The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has bitch-slapped the Los Angeles Film Critic Association for…uhm, not inviting him to cover its awards ceremony on Saturday night as a reporter and for refusing to discuss the matter. I tried to attend the LAFCA awards ceremony a couple of times in the old days (i.e., the mid ’90s), but they always said no. Now they’ve said no to O’Neil also, and the org’s president Lael Lowenstein has declined to explain why or whatever.

So LAFCA has hermetic tendencies as a group. Leave us alone, no guests, it’s our show. Not very attractive, but not exactly a huge crime either.
“The LAFCA stance is unprecedented,” O’Neil writes. “Outside journalists are invited to cover the awards fete of the New York Film Critics Circle. Everyone’s invited to see the Critics Choice Awards bestowed by the Broadcast Film Critics Association — they just aired on VH1. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globes gala is, ahem, usually televised — and will be, in truncated form, this Sunday.
“LAFCA policy is irresponsible and indefensible,’ according to former LAFCA president Jack Mathews, who is now film critic of the New York Daily News.”
About a third of the way into the piece O’Neil also hits LAFCA for having lax membership standards. This part is a little more interesting.

The Hollywood Foreign Press has taken over the Golden Globes announcement ceremony, and has announced that pretty much any TV network is invited to cover without the threat of WGA picketing. The new plan was obviously announced in the wake of HFPA and NBC coming to a parting of the ways.
“Following reports from insiders of financial bickering with NBC, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. said Friday that it will take complete control over Sunday’s event,” according to Variety’s Josef Adalian and Michael Schneider. “That means any network that would like to offer live coverage can. The WGA, meanwhile, confirmed Friday that it will not dispatch pickets to the event, in light of the format change to a general news conference rather than as an NBC exclusive event.
“After discussions with NBC, Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Jorge Camara today announced that the HFPA will have complete control of its 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards Announcement that is scheduled to take place Sunday, January 13 at 6:00 pm Pacific in the International Ballroom of The Beverly Hilton,” the HFPA said in a statement. “Under the new arrangement, there will be no restrictions placed on media outlets covering the press conference.”
“NBC says it will still offer live coverage of the event, even though it no longer has an exclusive. In a statement, WGA said: “In light of this change to the program, the WGA gave the HFPA our assurances that there would be no picket of their press conference on Sunday.”

In a 1.11 Huffington Post-ing, Lawrence O’Donnell has sided with my view that within the Democratic primary realm, John Edwards has more or less become the new Ralph Nader.
“John Edwards is a loser,” he declares. “He has won exactly two elections in his life and lost 31. Only one of his wins and all of his losses were in presidential primaries and caucuses. He remains perfectly positioned to continue to lose with a Kucinich-like consistency.
“Nothing but egomania keeps Edwards in the race now. All presidential candidates are egomaniacs but some of them have party status worth preserving that forces them to drop out when they hit the wall. A loser like Edwards has no status or dignity to lose. Campaigning and losing is his life. So, he will continue his simple-minded, losing campaign and deny Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the one-on-one contest they deserve.”
O’Donnell then writes that Edwards voters “would split evenly between Senators Obama and Clinton if Edwards dropped out.” Really? Edwards voters have always struck me as too militant to be content with Clinton, but maybe O’Donnell is right.
“If John Edwards stays in the race, he might, in the end, become nothing other than the Southern white man who stood in the way of the black man. And for that, he would deserve a lifetime of liberal condemnation.
“The white male monopoly on the Democratic nomination has finally come to an end. Someone has to tell John Edwards.”

The Academy’s short list of nine foreign-language films will be decided and announced next Tuesday, and then the screenings of these nine finalists — which in a fair and just world would include Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days — will begin a week from today.
The problem, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, is that some blue-hairs who are voting to decide which foreign films will be on the short list aren’t big fans of 4 Months, or at least they were after seeing it late last year. Of course, Mungiu’s film should be on the final nominee list of five, and, to go by all the awards it’s won so far, certainly ought to win.

Talk about two more cool Sundance ’08 movies, passed along last night. One is Alex Rivera‘s Sleep Dealer (Dramatic Competition), which has been described as a futuristic Mexican sci-fi drama by way of William S. Burroughs. “Gorgeous, intelligent, and intensely imaginative…churning with visual energy and originality…a fascinating and prescient work of science fiction that is as politically engaged as enjoyable to watch,” say the SFF program notes. Except you can’t trust these, of course, so you have to lean on party chatter.

The other is Andy Fleming‘s Hamlet 2 (Premiere), about an oddball high school teacher (Steve Coogan) threatened with job loss who desperately stages an original production of a sequel to Shakespeare’s classic. Catherine Keener costars. Written by Fleming and Pam Brady; executive produced by Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa and Michael Flynn.

“After two weeks of informal talks to lay groundwork, the Directors Guild of America is set to begin formal negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on Saturday, Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton reported a few minutes ago, noting that “the perception in the biz is that DGA has become the de facto negotiator for the WGA given the lack of communication between WGA and AMPTP since the latter broke off talks on Dec. 7.”
The interesting part is Littleton’s statement that DGA leaders “are known to have held extensive backchannel conversations with AMPTP reps during the past two weeks in an effort to hammer out details [to] ensure that the sides will be able to make significant progress when the formal sessions begin.” She’s right, but I was told by three sources last night (including a name director) that the progress of the back-channel talks has in fact been pretty bad. The director’s impression was that DGA negotiators concluded a few days ago that the AMPTP wasn’t even half-serious. “They just seemed belligerent,” “not constructive,” “they’re looking to break the union,” etc. The WGA, I think he meant.

Over at idrinkyourmilkshake.com, a guy named Jurgen is offering, for a limited time and while supplies last, to set up idrinkyourmilkshake.com email accounts free for anybody who wants them and leaves a post about There Will Be Blood.

I never could see Crispin Glover inside the “Grendel” in Robert Zemeckis‘s Beowulf. But I can foresee some people out there in ticket-buying land seeing…uhm, experiencing a little flashback ping in the coming days. Maybe. That’s all I’m going to say.

Does anyone remember that scene in At Close Range when Sean Penn and his gang are getting ready to rob a truck, and Penn tells Crispin Glover to stand watch and tell them when he sees it coming down the road? Glover eventually spots it, but he can’t just spit out the words “here it comes.” Because he’s “Crispin Glover”, he gets all spazzy and tongue-tied as he says in that half-nerdy, half-girly voice with one of his hands patting the back of his head, “Uhhmm….haaaeeeyyy? ….here comes the truck!”

“You were dead-on about needing to see There Will Be Blood twice. The first time I saw it I was extremely frustrated by it, especially the sudden and shocking ending, but the second time it went down like a milkshake. I was wondering why you would board a plane to San Fran to see it a second time, but now I understand why.” — HE reader Adam Graham, received this morning.

Picturehouse threw a party last night at Il Ceilo for Marion Cotillard, the favored Best Actress contender for her performance in Olivier Dahan‘s La Vie en Rose. The usual press contingent attended, and so did Colin Farrell (who gives his best performance in years in Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream), The Lives of Others director-writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and producer Mark Johnson (The Notebook, The Rookie).

La Vie en Rose star and Best Actress contender Marion Cotillard — Thursday, 1.10.07, 8:25 pm

Producer Mark Johnson, Picturehouse chief Bob Berney, Variety columnist Anne Thompson, Variety feature writer Sharon Swart at last night’s Picturehouse soiree — Thursday, 1.10.06, 8:55 pm

The Lives of Others director-writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Bob Berney — Thursday, 1.10.07, 7:05 pm

In yesterday’s N.Y. Times Pew Research Center president Andrew Kohut wrote that a “possible explanation” for the perplexing difference between the Barack Obama poll numbers just before the New Hampshire primary (way ahead of Hillary Clinton by at least 7 or 8 points) and his actual vote tally (which resulted in a loss to Clinton by three points) “cannot be ignored.”

He was referring to “the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor. Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.”
Kohut has to state his case carefully, this being the N.Y. Times and all, but he’s obviously doing a very careful dance.
Let’s try some plain language. If Will Rogers was still around and was trying to say the same thing, it might come out like this: “The common folk aren’t stupid. They know how things work, so when some fella calls ’em on the phone and asks how they’re votin’, they’re gonna play it like anybody else. But it’s a different story when it comes to the privacy of a voting booth.'”
Mel Brooks said it this way about 40 years ago. The fact that people laughed at this scene — jokes aren’t funny unless they connnect to something real that Average Joes instantly recognize — tells you almost the same thing that Kohut is saying.
I’ve been saying it all along — go outside the cities, the affluent suburbs and the college towns, and America is a nation of enlightened color-blind humanists. Or, as Gene Wilder says to Cleavon Little…

I’ve just gotten clearance to post a Cloverfield review, but I’m at a Starbucks on West Pico and have to be back at my home in 25 minutes in order to let a plumber in, so I’m just going to post what I’ve written about it in a letter to a friend. I’ll add to this later this morning:

Cloverfield is a monster film unlike any other — a complete original, but no less of a rock’ em-sock ’em for that.
It’s amazing in that it’s so short (by my watch about 74 minutes without credits), and yet so fierce. If Allen Ginsberg didn’t already own the title I would suggest that they call it Howl. This is not your father’s Ray Harryhausen rampaging- monster flick. Those movies, comparatively, were parlor dramas for the tame of heart. This movie is REM madness. It is Guillermo del Toro on a tab of brown acid with a little crack thrown in.
Cloverfield is a post-9.11 fever dream. As if a person who’s been through 9.11 in lower Manhattan has gone to bed traumatized and shaking with dread, and this is the dream they have. Illogical, ferocious, madball, all-engulfing….but very much of our world. Not It Came From Beneath The Sea but It Came From Someplace Deep in the National Psyche.
I don’t want to draw overly literal parallels here, but you can’t tell me this thing isn’t 9.11-inspired. You can say it isn’t and that’s fine, but I’m not buying it. Nobody will. The travelling dust cloud threatening to engulf everyone, the crowds walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, the earthquake-like impact that everyone feels at the very beginning, the molten explosion and the flying projectiles (like the scrap metal and wheels of the jets sailing down into the streets after the second plane hit)….gimme a break.
It has the illogic and surrealness of a Luis Bunuel nightmare because (and this is the genius of it) the beast doesn’t make “sense” in the way that ’50s monster films did. Explanations are entirely up to you, the viewer, because the Cloverfield victims don’t have clue #1.
In the watching of monster movies, we’ve all been trained to expect permutations of prehistoric beasts or enlarged versions of real-life animals (like King Kong). This guy…I don’t know what he is but he’s winning. (Kidding.) He’s a nightmare that “means” nothing but says everything. He’s a vision out of a Grimm Brothers fable, but one written by a deranged Matt Damon or Heath Ledger while locked in a 19th Century mental ward. He’s a fiend that a heroin addict might see in his sleep during his first night in rehab.