I'm not going to want to miss the inaugural activities on Tuesday, 1.20, which will extend from the early morning to early afternoon. I can catch it all later online, of course, but there's something about watching it live. I'm generally inclined to bypass any Sundance Film Festival screenings (press or otherwise) set for the first few hours of that day.

To go by early dvdforum reactions to the forthcoming French Connection Bluray (out 2.24), director William Friedkin has purposely degraded his Oscar-winning 1971 film by using a "pastel" process in order to present the originally intended feeling of New York grit. The result, say some, is "out of synch" and "bleeds horribly" -- a VHS experience.

One viewer claims it looks "almost disconnected from the image...it bleeds horribly and looks like something from a dodgy VHS copy...no, I'm not exaggerating...if you pause the picture...Read More

"The sun floods the wide sky in Silent Light like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within," begins Manohla Dargis's N.Y. Times review. "A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico -- and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals -- the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

"Mr. Reygadas's faith...Read More

Wall Street had a grotesque party, the lavishness of which has never been seen or experienced in the history of economically developed civilizations, and now the people who cruised along on the backwash of that party are going to have to pay for it. You, me, our children especially...sucking it on our knees for years to come, coping with annual deficits of $1.2 to $1.5 trillion on top of the usual burdens. Awful.

Taxes are going to have to go up and entitlement programs are going to have to scalpeled down. "If we do nothing," Barack...Read More

Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling has won the 2009 Mensch Award for Compassionate Programming by deciding to open the festival (1.22 through 2.1) with Rod Lurie's Nothing But The Truth. A first-rate political drama, NBTT was dealt a severe blow last month when its distributor, the Yari Film Group, filed for bankruptcy. "It deserves to be seen," Durling told me earlier today.

Deliver a great performance in a critically hailed film, get the Oscar talk buzzing, push up your Standard & Poor's rating and wait for a big paycheck opportunity. Winning the Best Actor Oscar is a very nice reward -- pop the champagne, hug your mom, etc. -- but the career revival and a big paycheck job is the real booty-boo. That's what Mickey Rourke's reported role in Iron Man 2 is. Speculation is that he'll play a tattooed villain called the Crimson Dynamo.

Get Jeremy Piven. Draw blood. Make his life hell. Take him down. Sue him. Make him pay somehow. Send dog packs after him. Torment him. Chase him down dark alleys. Flip him over like a turtle.

Always pruning, always re-thinking, always open to suggestions.

BEST PICTURE

Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight); Che(IFC Films); Milk (Focus Features); The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount/Warner Bros.); Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage/DreamWorks); Frost/Nixon (Universal); Doubt (Miramax); The Visitor (Overture Films), The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight), Gran Torino (Warner Bros.), Nothing But the Truth (Yari Film Group), WALL-E (Disney).

BEST DIRECTOR

David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Steven Soderbergh (Che); Gus Van Sant (Milk); Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road); John Patrick Shanley (Doubt); Stephen Daldry (The Reader); Tom McCarthy (The Visitor); Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler).

BEST ACTOR

Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road); Richard Jenkins (The Visitor); Josh Brolin (W.); Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler); Sean Penn (Milk); Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon); Benicio Del Toro (Che).

BEST ACTRESS

Kristin Scott Thomas (I've Loved You So Long); Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road, Meryl Streep (Doubt); Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married); Melissa Leo (Frozen River); Kate Beckinsale (Nothing But the Truth); Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky); Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight); Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder), James Franco (Milk), Alan Alda (Nothing But the Truth), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt); Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road); Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Viola Davis (Doubt); Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona); Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married); Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler); Elsa Zylberstein (I've Loved You So Long); Hiam Abbass (The Visitor); Vera Farmiga (Nothing But the Truth).

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie (Australia); Susannah Grant (The Soloist), Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), J. Michael Straczynski (Changeling), Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler); Nick Schenk (Gran Torino), Rod Lurie (Nothing But the Truth), Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky); Peter Buchman, Steven Soderbergh (Che), Philippe Claudel (I've Loved You So Long).

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), John Michael Shanley (Doubt), Justin Haythe (Revolutionary Road), David Hare (The Reader).

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Everlasting Moments (Sweden, d: Jan Troell); Waltz with Bashir (Israel) The Class (France), Captain Abu Raed (Jordan); Gomorra (d: Matteo Garrone); The Baader Meinhof Gang (Germany, d: Uli Edel); Necessities of Life (Canada, d: Benoit Pilon); Tear This Heart Out (Mexico; d: Roberto Sneider); Departures (Japan, d: Yojiro Takita); Tulpan (Kazakhstan; d: Sergey Dvortsevoy).

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Man on Wire (d: James Marsh), Trouble the Water (d: Carl Deal,Tia Lessin); I.O.U.S.A. (d: I forget); Standard Operating Procedure (d: Errol Morris); Encounters At The End of The World (d: Werner Herzog). SHAMEFULLY OFF THE SHORT LIST: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (d: Marina Gordon); Stranded: I've Come From a plane that crashed on the mountains (d: Gonzalo Arijon); Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (d: Alex Gibney)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight), Colin Watkinson (The Fall)

SPECIAL EFFECTS

Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull The Fall, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Dark Knight, Indy 4: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

WALL-E (Pixar/Walt Disney Pictures); Waltz with Bashir (Sony Pictures Classics); Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks SKG), Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who (20th Century Fox), The Tale of Despereaux (Universal Pictures), Igor (The Weinstein Company), Bolt (Walt Disney Pictures), Space Chimps (20th Century Fox), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (DreamWorks SKG), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Warner Bros. Pictures).

"Ask not, you know, what your country can, like, do for you. Ask what you, um, can, you know, do for your country." That's how Maureen Dowd's 1.7.09 column begins, but it's actually a defense of Caroline Kennedy's suitability for New York's U.S. Senate seat. Odd.

Because Sylvester Stallone did Mickey Rourke a solid by hiring him to appear in Get Carter, the Wrestler star is going to costar in The Expendables, an ensemble actioner that Stallone will be directing for Nu Image/Millenium.

The presence of producers Avi Lerner, Boaz Davidson, Danny Dumbort, etc. -- the Bad News Jews of the 21st Century -- suggests that on one level it'll be another crap programmer. On another it might be another laugh-riot actioner in the vein of Stallone's recent Rambo flick -- a classic of its kind.

Rourke "will play an unscrupulous arms dealer who becomes the go-to guy...Read More

Coming Soon's Ed Douglas informs there will be "some combination press/public screenings for some of the bigger movies at Sundance this year. RIght now I know that Adventureland, Brookyn's Finest and I Love You Philip Morris are three of the films being handled this way. Probably Spread as well. Plus there's a sneak preview scheduled for Wednesday, 1.21.

"There are currently no separate press screenings of those movies scheduled, but there will be press tickets available for the morning screenings of these movies at the Eccles. I don't know if there will be a separate reserved press section or not but they're...Read More

Nobody wants to see a shot-for-shot, concept-copying remake of the old 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, but with McG at the helm of Nemo, a new version of the Jules Verne novel, it can be safely assumed that the stuff that worked in the 1954 Disney version will be either ignored or vulgarized beyond recognition. But it's a good thing, at least, that McG has been consigned to the family-film ghetto. Keep him there.

The finalists in the feature film category of the 23rd Annual American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Outstanding Achievement Awards competition are...not terribly exciting! Five timid choices reflecting, yes, quality work, fine, but also cautious consensus values. In alphabetical order:The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Claudio Miranda); The Dark Knight (Wally Pfister, ASC); The Reader (Chris Menges, BSC and Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC); Revolutionary Road (Deakins); and Slumdog Millionaire (Anthony Dod Mantle , BSC).

The winner -- Mantle, I'm guessing -- will be named at an ASC soiree at L.A.'s Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel on 2.15.09. My personal favorites are Deakins' work...Read More

Why doesn't anyone just say it? On top of the taint of accepting an obviously cynical U.S. Senate appointment from Gov. Rod "stinkbomb" Blagojevich, Roland Burris is a pathetic replacement for President-elect Barack Obama because everything he puts out -- particularly in terms of his appearance and speaking style -- seems to be about caution and equivocation. He's a dull, timid pre-Obama type -- not of this era.

Burris -- face it -- looks like some kind of mediocre mouse. He's only a little over five feet tall, it appears. His voice is underwhelmingly soft and high-pitched. He wears a 1964 Adam...Read More

The word "prescient" obviously comes to mind in the matter of Patrick Creadon's I.O.U.S.A., one of the Oscar Shortlist Docs that'll screen on Saturday, 1.10, at the Tribeca Cinemas. Made in '06 and '07 and first shown at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it warns of America being on the brink of a financial meltdown due to rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. "America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions," the copy says. So Creadon's film will become one of the five nominees because his crystal...Read More

In a very concise and satisfying way, N.Y. Times guy Dave Kehr has explained the Oscar-bestowing mentality though the decades. Posted a whole week ago, read it last weekend and forgot to bring it up.

If the Blu-ray industry really wants the format to gain a serious foothold, drop the prices of those damn Blu-ray discs. I'm getting angrier and angrier at those $31 dollar prices on movies like Pineapple Express. Hell, I'm getting really angry at those $31 dollar prices on movies like The Third Man. Which, by the way, is a very slight burn in my book. The Criterion Blu-ray looks fine, but not that much better than the standard Criterion DVD version.

Digital Domain's wondrous digital effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- particularly the "aging and youthing" of Brad Pitt -- "are so perfect as to be virtually invisible, free of the usual trappings of CGI -- that too-fluid, too-fake, superimposed look that makes the cattle stampede in Australia, for instance, feel so unthreatening.

"Paradoxically," writes Vanity Fair.com's Julian Sancton , "this may mean that the most impressive visual effects feat of the year may go unrecognized.

"'The thing about Benjamin Button,' says Judy Duncan, editor of the visual effects trade mag...Read More

Because the prosecutor's office in Shreveport, Louisiana has dropped all charges in the Josh Brolin-Jeffrey Wright bar incident that happened last July (and which was recounted by Brolin during a W. interview last fall), the cell-phone video footage has finally been released.

It's now on TMZ. If anyone can send me an embed code, please do.

The shaky camera work is maddening, but what's been captured is quite intense. Theatrical even. The sight of the teary-eyed Brolin and Wright embracing each other before being cuffed is quite the statement about sticking by your buddy as the wolves...Read More

In his 1.5 story about David Fincher's q & a the night before last at the Time Warner Center, conducted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Kent Jones, Variety's Sam Thielman did the standard cherry-picking of money quotes. But to me, the undercurrent was a lot more interesting.

Fincher, I sensed, was feeling somewhat chagrined by -- or was certainly mindful of -- the unpersuaded reactions to Button in some quarters. (Including those among the audience that night.) He spoke much more freely about the technical aspects of shooting Button than what he believed the film was basically about...Read More

I once had a dispute with a guy over the proper role of a Hollywood columnist-commentator. He felt that columnists should basically be receiver-responders -- that they should only write about what the entertainment community puts before them. Baaaah. That's obviously part of the game, I said, but he was thinking too passively. A go-getter columnist should also adopt the mentality of a senior vp of creative affairs for the entire entertainment industry. Come up with new ideas, approve or disapprove of scripts, and so on.

All to explain that during a...Read More

In a New York/Vulture poll of 57 film critics, Gabriele Muccino and Will Smith's Seven Pounds has been named the worst film of 2008. Perhaps now that Seven Pounds has been fully reviled and discredited it's okay to allow people to check out this mock poster, although please understand that it's a complete spoiler.

Here's a list of all the critics polled or quoted, along with their own lists of the year's worst.

The other worst-of-the-year picks, going from tenth-worst to second-worst, is as follows: (10) Diane English's The Women; (9) Clint Eastwood's Changeling; (8) Frank Miller's...Read More

As expected, the award-giving party thrown by the New York Film Critics Circle last night at Strata (Broadway at 21st) was a convivial, stimulating, enjoyable thing. Thanks to the NYFCC and IHOP publicity for inviting me. The food and drink were choice and abundant. The swanky, two-tiered room was filled with distributors, publicists and all manner of talent. And the best critics, bloggers and entertainment writers around. My idea of a class-A event.

NYFCC from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

Almost...Read More

Democrat Al Franken isn't fully secured as Minnesota's next U.S. Senator, but it's looking very, very unlikely that his Republican opponent Norm Coleman is going to prevail, given that the Minnesota State Canvassing Board confirmed today that Franken has won by a 215-vote margin.

Franken is a bit of a snob, I feel, having met him once backstage at the old ABC Bill Maher show. He's also smart, witty, tough and, I believe, up to the task. I'm very cheered by his apparent victory and for the fact that U.S Senate Democrats now number 59.

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We're all disappointed, I think, that the Producers Guild of America chose their Best Picture nominees from the exact middle of the pack -- Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight and Frost/Nixon. They didn't even have the balls to nominate WALL*E. Buncha timid consensus pussies. The winner will be announced on 1.24.

Heading into town to attend the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner at Strata -- drinks at 6:30, dinner and speeches starting at 7:30. Hooray for Milk's Josh Brolin.

Gran Torino, which goes wide this weekend, is running at 71, 49 and 18. It seems likely to beat the debuting Bride Wars, which is tracking at 68, 34 and 10. Not Easily Broken is 60, 28 and 1 and The Unborn is 56, 30 and 7.

Andrew Breitbart is starting his own conservative-minded Hollywood-oriented site -- Big Hollywood -- tomorrow, and he's got Steve Mason as his box-office analyst," a D.C.-based reader asked this morning. "Will you still quote Mason from time to time, or does this put him on your shit list?"

"Of course not," I replied. "Breitbart's a good man and Mason knows his stuff so it's all fine."

It'll be fun to debate (i.e., mock, deride, joke about) the right-wing views espoused on Big Hollywood , which Breitbart says will "be a continuous politics and culture...Read More

David Poland is calling Steven Soderbergh's Che his #1 film of the year. I'm afraid that makes two of us, as I said the same thing 28 days ago. (I hadn't seen Gran Torino or Waltz With Bashir at the time, but I've seen added them to my list of the year's Top 15.) Here's Poland's piece with a few quips and quibbles from yours truly:

"When the chips are down, Che is as Old Hollywood as it gets.

"From the overture in which we watch Cuba -- and then South America -- laid...Read More

The Online Film Critics Society has decided on a list of 2008 nominees. [See below.] FilmJerk.com's Edward Havens sent them along this morning and asked for an opinion. What I think, I wrote back, is "that (a) these are fine...the same-old same-old '08 nominees except for Che's Benicio del Toro and The Visitor's Richard Jenkins nominated for Best Actor....agreed, but (b) why issue a list of nominees at this stage? The OFCS is not the Oscars. Bring on the winners already."

THE 2008 OFCS nominees:

BEST PICTURE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog...Read More

English-language Al Jazeera is reporting that "a dozen Palestinian civilians have been killed on Monday as Israeli forces pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip" with "the latest total death count in Gaza [standing] at 531 people killed across 10 days, with more than 80 deaths since the ground offensive began last Saturday."

But the innocents are always slaughtered in any war. 47 million civilians were killed during World War II, if you count an estimated 20 million from war-related disease and famine. It's horrific, but it's never stopped...Read More

The recently departed Pat Hingle had 84 good years, most of them on stage and in films. He excelled at playing small-town pit bulls -- snarlers, bigots, cops, mayors, disapproving dads who barked and brayed, brutes, vulgarians -- who caused much torment and unhappiness to various leading men and women (like Splendor in the Grass's Warren Beatty and The Falcon and the Snowman 's Tim Hutton). The rule of thumb was that if you saw Hingle approaching in a movie or TV show, things were about to get ugly on some level.

He was a steady...Read More

Spoutblog's John Lichman on the rants, insights, blurtings and whatever from a certain columnist. Thanks. I guess.

Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil is reporting specific backstage poop on yesterday's National Society of Film Critics voting that resulted in Ari Folman 's Waltz With Bashir taking the Best Picture prize. The voting also included a vote for Eva -- WALL*E's robot girlfriend -- as Best Actress. (What member of this distinguished body cast this vote? Fess up!)

WALL*E led on the first ballot, O'Neil writes, but then lost to Bashir because of the huge drop-off of voters once the proxies were disqualified from voting on the second round.

Lots of other flip-flops happened between first and second ballots,...Read More

Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, a social critique of the bland and suffocating 1950s, is at the Film Forum until Thursday. It's not on DVD in this country so I should probably set aside the time. "A superbly shot critique of the suffocating conformity, repression and materialism at the heart of middle-class life," a DVD Beaver critic exclaims, "Bigger Than Life is the American Beauty of 50s cinema.

"Shooting in Cinemascope, Ray brilliantly uses bold colors, expressionistic shadows, and the precise framing of domestic architecture (particularly of the staircase in the family home), to convey both...Read More

"I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight, Ricky Gervais has recently said/written. "They said something like 'you're not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It's the same thing.'

"But it's not the same thing, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn't work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat...Read More

I've had The Visitor's Hiam Abbass in the Oscar Balloon's Best Supporting Actress category for months, and now the New York Observer's Chris Rosen has gone on record in agreement. Finally...somebody! I'm also with Rosen about two of the best underrated performances of '08 having been given by Che's Demian Bichir (the guy who played Fidel Castro) and Santiago Cabrera (the smiling bearded cadre who explained the ventriloquist/"vanilla piss" remark). But of course, each and every performance in the Che films is exactly right.

A filmmaker friend wrote last night that a certain production company "will have an extra bedroom available for the nights of 1.19 through 1.21 departing the 22nd for $200 per night. The condo is not in town so a car or cabs will be necessary to get around."

I replied as follows, just to mess with him: "The hottest, most energetic Sundance days are always the first four or five -- in this instance 1.15 to 1.19, Thursday to Monday. (I always arrive a day before -- 1.14 in this instance -- to get myself all situated and set up.) The buyers,...Read More

The Sundance situation has reversed and I'm now offering rather than looking. I've got a shared bedroom (two single beds, you get one) in a two-bedroom condo open for $125-something per night, on a seven-day basis starting Friday, 1.16. The condo has wi-fi, and sits high above (i.e., looks down upon) Park City's Main Street. Hubba-hubba.

Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir is a strikingly original, deeply affecting animated docudrama about war and morality and monsters within -- easily one of the year's finest. But I wonder if maybe...just maybe the National Society of Film Critics decided to give this Sony Classics release its 2008 Best Picture prize in part because of the awful echoes going on right now in Gaza.

God help those who are about to get caught in the crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli military over the next few days and weeks. Bashir is about Israel's...Read More

In Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford's Joseph Turner has forced Faye Dunaway's Kathy Hale to miss a New England skiing rendezvous with her boyfriend and lie to him in the bargain. Now that they're saying goodbye, Turner wonders how it'll all play out when she finally goes north. Turner. Your boyfriend...he's a tough guy? Hale : He's pretty tough. Turner: What will he say? When you tell him what happened? Hale: (sighs) Understand, probably. Turner: Wow...that is tough.

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"As Hollywood faces grim times, there's a silver lining for 2009," writes Variety columnist Anne Thompson. "If the studios, God forbid, are forced by the credit crunch to make fewer, less expensive films and spend their own money producing them (as the L.A. Times reports in this grim forecast written before the SAG strike looked less likely), they will take less risks, yes, but they'll also pay more attention to making strong commercial films with a market niche. In short, they will make better films."

I agree but in a slightly different way. Having tons of money to burn has never...Read More

I was looking for a clip of the last two or three minutes of Patton, which ends with George C. Scott describing the victory procession of an ancient conqueror and concluding with the following: "A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning that all glory is fleeting ." Those last four words make me gulp every time I hear them.

As a dad, I think I understand a bit of what John Travolta is feeling about the sudden death of his 16 year-old son Jett. It goes a bit beyond that, actually, with my oldest son having the same name. Travolta's Jett was born in '92, four years after mine. Jett wrote me yesterday saying "there's now one less Jett in the world...feels weird to see my name in an obit." My sympathies all around. This is awful.