A tough-minded exhibition guy from another continent says that “‘awesome’ is the only word I can think of to describe Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood,” which he saw yesterday.

“As someone who fell giddily for Boogie Nights only to be frustrated by the excesses of Magnolia and disappointed in many of the indulgences of Punch Drunk Love, this new film does more than restore PTA’s stature as one of the most exciting American filmmakers — it puts him in the leagues of the masters.

“Blood is two hours and 45 minutes of cinematic heroin. It’s a frightening, overwhelming, punch-to-the-gut work — as strong as anything that John Huston or Stanley Kubrick ever made.

“Too much will be written and said about the accomplishments of Daniel Day Lewis‘s performance to start drooling here. Let’s just say that the Best Actor Oscar is his to lose, not that I imagine he’d care. Paul Dano, in a difficult role, matches him scene for scene — the breakout performance of the year. And Jonny Greenwood’s score is still giving me chills.

“The film is probably too grim and narratively uncompromising to break out commercially beyond the realms of where Jesse James aspires (and may not reach). But it deserves to, and will, do better than that film and certainly is more than just an actor’s showcase in the vein of Last King of Scotland. $20 t0 $30 million is possible, assuming the big awards come through? For my money Day-Lewis pushes the potential of the film beyond the art milieu.

“I can forgive the film for a shocking, visceral final scene that teeters on the verge of hysteria and then dives right off the edge. And also for that same scene’s logic-defying continuity problems.

“Despite these minor flaws, this is a cinematic and artistic experience that few other American films have delivered in recent memory.”

A friend who saw Lions for Lambs says it runs 88 minutes, and is calling it “a Godard movie” in the most intriguing sense of that term. It’s almost all talk and that’s fine, he says, because it really rips into the Bushies and their mishandling of the Middle Eastern terrorist threat. The hottest promotional angle for the film is that it will likely piss off Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and all the other staunch neocon militarists to no end, and good for that because it’ll be a lot of fun to see them fuming with necks and faces turning beet red.

Three “reveals” came out of today’s screening and press conference for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, 12.21), which happened from 12:30 to 2 pm on the Sony lot and was hosted by producer Judd Apatow, director Jake Kasdan (who appears to be roughly the same size as The Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona and Jason Schwartzman…good company!) and star John C. Reilly.

One is that the movie isn’t a genre spoof (as David Carr‘s N.Y. Times piece suggested a day or two ago) as much as a flat-out Walk the Line satire. The second is that the tone is similar to Eric Idle and Gary Weis‘s The Rutles: All You Need is Cash, the 1978 Beatles spoof. Which is to say it’s dry and hip. It’s not Airplane, it’s not Hot Shots, Part Deux…it’s lewd and “:funny” but in a fairly earnest, low-key way. With fairly decent music.

Oh, and the third is that the film has a signficant penis shot that…uh, lasts more a few seconds. Not one of those blink-and-it’s-gone deals. I don’t know what this means but Aptatow and Kasdan made a point of mentioning it.

Here are two video files – #1 and #2 — of producer Judd Apatow, star John C. Reilly and director Jake Kasdan doing the shpiel.

And here’s Reilly singing the “Walk Hard” song. Thirty songs have been recorded, and will be issued in a “Box of Cox” CD package sometime in late November or December.

I was speaking to Judd Apatow an hour ago with four or five other web guys after the Walk Hard presentation at Sony, and one of them told Apatow he’d seen Pineapple Express (Sony, 8.8.08) , the David Gordon Green-directed comedy about a stoner (Seth Rogen) and his dealer (James Franco) forced to go on the run from the police after they see a cop shoot a guy for the wrong reasons. And the big revelation, he said, is Franco’s hilarious performance.

Playing a character named “Saul” who, Apatow said, is somewhat like Brad Pitt‘s “Floyd” in True Romance, Franco is incredibly funny in the film. The web guy seemed to think It’ll put him right back on the map, probably the best thing he’s ever done, etc. Or certainly the best thing since the James Dean film six years ago. One of those surprise performances from a guy you thought you knew that make you go “holy shit!”

This shot of Benicio in the bush was taken during the filming of Guerilla, the second of two Steven Soderbergh films about the definitive up and down chapters in the life of Che Guevara, near the Spanish town of San Pablo de Buceite, which was chosen to sub for Bolivia. The first film, The Argentine (which I feel is the better of the two, by which I mean the more rousing and engaging), is now lensing in Puerto Rico.

Benicio del Toro as Ernest “Che” Guevara during relatively recent scene filmed for Guerilla.

The trailer for Charlie Wilson’s War (Universal, 12.25) tells you right away it’s going to be at least fairly good. It also persuaded me that Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a Best Supporting Actor nomination in the bag. (I’ve read the script and know he has a real part and not just a few clever lines.) Which means he’ll be fighting himself with ThinkFilm pushing him for Best Actor in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. As Charlie Partanna would say, “Which one of these?”

“In addition to being one of the most beautiful movies ever made about rock ‘n’ roll,” Anton Corbijn‘s Control “also works, quite simply, as a story about a gifted and deeply troubled young guy who just couldn’t hold it together. Sometimes the stories you think you’ve heard a million times before are merely universal.

“This is, by far, the most rapturously beautiful-looking picture I’ve seen all year. The images have an almost satiny texture. Corbijn’s shots are always meticulously composed, as you’d expect from a filmmaker with a background as a portrait photographer, but even though they sometimes betray only the smallest traces of movement, they’re always alive, never static.

“The look of the picture reminds me of the early Beatles photographs taken by Astrid Kirchherr: Corbijn picks up on everything that’s innocent and open about these kids’ faces (and they were, after all, just kids). The suggestion is that they were standing on the cusp of something massive and overwhelming — that they’d been granted a wish that could either make or destroy them.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Salon review, posted yesterday (10.10.07).

Astrid Kirchherr shot (Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe), taken sometime around ’61

This is the coldest (or pretending-to-be-coldest), flat-out funniest reply to a female golddigger I’ve ever heard or read in my life. In. My. Life. It’s completely logical (in a Wall Street sense of the term), completely heartless and utterly brilliant. My first big laugh of the day. The guy who wrote this should identify himself and take a bow…seriously. He’s a bit of a creep, but what he’s written has struck a nerve. He should go on Letterman.

An Israeli correspondent has forwarded a 10.11.07 Hebrew- language news story from Haaretz, the Israeli news agency, that Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit has been disqualified from competing for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The Academy’s foreign branch has determined that more than 50% of the dialogue is English and therefore, according to the rules, not eligible.

Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh is reporting the same situation also. (Ditto the Jerusalem Post.) Raveh says the Israeli Academy is planning to appeal to reverse the decision, but if the Academy won’t budge Israel will submit Joseph Cedar‘s Beaufort, the runner-up for Best Picture with Israel’s Ophir Award, asa replacement. Cedar won Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival for this film, and Beaufort is also Israel’s biggest natively-produced ticket seller so far this year.

Sony Pictures Classics will distribute The Band’s Visit in early ’08. SPC co-chiefs Tom Bernard and Michael Barker were unavailable for comment. Torene Svitl, the Motion Picture Academy’s foreign film liason/adminstrator, didn’t pick up.

In David Carr‘s 10.11 N.Y. Times piece about today’s absurdly overcrowded movie marketplace, Sony Classics co-president Tom Bernard speculates on the motives of new-to-the-business investors. “Hey, if you’ve made all of your money in corn futures and manage a hedge fund, why not gamble a bit in the movie business?” he says.

“I’d say that there is real money to be made by being the guy that collects and holds all of this money, the theater owner,” Bernard adds, “but I don’t see a bunch of Wall Street money heading into that. Nobody wants to show movies; they want to make them.”

There are two reasons why investors put their money into making and not showing. One is the marginal but tangible benefits of meeting famous people and occasionally hanging with legendary, world-renowned creatives (at lunch or business meetings, or at least at parties). Not just social but also spiritual benefits. The other, which feeds to some extent off the first, is the access that film investors sometimes have in these circles to educated, breathtaking women with immaculate genes and refined breeding.

As Tom Wolfe pointed out in The Painted Word, which looked at the tendency of the super-rich to purchase modern art and, in some cases, develop relationships with artists, nothing matters as much to people with money as the notion that people whose place in history is assured because of their fame or their artistry regard them as a member of the club, or at least as members with honorary status.

To say that a significant portion of today’s hedge-fund multi-millionaires lack grace and refinement is putting it very, very mildly. Such people naturally crave (and in some cases are desperate for) the assurances and status-upgrades that only famous artist elites can bestow.

Creative X-factor women with beautiful exotic looks are usually bored by corn-future investor types, but their cousins — beautiful elegant women who haven’t much edge or talent, or are too lazy to develop what they have — will sometimes entertain overtures from dull guys if they’re rich enough. You never know where things can lead. The key thing is access, and these investor types, in their dreams, live for the chance at meeting and then, given the right vibe and circumstance, pitching these women.

I swear to God that 90% of the financial action in the movie business happens because of these two things.