an expected $27 million, and now that at least some HE readers have seen it, did the "real Navy SEALS shooting real ammo" aspect do anything for anyone? From the get-go haven't people been bracing for the expected shortcomings in the acting end of things? And how could live rounds mean anything to anyone? What detectable versimilitude could possibly occur from this?

And I'm a little surprised that eighth-place Wanderlust is an instant DOA. People just...Read More

Visual effects (including special makeup) can be "imaginative, even astonishing, but [they] are ultimately there to sell a world, a character or a moment," writes Press Play's Aaron Aradillas for a two-parter about horror and makeup. "One of makeup's greatest triumphs is 1981's An American Werewolf in London, which became the first film to win an Oscar for makeup in regular competition. Overseen by Rick Baker, who supervised all of the film's makeup effects, it shows a man changing into a werewolf in real time...right in front of your eyes."

And the...Read More

To Catch a Thief (Paramount Home Video, 3.6) "looks marvelous on dual-layered Blu-ray. Everything tightens-up impressively and the contrast takes notable strides in the 1080p resolution. Colors also appear to improve with better balance in the presentation that has more than 4X the bitrate of the last SD transfer. A fair dusting of grain, no disturbing noise, no signs of digital manipulation. By far the best viewing I've ever had of this film. Beautiful." -- DVD Beaver's Gary Tooze.

From 3.6 Paramount Home Video Bluray of To Catch A Thief (3.6)

...

In the wake of this afternoon's Deadline report that the Academy has reversed course and will now permit Sacha Baron Cohen to do with his red-carpet routine to promote The Dictator, MCN's David Poland is tweeting "Wow...if Nikki Finke is correct, a new precedent is being set for the Oscars. And I expect people to be fired."

This, I've long believed, is Poland at the nub. When some person or company has been judged to have seriously erred through stupidity or clumsy politics or has otherwise dropped the clay vase on the stone floor, there...Read More

I wrote this right after the 2.16 Wanderlust premiere in Westwood, and then pulled it due to embargo restrictions: "Certain...okay, several portions of David Wain's Wanderlust (Universal, 2.24), a snappy satire of straightlaced vs. hippie-ish values and lifestyles, aren't half bad. That's not to say I laughed out loud, but I was quiety amused by much of it. And the crowd at the Village tonight was having a pretty good time.

"Wain and Ken Marino's screenplay is about a pair of anxious urban marrieds (Paul Rudd, Jennifer Aniston) toying with life at a well-tended hippie commune...Read More

It's been announced that the L.A. Times is going with a paywall on March 5th. Meaning that if I want to continue to read film industry coverage by Patrick Goldstein, Steven Zeitchik Nicole Sperling and John Horn on a wide-open basis, I'll have to cough up (a) $1.99 per week in a package that also includes the Sunday newspaper (which is a no-go -- the idea of that all-but-worthless mass of tree pulp being dropped on my doorstep every Sunday is repulsive) or (b) digital-only access at $3.99 per week. Online access will be included gratis for print subscribers.

That couldn't be...Read More

I have two...no, three bones to pick with Melena Ryzik's 2.23 Carpetbagger post, an easygoing, tra-la-la thing called "Tap, Tap, Tapping on Oscar's Door."

One is that title. If there's anything that Harvey Weinstein's p.r. machine hasn't been doing on behalf of The Artist, it's tapping or tap-dancing. The Artist campaign hasn't been a dance -- it's been a Third Army blitzkrieg. And if she's talking about tapping on a door ("hello?...may we come in and collect our Oscars?"), the Weinsteins haven't been doing that either. Nor have they been knocking or rapping or pounding on...Read More

The strongest response I can muster is that this video, which uses the Kaltura player, was/is slow to activate. I don't understand how or why any video clip could be sluggish in this day and age. This is not 2005.

Update: It's being reported that Sacha Baron Cohen is now good to go with his red-carpet shenanigans to promote The Dictator.

As reported widely over the last 10 hours, Bill Maher announced last night during his CrazyStupidPolitics Yahoo concert that he's donating $1 million to President Obama's SuperPAC, Priorities USA Action. I don't know what Maher is worth or what the tax ramifications might be, but I'm guessing he's flush but not stinking. So dropping a mill into Obama's re-election coffers sounds like a substantial and ballsy thing from his perspective whereas, say, Steven Spielberg donating the same is just a roadside piss.

The San Jose concert ended with the donation announcement, which...Read More

Jack Black doesn't look like a Mexican national in Richard Linklater's Bernie, which I saw at last summer's L.A. Film Festival, but he does in the one-sheet. In that poster his eyes resemble those of Pedro Armendariz, and to some extent the eyes of Cantinflas. Yeah, I know -- who's Cantinflas?

Sasha Stone and I knocked off a pretty good Oscar Poker on Tuesday. The usual Oscar round-up stuff. Sasha put it up last night and forgot to tell me. Here's a stand-alone mp3 link.

I'm fairly certain this Bodyguard Bluray wasn't rushed out in the wake of Whitney Houston's death. These things are planned months in advance. I saw this Warner Bros. release a little more than 19 years ago, and I remember almost nothing about it. (I had to read the Wiki synopsis to catch up.) All I remember is that Costner took some heat for wearing an unflattering Steve McQueen haircut. Mick Jackson, the director, has done L.A. Story before The Bodyguard, he made Clean Slate ('94) and Volcano ('97) after it...and that was it.

There are those few, those enlightened few, who understood the rhyme and the purity of Haywire, and there are those who will always kowtow to Asian martial-arts machismo-fantasy bullshit -- easily the most lethally boring and spiritually depleting genre on the planet. The place where the latter group is hanging out is a place I'll never want to visit.

I'ver been so bummed by the whole Oscar situation that I didn't update my Gold Derby predictions until last night, and that was mainly because Tom O'Neil kicked my ass and told me I hadn't updated "since the Coolidge administration." All I can say is God help the Academy (i.e., the Oscar telecast) if they have another lineup like this next year. The lack of fire and suspense and just plain interest is breathtaking. Harvey's win (and no slam on the guy -- he's just doing what he does and God love him) is the film community's loss.

Then again this is funny:

Sean Baker's Starlet, which will premiere at South by Southwest, takes its title from the name of a Chihuahua owned by the lead character, Jane (Dree Hemingway), an aimless San Fernando Valley youth. This indicates, of course, that the film is committed to an oblique strategy of sorts as it conveys...how do I know what it conveys? It's about Jane and her no-account doper friends and an 85 year-old woman (Besedka Johnson) and a stash of cash.

In real life the only people who smoke are the really young, the lower-middle and lower classes, the anxiety-ridden, the...Read More

An orally suggestive poster for Goon, the violent and presumably vulgar hockey comedy that Alliance is opening tomorrow in Canada, has been 86'ed at various Toronto transit shelters due to complaints, etc. The poster shows Canadian hyphenate Jay Baruchel, who co-wrote (with Evan Goldberg) and costars, making a gesture with his fingers and tongue that seems to suggest...what, analingus?

The film costars Seann William Scott, Liev Schreiber and Baruchel.

As I said on 2.8, "I'm sorry but I'm not getting the same sense of ironic hooligan satire from Read More

Ben Zauzmer is a Harvard freshman interested in movies and math, and the creator of Oscarforecast, which presents Oscar predictions based solely on rigorous and dispassionate mathematical analysis. Ben's calculations include "previous Oscar results, other awards shows, current nominations, critic scores, and guild awards," he explains. "All of these numbers -- over 5,000 data points! -- were plugged into a bit of matrix algebra."

Ben Zauzmer

And his system is predicting a Meryl Streep win for Best Actress. By a nosehair (0.7%), but still...Viola Davis gets the shaft? Everyone was sensing the closeness of this race, but I...Read More

"We need to stop glorifying the past and learn how to change for the future, and no film from last year -- nominated for Best Picture or not -- does that better than Moneyball," writes Cinemablend's Eric Eisenberg. "No movie released in 2011 better represents the era in which we are living, and the magnitude of that fact is why Bennett Miller's baseball drama should take home the Best Picture prize at this year's Academy Awards.

"At the end of Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) takes a meeting with John W. Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, who offers...Read More

"I am willing to bet that a huge number of [Academy Award] ballots are cast for pictures and performances purely on hearsay. That is why pictures that make money are preferred to pictures that make history. Industry people have to see the money makers for instruction in 'new trends.' Mere merit is no particular inducement." -- A 1970s quote from esteemed film critic Andrew Sarris, as quoted by Paste Magazine's Braxton Pope in a 2.22 Oscar assessment piece.

The cheesy Ranker.com sent me a piece called "The Top 7 Manliest Sword-fights on Film." Before even looking at it, I made a bet with myself that they wouldn't include any of the sword fights in Ridley Scott's The Duellist ('77). And of course, they haven't. Either they've never seen it, or they don't think Scott's duels are adrenalized enough. In my book The Duellists is on par with Barry Lyndon.

This is not what concerns Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea about Sacha Baron Cohen. The issue is that he's played out his string as a put-on absurdist who goes all outlandish and orifrice-y with unsuspecting chumps, etc. It peaked with Borat, began winding down with Bruno and now it's over with the upcoming The Dictator. (The trailer suggests it's more of the same.) It's been 18 months since the Freddy Mercury project was announced -- what's up with that?

This would have been funny (or at least funnier) if it had been posted three weeks ago, or just after Jean Dujardin won the 2012 SAG award for Best Actor. But today even grandmothers living in assisted living facilities in Southbury, Connecticut know Clooney won't win so where's the edge? Plus the pool guy (i.e, Gold Derby's Matt Noble) should have been more dry and reserved while delivering the bad news.

The point of displaying a corpse in a church or funeral home is to soothe the bereaved by conveying an impression that the deceased is (a) sleeping peacefully and (b) well groomed and well taken care of, not just in this realm but perhaps in the one beyond. It's a ritual meant to allay fears about death. It can be jarring to look at a loved one lying in a casket, obviously, but it also brings mourners to an acceptance of what's happened.

So if the point of displaying a body is to help the living cope with the inevitable, what's so...Read More

In the wake of Nikki Finke's 2.16 article about "shockingly soft" tracking for Disney's John Carter (3.9), The Daily Beast's Chris Lee has written a hit piece ("John Carter: Disney's Quarter-Billion-Dollar Movie Fiasco", 2.21) that focuses on possible repercussions if and when the $250 million Carter does indeed tank.

Lee mainly foresees trouble for Disney chairman Rich Ross, even though he states that Carter "is a problem [Ross] inherited from his predecessor" -- i.e., former Disney honcho Dick Cook -- "and that has provided him a certain level of insulation from the slings of...Read More

I finally watched Criterion's Anatomy of a Murder Bluray, and I have to admit that while I'm adamantly opposed to slashing off the tops and bottoms of films that looked perfectly fine in their natural 1.33 state, and while I would have preferred a 1.66 aspect ratio (if a cropping had to be done), the 1.85 aspect ration began to grow on me after a spell. I came to accept it. It's not a mauling of Otto Preminger's 1959 courtoom drama -- just an unfortunate decision.

The Criterion Anatomy of a Murder Bluray contains to my knowledge the...

Whenever I'm driving slowly (in a parking lot, say) and I see a soda can, I always flatten it. This isn't horrifically difficult, but it's not easy either. It takes a deft touch, a certain instinct. But a good driver can do it every time, and always the first time. If you know your car you just know.

I'm mentioning this because (a) I flattened a can earlier this evening, and (b) I was reminded on my way home how some drivers (women especially) will clench up and take forever when faced with the slightest challenge, like driving through a tight spot...Read More

"In the (still unlikely) event that Rick Santorum captures the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign would probably be to social conservatism what Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign was to small-government conservatism: A losing effort that would inspire countless observers to declare the loser's worldview discredited, rejected, finished.

"In the longer run, a Santorum candidacy might suggest a path that a more electable pro-life populist could follow, much as Reagan ultimately followed Goldwater. But in the short run, it would almost certainly be a debacle - a sweeping defeat for the candidate himself, and a sweeping setback for the causes that he champions." -- N.Y....Read More

A movie that nobody of any consequence really loves is going to win seven Oscars on Sunday, in the view of Hollywood Reporter forecaster Scott Feinberg. How can this be? There's a solid current of like for this agreeable little film, and that's about it. No one who knows or cares about Film Catholicism truly respects The Artist as a work of striking originality or spirit or technique or anything. All through the season people haven't voted for The Artist -- they've defaulted to it.

I'm trying not to pay too much attention to this or give...Read More

This isn't funny. It's well-shot, spunky, disciplined...but not funny. At all. I...uhhm...I was...uhm, going to say...aaah, it's just not funny.

In this Press Play video, Matt Zoller Seitz is suggesting a new Oscar for Outstanding Achievement in Collaborative Performance -- an Oscar that would "honor memorable characters created by mixing performance with CGI, immersive makeup, puppetry, or other behind-the-scenes craft." In this, the first of four essays, the focus is Andy Serkis, who should, of course, have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Rise of the Planet of the Apes...alas.

If anyone has a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Counselor, which Ridley Scott will begin filming on May 1st with Michael Fassbender in the lead, please forward. Deadline's Michael Fleming reports that "insiders" are describing The Counselor as "No Country For Old Men on steroids." What does that mean? That some regarded No Country for Old Men as...what, languid, laid-back, lacking a serious pulse?

Every time I see Michael Fassbender he's wearing that cock-of-the-walk smirk. He had it when I spoke to him at the 2009 New York Film Critics Circle dinner. I saw him again at last month's Fox Searchlight Golden Globes...Read More

Whenever I'm hit with a fever it always lasts for 36 to 48 hours. Yesterday was the worst of it. I had no energy at all. Standing up and walking was a challenge. Picking up the remote and changing a channel was a challenge. I slept the whole day except it wasn't sleep. You can't really sink to the bottom of the pond because there's an alien virus in your system and your muscles are aching so badly. You're floating on the surface, bobbing in and out.

I'm coming out of it now. You know you're home free when the damp sweaty...Read More

Yes, another 1.85 vs. 1.33 aspect ratio piece on Criterion's Anatomy of a Murder Bluray. But no, not another "1.85 fascism" rant. I'm...well, I guess I am talking about fascism. Otto Preminger's 1959 film looks sublime at 1.33. Needle sharp and comfortable with acres and acres of head space. Plus it's the version that was shown on TV for decades. It looks stodgy and kind of grandfatherly, and that's fine because it's your grandfather's movie in a sense. Boxy is beautiful.

It is perverse to deliver the Bluray -- obviously...Read More

Best Musto-ism: "Any picture that wins Best Picture is about Hollywood...Titanic is about Hollywood."

Second best: "Extremely Loud and Glenn Close...or whatever it's called."

Two days ago I told LexG that the pathetic, infantile, self-pitying sexual melancholia had to stop. He held himself in check yesterday but sometime this morning, while I was moaning and rolling around with fever, he went right back into it. So that's it -- LexG is gone and will never return. He's an alcoholic, a hooligan and an infant. I feel sorry for him but he's become a pestilence. He will not pollute this site again.

Fever tweet #1: The gay guy upstairs woke up at 6:45 am this morning and put on Alicia Keys' Empire State of Mind, and loud enough to share it. Not a straight-guy tune. Fever Tweet #2: "Straight guys, in fact, don't play loudish music at 6:45 am period. Something in their genes. Go figure. 'New YAWK...New YAW-HAW-HAWWWK!'" A guy wrote in and said that Empire State of Mind is "not a gay song." Fever tweet #3: "But it's from Sex and the City 2. In any case I choose to regard it as such."

I woke up at 2:30 am with a funny polluted feeling. Then I couldn't get up when the alarm rang at 6:45 am. Then I went out to the living toom and tried to write a couple things, and couln't. I collapsed on the couch around 8 am, and I just woke up from a three-hour nap. It's a real struggle to sit at the glass desk and tap this out, lemme tell ya. Another nap awaits. Liquids, liquids, liquids. Whenever this happens my muscles ache and ache, and then I start sweating it out after 36 hours or so, and then I'm...Read More

The Descendants has won the WGA award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Midnight in Paris has won for Best Original Screenplay. Some are saying this is how it'll go down at the Oscars seven days hence. But The Artist wasn't eligible for a WGA award so, as Sasha Stone forecasts, "if it sweeps major categories, it also wins Best Original Screenplay." Best Original Screenplay for copying and pasting A Star Is Born and Singin' in the Rain? REALLY?

As I've said time and again and again and again, the great thing about the Oscars is not (a) the Oscar award telecast or (b) Oscar nominees or (c) the winners or any other specific aspect, but the overall sweep and impact of awards season itself, and the fact that the Oscars long ago instigated the idea and practice of there being an awards season, and by setting themselves up as the climax of that, by default if not design.

The Oscars are the last big event, but what counts and what matters if that there's a season (September to mid-February) devoted...Read More

I bought a new Mac-friendly Canon scanner last night. I got out some old prints of Italy from 12 years ago, set the dpi resolution as high as it would go and gave them another run-through.

Outside Vatican Musem -- May 2000.

San Donato, south of Firenze, May 2000

Off coast of Elba -- late May 2000.

Sienna -- ditto.

Friend: The WGA Awards are happening now. Maybe we should wait for that to be over before we do the other thing.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Okay whatever...but at this stage of the game with everyone really tired of the award season and The Artist having it all locked anyway, who gives that much of a shit, really?

Friend: Well, The Descendants has been picking up steam, which you should probably write about. It won the Eddie award last night, beating Hugo, and it won the USC Scripter award the other night, beating Moneyball. If it wins the WGA this afternoon that'll be a three-for-three...Read More

"When's the last time you saw a public service announcement by a singer or an actor... to say to the American public, 'You know? You don't want to be like Whitney Houston,'" Bill O'Reilly asked Matt Lauer. "'Don't be like Elvis. Don't be like Janis Joplin.' When's the last time you saw that? [The people who might say this] don't exist. You know what we in the media do, Lauer? We wink-wink it. We Snoop Dog it. We Willie Nelson it.

"Name one commentator besides myself saying, 'Hey, Whitney? If you don't knock it off you're going...Read More

I'm respectfully taking issue with David Carr's new glasses. They don't compete with his features and thereby interfere to some extent with his manner and personality; they almost overwhelm them. Minimal wire frames required.

CNN's embed codes are infuriating. I've re-scaled the dimensions perfectly to fit HE's template (460 pixels wide x 413 pixels high) and still they come out smaller than they should.

Why are the Academy's Oscar nominees and winners criticized so frequently for being traditionally staid and "safe"? Why has the general Academy mentality proven so averse or oblivious to the contours and leanings of the present? We all know the answer. It's because the Academy is made up of mostly older white guys who aren't paying close attention, largely because they don't choose to because they're looking to maintain their relationships with other older white guys, and who are always looking for a job so why shake things up or otherwise rock the boat?

But all along...Read More

You are, at times, an inspired writer and obviously, within the Hollywood internet realm, a famous (or infamous) personality, your fame reaching all the way to London (evidenced by that July 20011 article by the Guardian's Tim Adams). But last night, again, you degraded Hollywood Elsewhere by taking a dump on the carpet with your pathetic, infantile, self-pitying sexual melancholia.

Imagine having a party at your home and an exceptionally bright and interesting guest -- a friend, in fact -- comes over and gets drunk and moons the guests and vomits all over the floor and then leaves. And then you...Read More

It's been nearly thirteen years since the debut of Alexander Payne's Election, and it's doubtful, frankly, that Reese Witherspoon will luck into a role as good as Tracy Flick again. It enabled her to give her very best performance. Certainly her most memorable, in part because she wasn't "acting" -- Tracy Flick is inside Witherspoon as surely as Tom Dunson and Ethan Edwards were inside John Wayne.

Has Witherspoon ever played a Tracy-ish role since? Of course not. Will she ever? Not likely. Will she ever make anything of any value again, ever? What...Read More

Hey, Tom O'Neil, Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Stu Van Airsdale, Scott Feinberg, et. al.! The Oscars are happening only eight days hence. Are there any more articles or polls or predictions or sideline pieces we can run with over the next few days? You know, just to keep the suspense and excitement going?

HitFix/In Contention's Roth Cornet posted one of the finest assessments of Bennett Miller's Moneyball that I've read this year:

"Many traditional sports movies either overtly or inherently deliver the message that our worth can be discovered, confirmed or solidified in one moment of victory and/or within the framework of a shiny, easily identifiable skill -- even if that skill is simply strength of will.

"Moneyball presents an image of the human experience that feels far more reflective of life, one in which we are, as Brad Pitt said in an interview with The Guardian, 'a series of successes and failures,' who...Read More

Ceasar Must Die, a reportedly not-great, less-than-commercial documentary by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the 80-something Italian filmmakers who creatively peaked 35 years ago with Padre Padrone, has won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Indiewire's Peter Kneght reports that "many had pegged Christian Petzold's Barbara or Miguel Gomes' Tabu as the likely winner, as both received considerable critical acclaim."

"Mixed reviews out of Berlin and an experimental production method may hold Caesar back from much of a wide release," Eric Kohn wrote in his Indiewire review, "although it has enough unique appeal to make its way to...Read More

A guy I speak to from time to time went to last night's Sleigh Bells concert at Manhattan's Terminal 5. Which is obviously fine but he also "dropped," if you catch my meaning. Can you imagine being in this kind of sensory-onslaught environment and going "whoo-hoo!" and raising your pointed index finger in tribute while tripping?

I wrote the guy back this morning and asked, "Sorry to sound like I'm sounding but have you ever thought about looking at LSD the old-fashioned way -- as a chemical additive that opens the doors of perception...Read More

Why would I want to buy a Bluray of a 1948 black-and-white film that, according to Bluray.com's Jeffrey Kauffman, (a) "isn't up to the incredible standards of some of the other Warner classics of this era", (b) was "sourced from a print and not a fine grain master positive or original negative," (c) suffers from "minor emulsion issues (the opening few seconds are the worst), [and] occasional white flecks and scratches," (d) could have provided "richer blacks," and (e) includes "a few scenes are noticeably softer than the bulk of the film"?

The only interesting psychological...Read More

About a week ago Bill Murray told his CNBC hosts that personal responsibility is lacking in this country, and that those who can't man up and cut the mustard are going to stay in place or become "compost" -- essentially a conservative sentiment. And on the other hand he says that super-partisans in Congress who are only trying to take the other guy down and make him look bad (obviously a reference to Boehner, Cantor & the wacko right) are destructive forces who are destroying hope.

This is a very inhumane, non-lefty, Big Hollywood thing to say, but Murray's compost remark led...Read More

TheWrap's Tim Kenneally reported a couple of hours ago that Wanderlust star Jennifer Aniston recently persuaded director David Wain and/or producers Judd Apatow, Ken Marino and Paul Rudd to digitally and editorially cover her naked breasts in a comedic topless scene, despite the precise point of the scene being that Aniston's character bares her breasts in front of a local TV news crew.

Notice Theroux's arm across Aniston's shoulder. Implied statement: "I'm not only playing a charismatic Mel Lyman-ish hippie clan leader who seduces Aniston's married character, but I'm also her boyfriend in real life, which means...

I won't be attending today's Bingham Ray memorial gathering (being held from 4:30 to 9:30 pm at Busby's East at 5364 Wilshire, near La Brea) until 6:30 or 7 pm. But I'll be there. What the prolonged Tim Russert memorials were to NBC staffers and reporters, the Ray memorials are to the indie film community.

I don't begrudge The Artist its probable win," says N.Y. Times critc A.O. Scott in a 2.17 chit-chat piece with Manohla Dargis. "It's a charming, likable movie -- a movie in love with movies and its own charm and also full of the genial cosmopolitanism that the Academy tends to like.

"It and The King's Speech, different though they are, may define what an Oscar movie is today: well made, emotionally accessible and distributed, as you note, by the Weinstein Company. People who see them mostly like them. But the movies people love -- both the idiosyncratic, ambitious movies that...Read More

For some reason a 2.17 piece in The Week, the Canadian weekly, has used one of my old "steak-eater" quotes to explain how the Oscar system is afflicted with older-white-guy views and 'tudes.

In a 2.16 Atlantic piece called "The Most Insane, Illogical Award Choices in Oscar History," Jason Bailey does a good job of explaining the Oscar break-up syndrome. It's in a portion of the article that laments the Best Picture crowning of Crash in early 2006. The riff follows, but what Oscar moments persuaded HE readers to emotionally disengage or walk away?

I've gone through countless breakup moments over the last three or four decades. Except I've never signed the divorce papers. Instead I hang around like a pathetic henpecked husband, taking the abuse. Well, not really...Read More

Paramount publicity will screen Titanic 3D for critics, but not until a week or so before the 4.4 opening (i.e., late March). How, then, did Roger Ebert see it three days ago and (surprise!) trashing it in a just-posted review? Titanic fans in major cities were invited via Facebook to attend special showings last Tuesday, 2.14, and Ebert somehow finagled his way into a Chicago showing.

Ebert didn't trash James Cameron's 1997 film, which he's long admired. He's trashed Cameron's 3D conversion process, which he says (a) adds little or nothing to the...Read More

By tweeting "uh-oh, I liked it," Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet is acknowledging that he's committing a form of cultural heresy by writing a half-supportive review of This Means War, which seems to be 2012's most despised film thus far.

Brevet is not alone. Others who haven't slammed and have even winked at McG's action comedy include Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, Hitfix's Drew McWeeny, Detroit News critic Tom Long, Jam! Movies' Liz Braun, Alonso Duralde and MediaMikes' Michael A Smith. Even N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis gave it half a pass, calling it "perfectly acceptable [if] watched on the...Read More

I hate to say this due to my respect and admiration for director Terence Davies, but I have a very serious issue with The Deep Blue Sea (Music Box, 3.23), which Davies directed and adapted from a 1952 play by Terence Rattigan. The issue, I regret to say, is with Florian Hoffmeister's cinematography.

In his 11.26.11 Guardian review, Phillip French says that look of The Deep Blue Sea is coated "with the brown varnish of postwar austerity." But that's under-describing it, really, for The Deep Blue Sea has one of the dispiriting...Read More

This is an allegedly newish (or at least newer than the previous) trailer for Ridley Scott's Prometheus (20th Century Fox, June 8). I've been looking for that dead-giant-elephant-skeleton space jockey to return for a long time now, and he's finally back in a four-second clip.

"The best sequence in Marley, Kevin Macdonald's sprawling, 2 1/2 hour chronicle of Bob Marley's legacy, arrives at the very end," says Indiewire's Eric Kohn. "While the credits roll, Macdonald shows Marley fans around the world singing his greatest hits. The diverse cultures and appearances, united by Marley's lyrics and good vibes, speak to the singer's global effect -- as well as its lasting appeal today.

"It's enough to make the fairly conventional overview of his career preceding the finale look comparatively tame. Despite its breadth, Marley delivers little more than a well-crafted overview sure to...Read More

I have a 2 pm screening of Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea, a film about an illicit affair and not about a killer shark, and then there's this evening's Westwood premiere of Wanderlust followed by an after-party. I'm not drinking or eating much these days so I'm not sure how I feel about socializing.

Filing from Berlin, Cineuropa.org's Fabien Lemercier has posted a speculation piece about Cannes 2012. Possible American entries, he says, include Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, Andrew Dominik's Cogan's Trade with Brad Pitt, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, Woody Allen's Nero Fiddled, Terrence Malick's Voyage of Time (the IMAX-y flow-of-time documentary component to Tree of Life) and possibly James Gray's Low Life.

Other likely-maybe's include Michael Haneke's Love, Ken Loach's Angels Shares, Walter Salles' On the Road, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, Carlos Reygadas's Post Tenebras Lux, Abbas Kiarostami's The End, Pablo Trapero's Elefante blanco, Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster, Matteo Garrone's Big House...Read More

It's no secret that millions of Americans care a lot more about their relationships with pets than with other humans, and that any public person known to have been heartless with a pet is going to incur their disdain. Mitt Romney's Seamus-on-the-roof story is really going to hurt him in the general election -- seriously. Dog cruelty is only slightly less deplorable than child abuse in the eyes of tens of millions. Here's the Dogs Against Romney site and its corresponding Facebook page.

From my 1.4.12 piece about the Seamus incident: "Anyone who...Read More

Captain! Captain! German U-boat sighting off the port bow! Torpedos heading this way! Hard left rudder, man! Harder! Do you want this ship to sink?

Disney's $250 million John Carter, a sci-fi fanboy adventure pic that opens in three weeks (Friday, 3.9), is in some kind of trouble, and maybe worse than that. A couple of hours ago Deadline's Nikki Finke reported that it's all but dead due to soft tracking. ("Dead" in relation to the huge cost and prospective return, I mean.) There's even concern, voiced by a rival studio exec, that "this could...Read More

Eighteen months ago Deadline reported that Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts would team on a Weinstein Co. film adaptation of August: Osage County under director John Wells, with expectations of filming in the summer of 2011. But a long delay ensued (largely due to playwright Tracy Letts taking forever to adapt his play into screenplay form) and Streep and Roberts were thought by some to have flown the coop.

But a month ago Deadline's Pete Hammond reported the actreses were definitely back on the project and that filming would begin in September for a late 2013 release. Today Streep...Read More

A hippy-dippy woman open to making love as a spiritual gesture or exercise can quickly lose interest when the recipient of her largesse starts talking crudely about slamming ham, etc. Watching this kind of prolonged miscommunication isn't the least bit funny. There's never been a 30something married guy (which Paul Rudd is playing) who's ever been this clueless. Not on this planet. Which is why the scene just lies there.

Because the idea isn't to be "funny" but to make a point that stodgy married guys are too thick or slow-witted to betray their wives even when...Read More

I should have posted this yesterday but all I had was the cat, and I was too lazy to find my own b & w Marty mugshot to complement it. The trick now is to find animals (wild or domestic) that other major nominees resemble. Seriously -- I'll post the best of them.

4:40 pm Update: HE reader Zach has visualized his Gary Oldman/swamp turtle from Neverending Story suggestion:

This from HE reader Martin Blank:

This from TimDG:

The only thing that can lift my Oscar spirits is something that can't possibly happen -- a suprise Demian Bichir win for Best Actor. That is the only thing that could possibly turn me on (other that Billy Crystal's patter) during the 2.26 telecast. This is going to be one of the dullest and least surprising Oscar shows in history.

It seem as if the Viola Davis-and-Octavia Spencer coronation has already happened, for the most part. I'd feel differently if Brad Pitt or George Clooney had a real shot at Best Actor, or if Moneyball's Bennett...Read More

Somebody sent this along yesterday without including the link. I didn't give that much of a shit about 22 Bonds so I didn't pursue...eff it. But the sound of 22 MGM lions roaring at the same instant is one of the coolest things I've ever heard. Especially with earphones. For that alone this is worth a post. The best opening credits to a Bond film? A tie between Dr. No and The Spy Who Loved Me.

Lowen Liu of Slate's "The Hive" has suggested that each year the Academy should have a chance to re-vote the Oscar nominees from ten years back. Which is a really good idea because then the membership would be making calls based entirely on distance and hindsight (which tend to clarify things) and without the fog of politicking and emotional mood swings.

So let's drop back a decade and hold a re-vote of the 2001 contenders:

Best Picture: In The Bedroom. Runners-up: A Beautiful Mind (actual winner, partly because of Russell Crowe' sperformabnce but mainly,...Read More

I'll give you a true-life "bullshit night in Boston" story. I was driving cab for Checker, which had a big garage next to Fenway Park. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had because I learned something new every day. In any event my driver's side window was stuck in the open position one night but it was warm out and not raining so I didn't mind.

So I was making my way south from Tremont in heavy traffic when two stone psychopaths -- guys with ugly complexions and madness in their eyes who looked...Read More

It's been decided that a father-son relationship drama starring Paul Dano and Robert De Niro will sell more tickets if it's called Being Flynn rather than Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the title of the 2004 memoir that the film is based on. Nick Flynn's book is about a reunion with his egoistic alcoholic dad in Boston in the late '80s. The title refers to his father's description of homeless living in Beantown.

Being Flynn (Focus, 3.2) was directed, written and co-produced by Paul Weitz (About A Boy). It costars Olivia Thirlby, Lili...

Steve Jaymes' The Interrupters, which aired on Frontline last night, is currently streaming for free. It's also on DVD/Bluray. It's about violence prevention under the aegis of CeaseFire, a Chicago organization, and a portrait of three "violence interrupters" -- Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, Eddie Bocanegra -- trying to protect their Chicago neighborhoods from gunfire, beatdowns, chain-whippings and other bad stuff.

Imagine what this movie would be if Jerry Bruckheimer got hold of the material and turned it into a narrative.

I did a little hanging and chatting with Jerry Bruckheimer in the mid to late '90s, once on the set of Crimson Tide ('95) but mostly in the wake of his partner Don Simpson's death (which happened in January '96) when "produced by Jerry Bruckheimer" meant elite, sirloin-steak guy movies like The Rock, Con Air, Enemy of the State, Armageddon, Remember the Titans, Gone in Sixty Seconds and Black Hawk Down.

Bruckheimer has been on an extremely lucrative but creatively downhill path ever since Pearl Harbor and particularly since the Pirates...Read More

Ten or twelve years ago a guy told me about an autobiography that his colorful, hard-living father had written, and the first sentence, he said, went something like this: "I've been used, sued, screwed, subdued, refused, abused, led astray, turned around, flim-flammed, betrayed, deluded, polluted, disrespected, bamboozled and tattoo'ed." I've actually made it into a longer sentence than it was originally.

Something historically significant has just happened in the mind of L.A. Times Hollywood reporter Steven Zeitchik, and I think it's worth exploring. At 5:44 am this morning he tweeted that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has "done middlingly in the US." Except David Fincher's noir-thriller, released by Sony, has recently topped $100 million so what does he mean? Is Zeitchik saying that $100 million domestic is a bit tepid for a film that cost $90 million to make? Or that $100 mill domestic is generally a meh-level thing?

Back in the '90s a film earning...Read More

If I knew that allegedly exciting and provocative films like Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky's Francine and Billy Bob Thornton's Jayne Mansfield's Car were playing at 2012 South by Southwest, I would have applied for press credentials and snagged plane tix and arranged for lodging and all the rest of it. But as I said two weeks ago, Austin just doesn't seem worth it.

21 Jump Street...possibly decent but clearly studio product, not enough throttle. Joss Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods...repelled. I saw about 60% of William Friedkin's Killer Joe at Toronto last September...meh. I caught Richard Linklater's...Read More

This was taken in the fall of '99, a couple of months into my deal with Reel.com and about 14 months after I'd first begun writing the Mr. Showbiz column in August 1998. Every now and then you'll find a photo or a memento lying around and you'll say, "Wow, that was eight or ten years ago." But October 1999 does not seem like 12 and 1/3 years ago. At all. The next time I turn around it'll be 15 years behind me, and then 20. It just gets away from you.

Yesterday Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney, filing from the Berlin Film Festival, posted an eloquent review of Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky's Francine, a.k.a., the Melissa Leo "cat movie" that I mentioned three or four days ago.

Melissa Leo, Keith Leonard in Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky's Francine.

"A minimalist, image-based character study that is almost impossibly fragile and yet emotionally robust, Francine is a legitimate discovery. It's propelled by Melissa Leo's remarkable title-role performance, rigorous in its honesty and unimpeded by even a scrap of vanity. Made on a shoestring, this first narrative feature...Read More

Last weekend 20th Century Fox flew several junket-whore types to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois to promote Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov's Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (opening 6.22). If you've seen the trailer (domestic or international) you know this film has as much reverence for Lincoln's history as my two cats. For what it's worth Burton's black-and-white introduction, filmed in London, plays well.

N.Y. Times music critic Jon Pareles and Billboard's Danyel Smith spoke about Whitney Houston on Charlie Rose last night. The only stab at explaining what caused Houston's tragic drug habit and death came at the 11-minute mark, when Smith said that Houston had all this responsibility to be great and maybe in the midst of this "she just wanted a cigarette, and maybe something else." Okay, but what about other superstar entertainers who've dealt with this kind of pressure and who haven't become cokeheads or died?

Smith also vaguely attributed some of Houston's difficulties to her having grown up in...Read More

The only positive response I've ever had to the word "valentine" was when I saw Sydney Lumet's The Fugitive Kind and Marlon Brando's Valentine Xavier appeared in a snakeskin jacket. I feel zilch about this Hollywood montage making the rounds today. The finale of The Apartment is the only proclamation scene that has ever touched me because (a) it comes at the very end and (b) the object of Jack Lemmon's affection shrugs and says "fine, whatever...let's get down to it." Exactly.

I also love the champagne-cork gag. Perfect timing, perfect delivery. I laugh every...

Deadline is reporting that Chris Pine's former agency, SDB Partners, has filed a lawsuit against the actor after he dumped them by email. SDB wants commissions on This Means War as well as Pine's forthcoming work as Captain Kirk in Paramount's Star Trek franchise.

It appears (emphasis on the "a" word) that Pine is dumping these guys because he's panicking about the reception to War, the all-but-universally reviled McG action-romcom that sneaks tonight and opens on Friday. He reportedly canned them last November, at which point he'd surely realized what a piece of shite the McG was....Read More

Your typical American yahoo believes that under the skin many if not most Islamics are radical anti-Americans who have to be guarded against and certainly can't be trusted. A more benevolent, open-hearted view is that we're all God's children and we have to accept our differences. Sean Stone, 27 year-old son of director Oliver Stone, belongs to the latter camp. He announced today from Iran, where he's shooting a documentary, that he's converted to Islam.

This is the kind of thing that bright willful types sometimes do in their 20s. Stone is trying to define himself. What matters in the end...Read More

I once made the mistake of leaning down and hugging a red Doberman Pinscher -- a dog I knew really well and had played around with several times. The fucker bit me on the right cheek and ear. That never would have happened with a Golden Retriever. You can't really trust Dobermans, Pit Bills or Mastiffs, certainly not when it comes to kissing or hugging.

Look at those cops after the Denver newswoman, KUSA's Kyle Dyer, is bitten by Max the mastiff. They be cool, chillin'...no worries. And look at that weather guy...

Rick Santorum, who would probably get slaughtered in a race against President Obama, has essentially tied Mittens Romney in three nationwide polls among Republicans. Santorum has 30% to Romney's 27% in a N.Y. Times/CBS News poll released today. A Pew Research poll has Santorum over Romney, 30% to 28%, and a Gallup poll has Romney at 32% vs. Santorum's 30%.

Is there a scenario in which Santorum could realistically override Romney and wrestle away the Republican nomination? Highly doubtful. If anything Santorum, who knows the taste of butter on bread, will probably go the opportunistic-waffle route and become...Read More

As you might expect, Dave Izkoff's 2.12 N.Y. Times story about Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Lovelace, the currently rolling biopic about exploited '70s porn star Linda Lovelace, was a marvel of artful dodging. Suffice that Itzkoff avoided mentioning that Lovelace's fame wasn't so much from starring in the famous 1972 porn film Deep Throat ('72) as playing a woman who swallows male appendages whole. Sorry.

All Itzkoff manages to say is that Lovelace "played a woman who learns that her clitoris is in her throat."

He also says "there is comedy...in the film's fastidious...Read More

Andrew Sullivan's 2.11 riff about how Ja Rule goes well with slow-mo Wes Anderson shots reminds how much I love Anderson's original scoring of this scene with Nico's "These Days". I'll always adore how she couldn't sing but sang with such honesty, and could hit every note. Perfect.

Daniel Nettheim's The Hunter (Magnolia, 4.6) opened in Australia last October to a mostly positive critical response. The ads indicate that Willem Dafoe's character is out to shoot a Tasmanian tiger (thought to be extinct when the last of the species died in 1936) but that's not the deal. This is tonight's diversion pour moi. Written by Julia Leigh, Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri.

My idea of a cool Abraham Lincoln vampire movie would be one that resembles Phillip Borsos' The Grey Fox -- a movie that looks, feels and behaves like it's actually happening in the 19th Century -- but with 19th Century vampires (i.e., ones that are trying to blend into society by concealing their nature whenever possible) running around. You need to respect the milieu and time period, and then weave in your bullshit. You're a filmmaker with a time machine, and you've just landed in 1864 Washington...got it?

This trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter...Read More

I have this sense of having seen too many romcoms about under-40 couples (partly GenX but most GenY) taking the longest time to either find their ideal romantic partner or, having found him/her, taking eons to pull the trigger about moving in together or getting married or having kids.

I'm telling myself that these films -- the latest being The Five Year Engagement (Universal, 4.27) -- are metaphors for a general sense of under-40 futility out there -- cynical attitudes and expectations, shitty jobs, crappy paychecks and "the Boomers have screwed us so what's the...Read More

I first saw Barry Levinson's Diner 30 fucking years ago at the Magno (now Dolby) Screening Room at Sixth Ave. and 55th Street. It might've been late January rather than early February 1982...I forget. But I remember going "wow! this is definitely the shit!" in my review, and then interviewing Levinson at the Sherry Netherland and then Kevin Bacon for an Us magazine piece.

I wish now that I'd landed a Mickey Rourke interview because I could now say I talked to the guy during his magic-ascendancy period (Body Heat to Angel Heart) before the...Read More

We all understand that Viola Davis is an extremely articulate and highly communicative woman. This interview underlines that. Worth a viewing.

Not bad. The Help could be a musical...easily. Music, lyrics and video editing by Jon Kaplan and Al Kaplan (Conan the Barbarian: The Musical, Off-Broadway's Silence! The Musical)

Rebecca Cammisa and Julie Anderson's God Is The Bigger Elvis, one of the nominees for Best Documentary Short Subject, is a congenial, fair-minded portrait of the actress once known as Dolores Hart, who had a pretty good career for a while (costarring in Loving You, Miss Lonelyhearts, King Creole, etc.) until she decided to hang it up and become a nun in 1963. Now 73, she lives in a Benedictine retreat in Connecticut and is called Mother Prioress.

Hart was invited to pursue a higher calling, and I think it's nice that she chose a...Read More

Updated: I've been given a more accurate capturing of yesterday's volatile Twitter volley between Awards Daily's Sasha Stone and Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg that occured in the wake of the BAFTA Awards.

Boiled down, Feinberg is an advocate of journalistic impartiality, and Stone, to her credit, is an advocate of the Oscar nominees she believes in. And never the twain shall meet. Here's how it went down (with edits):

AwardsDaily: The Artist [wins at] BAFTA. What a shocker! The most painful BAFTAs I have ever endured, honest to God.

ScottFeinberg: People dumping on The Artist: have a little...Read More

The Artist dominated the BAFTA awards this evening -- Best Picture, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Original Screenplay (Hazanavicius), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Music. With each successive award I felt number and number. I am berefet of all feeling...nothing. I'm a cypher sitting in a leather chair.

Previous Update (1:32 pm Pacific): Nobody with their mind and feet half-planted in the real, non-movie-blogging world (like me) gives a damn about the BAFTA awards. The BBC America broadcast is delayed until this evening, and you can't even watch a live feed online. There's...Read More

This is footage of an East of Eden screen test or reharsal of some kind between James Dean and Richard Davalos, who played Aaron, the older brother of Dean's character, Cal. Impressions?

It's very difficult to summon the energy to do this as it's very hard to care, but here are my picks for likely Oscar winners in the major categories:

BEST PICTURE: The Artist (p: Thomas Langmann). SHOULD WIN: Moneyball (p: Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz, Brad Pitt) or The Descendants (p: Jim Burke, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor). SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED: Drive.

BEST DIRECTOR: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist. SHOULD WIN: Alexander Payne, The Descendants. SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED: Bennett MIller, Moneyball.

BEST ACTOR: Jean Dujardin, The Artist. SHOULD WIN: Brad Pitt, Moneyball or Demian Bichir, A Better Life or...Read More

It took her many years to get there, but Whitney Houston, 48, has finally bought it.

Five or ten minutes ago Associated Press music industry reporter Nekesa Mumbi Moody reported Houston's death, stating that publicist Kristen Foster has confirmed. Deadline's Nikki Finke is reporting that Houston died at the Beverly Hilton hotel. The 911 call came in around 3:25 pm this afternoon.

The specific cause of the pop singer's death is unclear, but c'mon...this has been in the cards for ages. Houston's rep as a poster girl for drug abuse long ago eclipsed...Read More

In response to Thursday's post about What's Up Tiger Lily?, HE reader John Muller posted this clip yesterday.

I love the visual panache in today's front page so I figured I'd capture it as everything will shift over in a few days. Dylan's Damien Demian Bichir ads went up this morning, and I'm really delighted with the red-orange Extremely Loud skin -- one of the best-looking ads we've ever run.

Either a lady likes me and gives me the green light, or she doesn't. Either way is cool. Every time I've connected with someone I've known within minutes if I'm "in" or not. It's in her eyes or it isn't. That doesn't mean we're instantly whoopsy-doopsy. There are many, many ways you can persuade someone who's initially attracted to back up or do a 180. But a green light at the outset is never earned. It is either given or not given free of charge. I don't believe in jumping through hoops and balancing beach balls on my nose in order to charm...Read More

The Boomers popped out from '46 to the early '60s. GenX started to be born in either '62 or '64 (although there's a question if Barack Obama and David Poland are old GenX or young Boomer). GenX ended roughly 20 years later, and then along came GenY in the early to mid '80s. Except the highly perceptive and literal-minded Bill Moyers doesn't call them GenY but Millennials, and he says they began to be born in '78. Who decided that? A generation that began to be born the year that Some Girls was released...odd.

I'm not convinced that an upcoming BFI Region 2 DVD release of Ken Russell's The Devils (due on 3.19.12) is the original, super-notorious, naked nun, "rape of Christ" version. A 2.10 Home Cinema posting says that the DVD is "the original UK X certificate version," but I smell vagueness. Yes, despite Devils restoration champion Mark Kermode delivering a two-minute introduction plus supplying audio commentary with Russell, editor Michael Bradsell and Paul Joyce.

I'm concerned about an oft-repeated qualification found on more than one film website as well as The Devils' Wiki page that...Read More

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has noted that Safe House cinematographer Oliver Wood "also shot all three Bourne movies. The world, the filmmakers say again and again, is a terrible place, and yet, as you look at this film, with its beautifully bleached-out palette and somewhat coarse visual texture -- the images look as if they had been lightly sandpapered -- it's hard not to be struck by its loveliness."

And then waaaay over in Bhavani Junction, Movieline's Stephanie Zacharek writes that Safe House is "so visually ugly that, to borrow a line from Moms Mabley, it hurt my feelings. The...Read More

12 and 3/4 years ago I emerged from an all-media screening of The Phantom Menace at the now-vanished National in Westwood. I looked up at the night sky and vowed to expel Jake Lloyd from my movie-watching realm for the rest of my days. The film industry came to the same conclusion so keeping the pledge wasn't difficult, but re-experiencing The Phantom Menace in 3D is still forbidden. Even if the 3D is relatively decent, as I've read.

For me it was always Lloyd, Lloyd, wretched Lloyd when it came to summoning the fury. Jar-Jar...Read More

I woke up, had coffee, read a bit and watched this. Sorry if others have seen it but it was the first time for me. I laughed out loud, and I'm more of a heh-heh type.

I can't explain this in a way that makes precise sense, but somehow this video of This Is War director McG and star Tom Hardy is a suitable followup to last night's post about Drew McWeeny vs. "The Other," which happened during a screening of This Is War. Or...whatever, it partially explains Todd McCarthy's reaction to the film.

Last night, or roughy 29 hours ago, Hitfix's Drew McWeeny had a gloriously passionate encounter with, to go with the flow of his descriptions, a gauche, insensitive, moronic and deeply offensive woman during a press screening of This Is War. This is the essence of what he said to her in his mind:

"When you go to a movie theater and you treat it like it's your living room, sharing every horrifying spasm of that flaccid muscle occupying space between your eyes, you have to understand that it is intolerable. I suspect you made a choice tonight that your enjoyment was more...Read More

I was wandering around Hollywood Ameoba last night when I was slightly jolted by the sight of a $35 price tag on the Criterion Godzilla Bluray. I always buy Amazon these days, but I go to Ameoba to wander and dream and meditate. How good could Godzilla, a 1954 black-and-white film, look and sound to be worth $35? Even by Criterion standards it should retail for $20, tops. The Amazon price is too much also -- $27 and change. The superfluous Raymond Burr version is included, but still.

Why didn't the friends of the late Bingham Ray arrange for a simultaneous New York and LA double-header memorial -- one at Manhattan's Paris theatre (which happened today) and the L.A. version happening at Busby's (5364 Wilshire Blvd, between Cloverdale and Detroit), which is set for next Friday, 2.17? Probably due to an audio-visual presentation that can only play one place at a time. Indiewire's David D'Arcy has written a nice story about the New York event.

It's funny, but during all the years I knew Ray we never compared notes about working for Sid Geffen...Read More

Nominees for the Best Animated Feature Oscar are almost always the same hip family ghoulash. Mostly Pixar or DreamWorks-produced, big distributor, voiced by big-name actors, big budget, aimed at kids and adults. Even when they're from outside the U.S., like A Cat in Paris, they still feel like typical family-friendly fare. Which is why it's pleasing that at least one of this year's nominees -- Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal's Chico and Rita -- doesn't do the usual usual.

It's an adult Cuban jazz romance that spans decades and involves a love affair between...Read More

In the view of Film Business Asia's Derek Elley, Jiang Wen's Let the Bullets Fly (Variance, 3.2) is "a richly entertaining Oriental Western anchored by a well-honed, ironic script and terrific performances." The trailer tells me otherwise. It tells me it'll be agony, and that the only way I'll stay to the closing credits is if I'm strapped to a theatre seat with Clockwork Orange eyelid-clamps, etc.

Who would've suspected that a single shot from a rifle could not only derail a large train car being pulled by a team of horses along a...Read More

"Some films have certain scenes that need to be redone, but on This Means War the whole picture should have been sent back for a reshoot. This perfectly dreadful romantic action comedy manages to embarrass its three eminently attractive leading players in every scene, making this an automatic candidate for whatever raspberries or golden turkeys or other dubious awards may be given in future for the films of 2012. It's an eye-roller from start to finish." -- from Todd McCarthy's 2.9 Hollywood Reporter review, posted at 7:09 pm.

Why would I want to see a Deep Impact relationship comedy? What's funny about cops who still give tickets and particularly people who give a damn about cops giving tickets with a meteor about to smash into earth in three weeks' time? What's funny about a maid who gets offended when told she doesn't have to return to clean? How can anyone be expected to invest anything whatsover in a relationship happening under the cloud of certain doom?

Focus Features is opening Seeking A Friend for the End of the World, which costars Steve Carell...Read More

Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky's Francine, a drama starring Melissa Leo as an ex-con sturggling to find fulfillment, will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday, 2.13. An Indiewire synopsis says that Leo's character's "failure with human connection leads her to seek support from animals, with tragic consequences."

As a writing class experiment, HE readers are requested to take five minutes and explain how a middle-aged woman seeking support from "animals" -- obviously a reference to a Calico cat -- could lead to "tragic consequences." Let's see...the cat is a stray who comes by for food...Read More

Every couple of years I post a short clip from What's Up Tiger Lily?. It's a longstanding Hollywood Elsewhere tradition. There's no clip of my favorite scene (the royal bearded guy pulls out a small map and says, "This is Shepherd Wong's home," and Phil Moskowitz asks, "He lives in that piece of paper?") so I had to go with this.

Variety's Jeff Sneider is reporting that DreamWorks and Working Title Films have agreed to pool forces on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca. The script will be written by Eastern Promises scribe Steven Knight, who "will go back to the original book" by Daphne DuMaurier. Has there ever been a trade story about a remake of a well-known Hollywood classic in which the principals didn't say they'd base their script on the original book?

I'll tell you what it'll mean to "go back" to the DuMaurier book. Maxim De Winter (played by Laurence Olivier in the...Read More

There's nothing in Daniel Espinosa's Safe House (Universal, 2.10) that you haven't seen many times before. Set in South Africa, it's a cookie-cutter Bournedoggle about a CIA rogue-on-the-run (Denzel Washington) and a safe-house operative (Ryan Reynolds) who's trying to keep him in cuffs. It's shot like the Bourne series (hand-held, grainy photography, jazzy cutting), and Washington-Reynolds do a decent job with all the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay and car madness.

But...BUT!...I never felt bored or burned because the Swedish-born Espinosa, 34, really knows how to shoot and stage action like Tony Scott or Paul Greengrass. Or at...Read More

Due respect for the ad-poster guys but out of politeness one should never run a photo of an older man in profile as this always accentuates the neck waddle and the paunch.

No comment implied about Von Sydow's performance in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, of course, which is fine for what it is. He's been working like a champ since the mid '50s, and is obviously one of our greatest older actors. My favorite MVS perfs are contained in The Virgin Spring, Shame, Three Days of the Condor and Hannah and Her Sisters,

I'll bet all the ad money I've earned during Phase One and Phase Two that 95% of the Academy members who love The Artist (or at least are giving it their Best Picture vote) have never heard of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies ('06) or OSS 117: Lost in Rio ('09), much less seen them.

They should at least be aware of them and what they are. Because these two clever comedies -- 007 spoofs released in '06 and '09, directed by Michael Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin and costarring (in...Read More

On 1.29 a National Public Ratio "Weekend Edition" interview between Rachel Martin and Awards Daily Sasha Stone aired. (And was posted.) It's a short piece about the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and about as simple-minded as an interview of this sort could possibly be without attempting to satirize.

We all think of NPR as a haven for bright and informed conversation, but this piece was assembled for the slowest ADD person in the room. I guess the NPR motto has always been "keep it simple and peppy and above all not too long." (Kim Masters'...Read More

"Brad Pitt's performance [in Moneyball] is an almost old-fashioned, movie-star one," the narrator says in this 2.9 Press Play "Should Win" essay. Nope, not "almost" -- it is a movie-star performance, and an intimate and revealing one at that. On the level of George Clooney's vulnerable anguish in The Descendants, and way, way beyond what Jean Dujardin delivers in The Artist.

"In another universe, one could imagine Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant taking the part," the narrator continues.

Yeah, Stewart of the early '50s could have strode around in Billy Beane's shoes....Read More

"The contemporary Oscar economy runs entirely on charm," Movieline's Stu Van Airsdale wrote late today. "Your movie can make $1 million or $1 billion, be a polarizing scourge or smothered in plaudits and acclaim. You can place ads everywhere, send thousands of DVD screeners and engineer a fortune's worth of publicity. But by the time nomination ballots are mailed in late December, if you haven't found a way to charm a vote out of an Academy member, then you and your film are about as long for the awards race as Angelina Jolie is for a burger-eating contest."

...

I'm sorry but I'm not getting the same sense of ironic hooligan satire from Goon (2.24) that I did from the Hanson Brothers drawing blood in George Roy Hill's Slap Shot. But I'll bet that the Goon guys (director Michael Dowse, screenwriters Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg) took their inspiration from the Hanson Brothers.

Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin's Undefeated (Weinstein Co., 2.17) is a deeply touching 90-minute doc about Memphis's Manassas Tigers, an African-American high-school football team trying to up their wins. But it's mainly about various team members toughing it out with personal struggles. And it really sinks in.

The first half is somewhere between good enough and not bad -- very nicely shot and smoothly cut but still a familiar portrait of a rural underdog football team. Kinda seen it before. But the second half...whoa. That's when all the threads pay off and the seeds sprout,...Read More

The L.A. all-media screening for Daniel Espinosa's Safe House happens tonight at 7 pm. Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds bagging a paycheck for a standard action thriller -- i.e, a variation of the Training Day formula set in South Africa, CIA operatives instead of L.A. cops, same old same old, blah, blah explosions, etc.

Many critics have already seen Safe House and reviewed it and, according to Rotten Tomatoes summary, given it a failing grade. Universal's request that reviews be held until Friday seems....well, odd in light of this.

Is Reynolds ever going...Read More

Here's a reminder that Robert Weide's Woody Allen: A Documentary will begin streaming gratis starting tomorrow (i.e., Thursday, 2.9) "for a limited time," whatever that means. There will also be an encore broadcast on PBS CoCal on Saturday, 2.18 at 9 p.m. Here's my review from mid November 2011.

Tony Gilroy's The Bourne Legacy (8.3.12) got a boost from Jeremy Renner's standout performance in Mission Impossible 4. That movie explained to the primitives (i.e., those who couldn't be bothered to see The Hurt Locker) that Renner is solid and cool. The second best thing is this trailer, which makes it clear that Legacy is a Renner-for-Matt Damon substitution thriller with many of the same players (Joan Allen, Albert Finney, Scott Glenn ) as before.

The only thing that gives me a moment of pause, frankly, is the August 3rd release date -- obviously...Read More

A Better Life's Demian Bichir was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar due to quality of performance, word-of-mouth and pressing the flesh at industry events. When I returned from Santa Barbara last weekend I asked about running some FYC ads to help things along, but was told it was too late in the Phase Two cycle to construct ads because it would take too long. This didn't seem to make sense as a full two weeks remain before the balloting dealdine.

So yesterday afternoon I turned to freelance art director Dylan Wells and asked if he could...Read More

"The title role in Albert Nobbs goes to Glenn Close, who played it Off Broadway thirty years ago and has striven ever since to bring it to the screen. She co-wrote and co-produced the film, and is seldom out of our sight. But what do we see? Albert is a woman dressed as a man, in the Ireland of the late eighteen-hundreds, yet what Close serves up is neither man nor woman, flesh nor fowl, but a strange hieratic hybrid of no discernible identity.

"She walks as though freshly risen from the dead, patrolling the streets and corridors in a stiffened glide,...Read More

Grantland's Mark Harris admires Meryl Streep's "old Maggie" acting in The Iron Lady, but he has difficulty with the other two-thirds of the film because it "lets its subject down by insisting that the most -- no, the only -- interesting thing about Prime Minister Thatcher is that she was a woman in a world of male power.

"There's a campy scene in Mommie Dearest when the widowed Joan Crawford tells off an all-male Mad Men-era boardroom by bellowing, 'Don't fuck with me, fellas! This ain't my first time at the rodeo!'...Read More

Last night I didn't attend Film Independent at LACMA's screening of Moneyball at the Bing Theatre at LACMA. (I've seen Bennett Miller's film five or six times.) But I did attend a pre-screening q & a with star-producer Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane. Thanks to FIND's Elise Freimuth and LACMA host, curator and gadfly Elvis Mitchell, I mean. Without their help I would have been out on the pavement.

Moneyball's Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill during last night's q & a at LACMA's Bing Theatre.

It must be said that Freimuth's assistance aside, LACMA/FIND...Read More

The first in a series of This Is War billboard capturings in West Hollywood. The images are artful, I feel, when you consider the elements (billboard + neighborhood + natural light + cars) as a single integrated statement. Something very subtle but in some way measurable has happened due to the presence of these posters over the last few days. I can say no more.

Last weekend I finally bought Lorber Films' Bluray of Bertrand Blier's Going Places. What a pleasure in every department. This is one of the great anarchic comedies of any culture or era, and the film-like Bluray made me feel like I was watching it fresh and new. With the exception of a 40-second passage of dupey, sepia-colored footage, the transfer is clean and robust from top to bottom.

From my September 2011 riff called "Going Places Forever":

"Going Places ('74) is one of the most curiously seductive films...Read More

In posting this new English-subtitled trailer for The Kid With The Bike (IFC Films, now available), it's only fair that I include an excerpt from my 5.14.11 Cannes Film Festival review.

"Directors Jean Pierre and Luc Dardennes are first-rate scenarists and straight shooters. Their work is assured -- they know exactly what they're doing every time. And their film ends well. But Cannes critics are, I feel, kneeling forward and kissing the proverbial ring. There's nothing wrong with that in a general sense as long as there's perspective.

"Yes, I took an instant dislike to...Read More

"Let's have a moment of silence for the suffering Oscar bloggers as they enter the most trying and mortifying weeks of their labors," Glenn Kenny tweeted a little while ago. "Pray for @DavidPoland @kristapley @GuyLodge and @AwardsDaily, that they may not be crushed by the inevitable world-weariness. God grant them the serenity to accept the awards results they cannot change, and the temerity to tell the rest of us to shut up about it. And a special prayer for @wellshwood, that he may not be afflicted by spontaneous combustion."

Deadline's Nikki Finke has reported that poor tracking (i.e., ticket-buyer interest and awareness) has prompted 20th Century Fox to jettison the Tuesday, 2.14 opening of McG's This Means War. The studio will now sneak This Means War on Valentine's Day and open it on Friday, 2.17, hoping that the sneak will boost interest.

"I don't get what the moviegoing public's problem with this pic is," she wrote. "Chris Pine, Tom Hardy and Reese Witherspoon are cool casting. And the film doesn't look dumb, which is half the battle with this genre." It may not look "dumb" but the trailer...Read More

I'm still wrapping my head around the idea of a brand-friggin'-new Spider-Man origin story coming out only ten years after Sam Raimi's 2002 original, also an origin story. Boil them down and they're more or less the same movie.

This is the second opener in a major franchise to be re-made and released within the same decade, the first being David Fincher's 2011 Dragon Tattoo reboot on the heels of the Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 original. And both from Sony Pictures, of course.

You don't want to hear about the lethargy and gloom affecting Sasha Stone and myself during today's Oscar Poker recording. Here's a stand-alone mp3 link.

Deadline's Pete Hammond attended Monday's Oscar Nominee luncheon, and noted in his report that Max Von Sydow, Best Supporting Actor nominee for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, got the biggest applause of all when he walked to the podium for his certificate of nomination. An indication of a possible upset victory over the favored Christopher Plummer, or a gesture of respect for a 50-year veteran?

The next two biggest-applause winners, says Hammond, were The Help's Best Actress nominee Viola Davis and A Better Life's Best Actor nominee Demian Bichir. I'm 94% convinced that Davis has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag,...Read More

Viola Davis is always playing characters defined by their work -- social worker, CIA agent, bad mom, domestic maid, space engineer, nurse, cop, policewoman. Her next two roles will be (a) a librarian helping a couple of kids deal with hauntings in Beautiful Creatures and (b) a genius recruited by the government to help defeat an alien insect race in Ender's Game. In short, she's in a rut.

The solution is that she needs to play a woman defined by emotion, preferably by sex and passion. Davis is 46 and if she's going to play a role of this type, she...Read More

From the director whose name is synonymous with soulless flashbang filmmaking of the lowest order, a romantic action-comedy in which Reese Witherspoon has to choose between two hot-shot suitors who happen to be spies. On the left is good-looking smoothie Chris Pine (i.e., Captain Kirk) and and on the right is Tom Hardy, a subtle and intelligent actor who's nonetheless played three famous animals so far -- Bane, Bronson and a hulking MMA fighter in Warrior.

Who is cuter? Who will be the better provider? The better dad?

Does Reese test-drive them both, so to speak,...Read More

One of the most historic red-carpet interviews of all time happened when Bert Parks, a glad-handing showbiz whore, interviewed director Joseph L. Mankiewicz before the June 12, 1963 premiere of Cleopatra, and got these three quotes: (a) "You must know something I don't" (in response to Parks calling the film "a wonderful, wonderful achievement"), (b) "Everything connected with Cleopatra is beyond my control at the moment" and (c) "I feel like the guillotine [is] about to drop."

The music used for this Act of Valor trailer is a problem. It tells you that the movie is some kind of amplified power-pop thing aimed at the multiplex Guidos. It suggests insubstantial realism. The film opens on 2.24.

Somebody tell me what Clint Eastwood is actually saying here. Let's stand up and pull together? Not with the Tea Party nutters coloring the conversation. Clint has been an Eisenhower conservative almost all of his life and I respect that, but there can be no coming together with the wacko Cantor right -- they're demonizers and toxic liars and shills for the corporate malignants who have all but crippled this country.

I've written plenty about the problems afflicting Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Cleopatra. But the multi-region British Bluray is visually beautiful, and if you can somehow make yourself ignore the film's elephantine, glacially-paced, dialogue-driven nature and just focus on the lavishly expensive Todd-AO splendor and the large-format clarity, it's a nice high-def bath.

And as always, the highly intelligent "making of" doc, Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood, is more than worth the price.

I've been susceptible to the perceptions of UCLA film professor Howard Suber since the mid '90s, which is when I first listened to his incisive commentary on the Criterion Collection laser discs of The Graduate, High Noon and Some Like It Hot. Three months ago I asked Suber for specially burned DVDs of these. When I returned from Santa Barbara this morning I found discs of Suber's Graduate and High Noon commentaries laid on top of the films. Here's a small portion of the Graduate disc:

I chose this portion because Suber points out the highly...Read More

Leaving aside my oft-vented feelings about the Oscar worthiness The Artist, I succumbed to the charms of Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo during Saturday night's appearance at Santa Barbara's Arlington Theatre. Their visit was my final Santa Barbara Film Festival event, and it was probably the most pleasant. The word is actually "fizzy" -- they gave off a kind of contact high. I sat down in my seat thinking "oh, God, here we go" and left with a very different attitude.

Tweet #1: "What I got from Dujardin and Berenice Bejo tonight was something along...Read More

I caught Joe Berlinger's Under African Skies, an okay doc about the history and legacy of Paul Simon's Graceland, at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. And I liked...well, went with it for the most part. But I couldn't settle into the substance for a reason that some might find superficial. But I don't think so.

Under African Skies has two narratives -- the making of Simon's landmark 1986 album and a 2010 South African reunion with the original musicians, and Simon coming to grips with the political blowback to Graceland. Simon was...Read More

Earlier today I sat down with West of Memphis director Amy Berg, former West Memphis 3 defendant and currently free-as-a-bird Damien Echols and wife Lorri Davis. We sat at an outdoor table behind Santa Barbara's Lobero Theatre for a little more than 20 minutes. Echols and I talked mostly about right now and what's coming, and only a little bit about the past. I've posted five or six riffs about Berg's film since Sundance so I'll let the mp3 speak for itself.

(l. to r.) West of Memphis director Amy Berg, Damien Echols, Lorri Davis....

I wrote a few hours ago that during the q & a portion of today's SBIFF Directors Panel "three enterprising and obnoxious assholes (one wearing a black cowboy hat) took the mike together and basically asked the panel for help with their filmmaking careers." They were booed and shouted down. Three hours later the same cowboy asshat tried the same routine during the Movers and Shakers panel. Watch the sudden reaction of moderator Patrick Goldstein as the guy goes into his schpiel.

Indiewire's Anne Thompson has posted a video except of a 9.18.70 Dick Cavett Show interview with Husbands costars John Cassevetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. Cavett is fine but his guests are all gone now, Gazzara's death yesterday sealing the deal. Here is part #2 and #3.

The just-concluded Santa Barbara Film Festival directors' panel discussion was a dud for the most part. The only directors I found likable and interesting were Bridesmaids' Paul Feig, a clever, well-spoken, fast-on-his feet fellow, and Terry George, helmer of a currently-playing short called The Shore. Moderator Peter Bart did what he could, but the panelists included three helmers of animated film (including the ogre-ish Gore Verbinski, the paycheck-driven director of Rango, two Pirates movies and the forthcoming Lone Ranger) so it was almost an animation panel, which are always boring if you're not an animation fan.

Today's...

During last night's post-Virtuoso Awards after-party West of Memphis director Amy Berg showed me a mock magazine-cover illustration recently drawn by former West Memphis 3 defendant Damien Echols. It depicts himself and partner Lorri Davis. Echols and Davis arrived here last night to do interviews and take part in a post-screening q & a this evening.

Young Adult's Patton Oswalt was the absolute star and the life of the party during last night's Virtuosos Awards presentation at Santa Barbara's Arlington theatre. Rise of the Planet of the Apes' Andy Serkis took a close second for apperaring on-stage shirtless, and A Better Life's Demian Bichir was charming and affable. Dragon Tattoo's Rooney Mara seemed politely subdued. The Descendants' Shailene Woodley was fine. And moderator Dave Karger was typically smooth and engaging.

My favorite photo-editing app isn't an app -- it's a website called Picnik. It's clean and efficient and dumb enough for the likes of myself. Cropping, resizing, sharpening, tinting, contrasting and red-eye fixes are a snap. And yet Google, the fascist insect that bought Picnic a year or so ago, is closing it down on 4.19. I'm guessing it'll still be available for Google Plus users, but many people are furious. I'm now looking for an app that's comparable in terms of ease and simplicity.

At the very least Google should offer...Read More

A Criterion Bluray containing a slash-and-crop 1.85 to 1 version of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder will be out on 2.21. DVD Beaver has posted a review with screen captures comparing Sony Home Video's exquisitely boxy 1.33 to 1 DVD version to the Criterion Bluray. I'm not saying the Criterion (which I haven't yet seen) won't have value. A Bluray of an excellent courtroom drama that shows 2/3 of what dp Sam Leavitt originally shot is better than nothing.

A visually compressed, jail-cell cropping, captured from Criterion Bluray.

I'll allow that...Read More

I was walking up to the Arlington last night to catch the Virtuosos Tribute when I noticed a long line outside the Fiesta Five. "Is this for Chronicle?" I asked a woman near the end of it. "It's a general line for everything," she said. I asked what she was seeing. "The Woman in Black." Something was obviously up. It was a cool Friday night and a certain hunger among a younger, less cultured Santa Barbara crowd (i.e., SBIFF-averse for whatever reason) had made itself known.

Chronicle and Woman in Black were neck-and-neck, as it turned out. At 10 pm...Read More

My only enthusiastically preferred Democratic Presidential candidate of 2016 is Elizabeth Warren...end of story. I'll accept Hillary Clinton, yes, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. But a voice tells me it's Warren's to lose or fulfill. The Gods have picked her. Plus half the electorate, I sense, really wants to see a woman in the White House...finally.

The great Ben Gazzara has died at the age of 81. He had a long and rich life, and from the 1957 release of The Strange One (which is a very strange film) on he was "Ben Gazzara," and that really meant something. But what? Gazzara was almost as much of a vibe as he was an actor. He was magnetic but also a bit of a hider. In film after film he was always some variation of a jaded, laconic, laid-back smartass with a very slight grin starting to emerge.

As a member...Read More

A highly dubious source confided this morning that a secret high-level meeting of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bigwigs happened two nights ago at Kate Mantilini. I wasn't able to verify if Academy president Tom Sherak, COO Ric Robertson, and CEO Dawn Hudson actually met at 10:30 pm in a rear booth. I've only been told that a conversation might have unfolded as follows:

Sherak: I know it's late, but thanks for coming, guys. (To waiter) I'll have a Chardonnay and a bowl of whatever the soup is. What's the special?

Waiter: Split pea with...Read More

Deadline is reporting that Zalman King, director of high-toned erotic features like Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid and Red Shoe Diaries and producer/co-writer of Adrian Lyne's 9 1/2 Weeks, died today at age 69 from cancer. King and wife Patricia Louisianna Knop co-wrote 9 1/2 Weeks ('86), which co-starred Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, and Wild Orchid ('89), starring Rourke and Jacqueline Bisset plus several episodes of Red Shoe Diaries, the Showtime series.

Let no one accuse Hollywood Elsewhere of not standing by its opinions despite financial consequences. My anti-Artist jihad has apparently resulted in a lack of Phase Two ads from the Weinstein guys. Many thousands down the drain. But it's fair game and totally their call. I hear what they're saying, and no worries. For what it's worth an ad on HE doesn't mean I follow suit with obsequious endorsement. It just means that the Oscar conversation is happening on this site and...you know, whatever, have at it. I know that Artist ads are currently on The Wrap, Deadline, Hitfix and L.A. Times. C'est...Read More

My first significant activity after returning to Santa Barbara yesterday was a second viewing of Amy Berg's West of Memphis, a tightly compelling and superbly woven doc about the nearly-20-year saga of the West Memphis 3. (My first was in Park City a week and a half ago.) It played at the Lobero theatre, and was followed by a q & a with Berg and John Byers, stepfather of one of the three murder victims.

West of Memphis participant John Byers, director Amy Berg during last night's post-screening q & a at Santa Barbara's Lobero...

"Do you think they'll ever make a movie about a big-market baseball team, and they have the money, and they still suck?" Last night Jon Stewart asked Brad Pitt why Oscar movies don't go negative on other movies like Presidential candidates do in political campaigns. Uhm, well...in my own modest and personal way I've been engaged in surgical negative Oscar campaigning for years now. No biggie, just saying.

I dropped by my place during my visit to Los Angeles and picked up a just-arrived Bluray of Billy Wilder's The Apartment, which I'd ordered via Canadian Amazon. Joseph LaShelle's black-and-white Scope images are radiant and shaded and really beautiful this time out. I felt as if I was truly seeing them for the first time. They're clean and film-like and yet not, to my eyes, scrubbed or DNR'ed. The best part? You can see the eyeliner and face powder on everyone. Even on Jack Lemmon, Fred MacMurray and Ray Walston.

Honestly? I'm on the fence about doing South by Southwest this year. Am I going to spend at least $1000 to $1200 (and probably closer to $1500) on basics to fly there and stay in a flophouse so I can see...what, 21 Jump Street and one or two other films that might be worth the hassle and expense? This is my concern, dude. I'm not saying the value isn't there. I'm saying I don't see it yet. This is a process, not a judgment.

Last year Bridesmaids debuted in Austin, and so did Undefeated, Weekend, Natural Selection and The Beaver. For me...Read More

A near-miss on the 101 Freeway early this afternoon left me hugely impressed with my driving skills. I was next to the farthest left lane, speeding along at 75 or so when a young Asian-American woman in a white Honda SUV turned sharply left without a signal. She was just a few feet ahead. I'm sure I was in her blind spot. This is why they tell you to quickly look over your left shoulder before changing lanes.

I was breaking the law myself by talking on my cell phone, holding it to my right ear with...Read More

Markus Schleinzer's Michael, a "somewhat chilly, jewel-precise" study of an Austrian child molester, "is the absolute best film I've seen at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival so far," I wrote on 5.14.11. "It isn't pleasant to watch, but it's briliiant -- emotionally suppressed in a correct way that blends with the protagonist, and aesthetically disciplined and close to spellbinding."

Michael will play at Manhattan's Film Forum from 2.15 through 2.28. An absolute must-see, if only to get into the argument.

I wrote the following reply to a Glenn Kenny post on 5.14: "Those who...Read More

Knowing I'd worked for Cannon Films in the mid to late '80s, a guy asked me this morning about Dolph Lundgren and the making of Masters of the Universe . I replied as follows: "All I did was write the press notes and visit the set, once. I remember very little because I knew it was a cheeseball enterprise from the get-go and I didn't give a shit about any of it. The idea of the Golan & Globus machine attempting to arouse the geek/comic-book fanbase was hopeless from the start...pathetic."

"What was the atmosphere at...Read More

Let's at least acknowledge what I've been told again and again and again about the fate of Miss Bala. The main reason it didn't get nominated for a Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar is because progressive-minded industry women didn't approve of Stephanie Sigman's Laura Guerrero being constantly intimidated and pushed around. They wanted to see her stand up in Act Three and take charge of her fate. Films about women that fail to endorse and affirm the prevailing p.c. doctrine do so at their own peril -- that's a fact.

Yesterday afternoon (as I was politely firing my old accountant and meeting with my new one) Rope Of Silicon's Brad Brevet pointed out how oppressive regimented flashback sequences have become (i.e., always some of dreamtrip effect, always a different film stock or texture), and how ingenious it was for Alfred Hitchcock to invite those 1940 audiences watching Rebecca to -- horrors! -- imagine the details as Laurence Olivier recalled the take of his late wife's accidental death. The sequence starts somewhere around 3:20, but doesn't really kick in until 4:00 or thereabouts.

Due respect to Michael R. Roskam and the Bullhead team, but I was fundamentally uncomfortable with the story of a primitive, inarticulate, bull-like Belgian guy with no balls. Literally. Having been more or less castrated as a youth by a neighborhood psychopath. I disengaged and in fact ran the other direction from this film so fast it wasn't funny. Life is hard enough when you have a pair. And the Academy foreign branch preferred this to Miss Bala?

Is this another teaser-for-a-Superbowl-Dictator trailer or the actual Superbowl spot itself? The only original material is (a) "Hey, America, I bought NBC!" and (b) the track-race sequence. The "what am I, a Kardashian?"/"No, you're much less hairy" exchange was in the original teaser.

TV ad guys trying to reach Joe Superbowl know that however attuned or even brilliant he might be about sports, when it comes to movies he's half-bombed and/or half-retarded. His eyelids are at half-mast, he's slow on the pickup and his pants are halfway down around his ankles. You have to keep...Read More

"Side by Side, a new documentary produced by Keanu Reeves, takes an in-depth look at this revolution. Through interviews with directors, cinematographers, film students, producers, technologies, editors, and exhibitors, Side by Side examines all aspects of filmmaking -- from capture to edit, visual effects to color correction, distribution to archive. At this moment when digital and photochemical filmmaking coexist, Side By Side explores what has been gained, what is lost, and what the future might bring."

South by Southwest 2012 has announced what appears to be most of its slate. The crassly commercial 21 Jump Street will be the centerpiece and Big Easy Express, a doc by Emmett Mallory, will close things out. I'm going to have to beg and plead for tickets from publicists and take cabs and bicycle rickshaws and wait in long press lines and contend with James Rocchi singing karaoke, etc. SXSW is no duckwalk.

Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum in 21 Jump Street.

It's been almost 45 years since the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 40 years since the Allman Brothers' Eat A Peach, about 31 or 32 years since the heyday of The Pretenders and 20 to 30 years since the peak days of The Police and Sting. And yet each and every Starbucks you walk into these days insists on playing little else besides classic Beatles, Pretenders, Police/Sting and Allman Brothers cuts, over and over and over and over.

The over-50 people who run companies and corporations just won't play anything recorded within the last 20 or 25 years, certainly...Read More

I've just parked my car on a leafy residential street in Glendale, and I felt a sublime surge of calm and well-being when I realized there were no parking meters or residential sticker requirements. Okay, a sign said "No parking on Wednesday -- 8 am to 10 am" but otherwise it was a place of peace. I felt like I'd parked my car on a shady cul de sac in Bedford Falls in 1946. It's been the best thing that's happened to me so far today. That plus my accountant being a nice guy and shrugging his shoulders and wishing me well when...Read More

I drove down to Los Angeles yesterday afternoon to take care of some accounting matters. I'm looking at a full day of hitting banks, meeting with two accountants, driving around, etc. This won't be a big posting day, or at least not until later this afternoon or this evening.

Last Sunday I wrote that facial stubble was mandatory for lead actors in Sundance 2012 films, and that "every single actor in every single film I saw in Park City complied." The mandate also includes mainstream cinema, as this still from Skyfall, the latest 007 installment, makes clear. Daniel Craig's James Bond was absolutely clean-shaven in Casino Royale, but I can't recall if he wore GQ stubble in Quantum of Solace.