That “uppity nigger” line from a draft of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana script was revealed on Boing-Boing earlier today (12.28), and then a link appeared on Defamer. Tim Blake Nelson doesn’t blurt this term out to Jeffrey Wright in the film (certain people probably would’ve freaked) but I’m sorry Gaghan didn’t just let it rip anyway. The rumpus would have been fun.

Two or three times Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares is listed as one of the 2005’s best in the Village Voice‘s 7th Annual Film Critics Poll. I knelt down to pray in front of this film when I first saw it a year ago and spewed my praise in a column piece that ran on 12.17.04…which is why I didn’t think to include The Power of Nightmares in my Best of 2005 column, even though it was shown at the Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier this year and then at the ’05 Cannes Film Festival. (It later enjoyed a well-attended theatrical run at Manhattan’s Cinema Village, among other arthouse venues in other cities.) I’m just laying this out to explain why I didn’t mention it among this year’s best, etc. It is that by boilerplate theatrical standards, and it sure would be nice to have a first-rate digital transfer version out on DVD someday soon….but for me it was a late ’04 film.

I was so taken with Norman Lloyd‘s short penetrating cameo performance in In Her Shoes — he nails it like a champ in one five- or six-minute scene — that the least I could do was write a tribute piece about him last September. Now there’s another actor who’s delivered another one of those rock-solid, feet-planted, holy-shit performances. I’m speaking of Roberta Maxwell, whose acting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s mom in Brokeback Mountain‘s second-to-last scene (i.e., when Heath Ledger pays a visit) totally slays. It’s obvious that Maxwell and her scowling homophobic husband (the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger had with their son, but her eyes are a river of feeling…grief, acceptance, compassion…you could take a bath in them. It’s really the interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that brings the sadness home and sets up the final hit when Ledger’s daughter tells him she’s getting married to Kurt. I should have given credit to Maxwell sooner…she really and truly knocks it out of the park.

As long as we’re on a Maxwell jag, here’s a 12.21 profile of this New York-based actress by the Toronto Star‘s admiring Martin Knelman. He starts it off by saying, “If there were an Oscar for best performance by an actor with only one scene, surely the winner would be Roberta Maxwell as the repressed mother in Brokeback Mountain.”

A friend says, “I agree on your take about the downturn of King Kong‘s ticket sales. But look everywhere else also — all the Oscar contenders are petering out at the box office. Brokeback is stalling and so is Munich. Geisha is a bomb. It’s not just Kong…it’s everything except, I guess, Walk the Line.”

The first time it hit me that the public was starting to really rebel against allusive or metaphorical broad-brush movie titles was when it was decided in 1984 that Taylor Hackford’s remake of Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 film noir Out of the Past…a title with an obviously haunting quality…would be retitled as the dumbly-macho and aggressive-sounding Against All Odds. That was 21 years ago, and now things have downshifted to the next level of primitivism with New Line’s upcoming Snakes on a Plane (currently slated for August ’06). The fact that Samuel L. Jackson (a once-cool actor whose willingness to bend over for anything is putting him in competition with Cuba Gooding) is starring and former stuntman David R. Ellis (Cellular) is directing should give you pause. Don’t misunderstand: Snakes on a Plane is an unmistakably great idiot-level title. The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Garry Maddox reported a few days ago it “was a reader favorite after a Herald website discussion about film titles earlier this year.” And I’m not saying that if all film titles were reduced to their primitive childlike essence that the same brilliant-jokey effect would be realized. But I am saying we have truly arrived at a new stage of cultural devolution with the acceptance and celebration of this title. It represents the turning of another page in the great Will and Ariel Durant 21st Century novel called “The End of Civilization (As We Once Knew It).” How different, really, is Snakes on a Plane from “Camels”, which is what my son Jett used to call Lawrence of Arabia when he was two?

Variety has recently let some folks go, they’re cutting back at the L.A. Times, some Time bureau chiefs have received pink slips, etc. The reasons are varied, but all of this is tracable in part to diminishing ad revenues on the print side. And not just in the movie-ad realm. This shouldn’t figure as far as Variety‘s ad revenues are concerned, but ad buyers are realizing more and more how little impact print ads are having on younger viewers (my sons never buy a newspaper or even a classy monthly glossy like Vanity Fair), and they’re acting accordingly.

There’s something missing in this AP story about the King Kong shortfall. It says that Peter Jackson’s film “eked out” a box-office win last weekend but “has little so far to be thumping its chest about” because it’s “falling well short of blowout blockbuster status like that earned by such box-office gorillas as the Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises.” And it has the relentlessly bland Paul Dergarabedian saying one reason is the 187-minute length: “They can’t show it as many times during the day, so that may have lessened its box office strength,” blah, blah. But the story seems averse to considering the basic fact that few if any moviegoers out there in Ticket-Buying Land are over-the-moon about Kong. My reading (based on the e-mails I’ve received) is that they’re a good deal more negative than the critics, and even the ones who like it are feeling a bit underwhelmed. This is the deal: 2/3 of Kong is a rousing ride but the movie as a whole isn’t good enough to blow anyone away or set new box-office records…and that’s that. It’ll make $250 million domestically and be an overall hit, but it’s still The Gorilla That Never Quite Roared. If anyone had predicted this outcome in late November when the Kong buzz was bubbling and spilling over the rim, that person would have been dismissed as a blabbering, saliva-dribbling fool.

I’m just doodling here and the man on the street will shed no tears, but could the situation at Paramount right now be analogous to the reign of terror in France (1793 to ’94) that led to many impassioned people feeling the kiss of steel? Distribution chief Wayne Lewellen…whacked. DreamWorks’ TV distribution honcho Hal Richardson moving in and the Paramount exec now handing this…soon to be whacked. As Slate‘s Edward Jay Epstein wrote a little more than a week ago, Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey bought DreamWorks in large part in order to make up for a lack of Paramount-generated films, since DreamWorks has a good number of projects in various stages of development. Point #1: “The true brilliance of Paramount’s high-profile acquisition of DreamWorks is that it will serve to divert from, if not totally hide, Paramount’s own failure to assemble a full slate of films for 2006-2007. And point #2: “When [the acquisition] deal closes, Paramount will essentially become, at least for the next two years, DreamWorks. Of course, many, if not all, of the people who work at DreamWorks will lose their jobs, and the people at Paramount who created the near-meltdown will take credit for the films they’ve acquired. But, as they say, that’s show business.”

Reader Sean McDonald feels there’s a valid analogy between sex scenes directed by Steven Spielberg and Paul Herhoeven. Spielberg “has no idea how to end this mess” — i.e., Munich — “so he chooses to do it half a dozen times, each time less engaging than the last, only to push me over the edge with the most ridiculous sex scene ever put on film. My friends and I could only come up with the flopping-goldfish pool scene in Showgirls as more ridiculous.” This warrants a list…the dopiest (i.e., most excessive) boot-knocking scenes of all time. Suggestions?