Animals aren’t just poking through as the stars of new films, but are giving killer performances…so to speak. This is almost the view of Pete Hammond, who saw Frank Marshall’s Eight Below (Disney, 2.17) at the all-media last Monday. He also showed Eight Below to his UCLA “Sneak Preview” class last week and says “it went through the roof…one woman said it was the best film she’d ever seen at the series.” He also says that the Huskies and Malamutes in the film are phenomenally touching, and that they almost seem to show acting chops. I couldn’t be bothered to see Eight Below because (a) it looked sappy, (b) I’m starting to wonder if Walker is making the right career calls, and (c) because I’m a narrative animal-movie snob. Except, of course, when it comes to movies like Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar (a sad donkey movie)or Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu’s Amores Perros (sad dogs). Bresson’s would be an excellent film to remake, of course. It can’t be improved upon, but most people out there won’t rent or buy the Criterion DVD so at least a remake would be seen, although a Balthazar remake would probably turn out better if the Disney people had nothing to do with it. I’m serious about this — animal movies are vaguely in vogue now, and a Balthazar remake would be an upscale way to go with at least a potential of being a critical favorite and an award-winner, if only because cultured film lovers regard the Bresson film as a landmark art film.

An interactive Oscar ballot that the New York Times would love you to fill out.

I’ve decided to simultaneously shock myself and the readership by actually doing an “Elsewhere Live” broadcast when I’m supposed to, which is Thusdays at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern. So here goes…the main subect is John Scheinfeld’s Who is Harry Nilssn (and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him)?…listen if you’ve a mind to.

The writing has been on the wall for Harrison Ford‘s downturn for years. I saw it coming when he turned down the Michael Douglas part in Traffic, and now he’s finally burned himself out with audiences because he won’t divert from doing the same old well-made but tired formula films like Firewall. Plus he’s just looking too grandfatherly to be the older hero type. So it’s downshift time and it happens to the best of them. It happened to Redford and Newman. (I think Newman handled it the best of all with his character parts, etc. Redford seems to be somewhere between over and treading water.) But the Harrison Ford of Clear and Present Danger (the best film he’s made in the last twelve years, I feel) is over the hill and gone for good, I’m afraid. He just needs to start playing crochety older guys, is all. Or start taking offers from the indie sector. Not a terrible thing, and hitting it in the right kind of indie film could bring him back, in a sense.

The feds obviously suspect that Mike Ovitz, the former CAA topper, ex-Disney honcho and failed management-agency chief, hired Anthony Pellicano to use his wiretapping skills to get information about people Ovitz was dealing or negotiating with. This is why Ovitz has been called before a grand jury “to testify about his dealings and conversations with Pellicano, who pleaded not guilty to charges that were unsealed last week in a 110-count indictment,” says a New York Times story by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. A person who hires someone to do something illegal means Mr. Moneybags is just as guilty and prosecutable as the one who was hired…right? That’s my layman’s understanding.

Steven Soderbergh‘s The Good German (Warner Bros., early-mid fall ’06) is set in 1945, not 1947…and it’s been described by Soderbergh not as a risky romance drama but as “a real murder mystery.” (Reader Joshua Flower, responding to the Dakr Horizons plot description I posted yesterday, says it “sounds like a bit of a gloss on The Third Man.”) Plus it’s been shot in black and white, and that settles it — I’m in love. Why monochrome? “I’m incorporating archival footage into the movie and there’s just no other way to make it match,” Soderbergh told Suicide Girls correspondent Daniel Robert Epstein. (Pete Hammond tells me he was casually praising Clooney at a party last weekend for keeping the monochrome tradition alive with this and Good Night, and Good Luck, and Clooney answered, “Yeah, well, I think after The Good German that’s about it for the black-and-white thing.”) “Will it premiere at Cannes this year?” Epstein asks Soderbergh. “I hope so,” comes the reply.