I sat down early Sunday evening inside a spacious, softly lit Culver City cafe and spoke with Frozen River star Melissa Leo. She’s blonde-ish these days (part of a look she’s using for the currently filming Welcome to the Rileys, in which she plays the estranged wife of James Gandolfini) and very thin and…well, looking good, which is to say sexier, healthier-seeming and more spiritually centered than the frazzled trailer-dweller she plays in that three-month-old Sony Classics release.

Melissa Leo outside of Akasha in Culver City — Sunday, 10.26.08, 6:35 pm

After catching her portrayal of that desperate, financially strapped mom trying to make ends meet by smuggling illegals over the Canadian border, I told myself (as did many others) that Leo is the first hands-down Best Actress contender of ’08. It’s one of those performances that are not so much “acted” as occupied or lived in. A character gripped, turned around and held onto.

And yet Leo is now one of three Best Actress contenders in Sony Classics releases — herself, Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married and Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long . The declared policy from SPC co-president Michael Barker is that none of these three will reap a disproportionate share of press ink and/or trade ads, but one can’t help but wonder. Doesn’t the newer movie or performance always seem to get the grease?

Leo certainly seems the most indie-ish of the three. Meaning that she appears to be the most self-sufficient and stand-aloneish by way of being (or seeming) less on the corporately-funded limousine circuit. Plus the earthy intensity and hardscrabble conviction that she puts out every time she stands up and opens her mouth in a film, or shares an opinion about any strong belief over a dinner table. She’s the real deal.

Leo in Frozen River

Leo is certainly one of the two or three most gifted and intensely watchable American actresses of a certain age working in movies today. (Along with Meryl Streep and…I don’t know who else to name right now. It’s too hard to decide.) I became convinced of this five years ago after catching her as Benicio del Toro‘s suffering domestic partner in Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s 21 Grams.

“Look at me, I did it on my own, landed the best role of my lifetime and hit it out of the park,” her face and life and career seem to be saying about the Frozen River deal and the general here-and-now.

A friend suggested last night that Leo is the female Richard Jenkins in the ’08 Oscar race. He half-believes they should actually do interviews together, going out of the circuit as the Ma and Pa Kettle of talented indie-level award campaigners. He’s not being a smart-ass — it’s just that he feels they would get a little more attention this way and stand a better chance of inspiring Academy members to actually pop in those Frozen River and The Visitor DVDs.

This fellow also believes that the presumed and/or expected award-quality performances from Meryl Streep in Doubt, Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road and The Reader, Angelina Jolie in Changeling, and Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — all big-name actresses with more heavily-bankrolled campaigns behind them — may stand a better chance of being nominated. “Why the hell would that necessarily be?” I argued. “Because it makes Academy members feel better, to vote for venerated brand names?”

“Well, maybe Leo will win the Spirit Award for Best Actress,” he then said. No…no consolation prize! Leo has been too good in too many other films. She’s too talented and intense and has worked too hard and long and well to be fobbed off. This is her year, her time.

According to her IMDB page Leo has acted in 13 films since completing Frozen River. OKay, so maybe it’s actually ten or twelve or fourteen, but she’s obviously not letting the grass grow.

Anyway, here‘s the mp3. You can hear our discussion pretty well at first, although gradually the music gets louder and then groups of four and six are seated nearby and start in with the yappy-yap-yap, and before you know it Leo and I are leaning forward a bit more in order to hear. And then the yappies start in with the red wine and the giggling, and then laughing uproariously every so often. And then the owners turn up the music even louder, and this time it’s Mick Jagger. The only thing is missing is a trio of guitar-strumming Mexican guys coming up to the table and singing “Por un Amor.”

Update: It’s 1:32 pm, and I’ve changed my mind about yanking Josh Brolin. I was weak. Brolin is back in. Original 1:21 pm post: Earlier this week I withdrew Josh Brolin‘s W. performance from the Oscar Balloon, and I feel badly about it. Every press person I’ve spoken to thinks his performance is spot-on and emotionally genuine — they all get the sadness and the lost feeling at the end. But nobody would stand with me and call it Oscar worthy. Nobody did any cartwheels in the lobby about it, as I did.

Probably, I guess, because the film was not a volcano or a motorcycle. It was measured, straight, sharp, and rigorously based on reported and researched facts. Whatever else it is or was, it didn’t start any fires. So I gave up. Does that make me a consensus columnist, unwilling to stand against the tide? To some extent, truth be told, yes. But in other ways, no. I’ve been a stand-aloner all my life, but you have to pick your fights.

High School Musical 3, which I wouldn’t see with a snub-nosed .38 jammed into my ribs, turned out to be a Friday-night sensation (it reportedly dropped 10% on Saturday) which means it will only have $42 million as of Sunday evening instead of Steve Mason’s projected $55 million.

Mason initially predicted a weekend gross between $35 and $38 million on 10.22, and then reported a projected 3-day haul in the region of $55 million.

“For all its sophistication, Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche is oddly fond of poop jokes and, indeed, of poop shots. Is there really no better way to dramatize the frail health of your character” — Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s Caden Cotard — “than by showing the discolored stream of his urine? The problem is not one of bad taste, to which the director is welcome, but the obviousness — dare I say, the dullness — with which he nags away at the sight of debilitation, in body and spirit alike.

Illustrationm by Robert Risko

“There has long been a strain of sorry lassitude in Kaufman’s work, and here it sickens into the morbid. Although Hoffman appears in almost every scene, he is seldom given the chance to shrug off his blue mood and demonstrate the dazzling range of which he is capable. One longs for the Hoffman of The Talented Mr. Ripley, all crowing tones and carroty crew cut. I have heard him, in an interview, say how freed up he felt by that film’s director, the late Anthony Minghella, but Kaufman seems to be following the reverse procedure.

“Such zip as we get is provided by performers in the secondary roles, notably the women: Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, and, phlegmatic as ever, Samantha Morton. (The best gag in the film is that Hazel’s home is forever on fire; she lives there quite cheerfully, never explaining the flames, and barely noticing them. Luis Bunuel would be proud of her.) To what end, however, are these actresses devoting their panache? In short, what is Synecdoche, New York about?

“Well, there are three commonplaces on which it repeatedly riffs. One is what you might call the romantic-pathetic theory of imagination: any alternative reality that we design and furnish, when we conceive a work of art, is always to some extent a stand-in for the puny or pitiful one that we have been personally landed with. The second and most imperishable truth is: we grow old, and perish. And the third says: all you need is love.

“These are noble principles to pursue; unless the pursuit is waged with gusto, however, it threatens to slump into the sententious, and that is what happens here. With so much screen time being allotted to Caden’s bad marriage and pustular health problems, his majestic production doesn’t get going properly until the second half of the film, and by then we don’t care enough (worse still, we don’t know enough, such is the vagueness of its guiding rubric) to mind whether it triumphs or flops.

“Compare Dennis Potter‘s great mini-series of the nineteen-eighties, The Singing Detective, and you will see much the same setup — a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch — rendered with unstinting vigor. And, should you still have a taste for the fancies of a fading man, try Orson Welles’s ,em>The Immortal Story, or a little picture of his called Citizen Kane, all of which, I sometimes think, could be floating within Kane’s cranium, like snow inside a globe.

“In each case, there is joy — not just a mournful snickering, as carried in Charlie Kaufman’s bag of tricks, but the breath of divine pleasure — in the conjuring of dreams. If you want to show a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, go right ahead, but give that hour all the life you can.” – from Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review, dated 11.3.08.

Warner Home Video’s double-disc release of a remastered Quo Vadis has two selling points, which are (a) Peter Ustinov‘s portrayal of Nero and (b) Miklos Rosza‘s score. Otherwise it feels like a wash. I’ve never had the slightest interest in seeing it. Partly because I’ve never read a truly rousing review, and partly due to Robert Taylor, an actor I’ve never liked and have always tried to avoid, being the lead.

Is there any big-time star of the old studio system of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s who matters less to anything or anyone right now than Taylor? Just as some old-time actors have a vitality and an edge that transcends time and fashion and gives them a kind of perennial status, actors like Taylor bring only stodginess and antiquation to the table — they’re relics, timepieces, men of their time but not in the least bit ours. On top of which he was a “friendly witness” in front of HUAC in the late ’40s.

Somewhere within Prague’s Stare Mesto, taken last week and sent along by Jett, who just returned to London after a visit to the Czech Republic capital as well as Budapest (seven hours from Prague by bus).

Five or six days ago in Prague

“There are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country,” N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich writes in today’s edition. “But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included.

“Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even ‘racists for Obama,’ as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.

“The original ‘racist for Obama,’ after all, was none other than Obama’s own white, Kansas-raised grandmother, the gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, whom he visited in Hawaii on Friday. In ‘Dreams From My Father,’ Obama wrote of how shaken he was when he learned of her overwhelming fear of black men on the street. But he weighed that reality against his unshakeable love for her and hers for him, and he got past it.

“When Obama cited her in his speech on race last spring, the right immediately accused him of ‘throwing his grandmother under the bus.’ But Obama’s critics were merely projecting their own racial hang-ups. He still loves his grandmother. He was merely speaking candidly and generously — like an adult — about the strange, complex and ever-changing racial dynamics of America. He hit a chord because many of us have had white relatives of our own like his, and we, too, see them in full and often love them anyway.

“Such human nuances are lost on conservative warriors of the Allen-McCain-Palin ilk. They see all Americans as only white or black, as either us or them. The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.”

A 70mm presentation of West Side Story played last night at Santa Monica’s Aero. It’s a stodgy, dated, mediocre film in so many ways. But the Leonard Bernstein score (and the Stephen Sondheim lyrics) will always be beautiful, so I delayed a dinner date so I could drive over and buy a ticket in order to watch the first 20 or so minutes, which is the only part I can stand.

The rest of it is mixed to painful. The fresh red paint on the tenement walls is ludicrous. The casting of Richard Beymer as Tony and Natalie Wood as Maria was fatal. Even back in the day people were shocked — appalled — at the use of the term “daddy-o.”

I’ve barely seen any Blu-rays of classic black-and-white films, but enough to know that the format is heaven for anyone with a serious monochrome jones. So my interest in the forthcoming Scott Derrickson-Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) is, I have to admit, at the very least matched by interest in the remastered Blu-ray of the1951 black-and-white original with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Billy Gray, Sam Jaffe and Hugh Marlowe, which is out on 12.2.

An MSNBC reporter in Scranton said this morning he’d recently spoken to a middle-aged woman who’s still undecided about Obama-McCain, still wants to know more, etc. Meaning, of course, that she’s (a) profoundly uncurious or otherwise lazy, (b) intellectually challenged, or (c) would rather not say what she’s actually thinking to a TV reporter. (Or a combination of all three.) Most voters of her ilk are probably going to break for McCain, which might mean a final national lead for Obama in the range of six or seven points rather than nine or ten when all is said and done.

Then the reporter spoke about John MCain planning to hold a rally tomorrow evening in Putzville, Pennsylvania, and my mood immediately brightened. For 15 or 20 seconds. Until I did a search and saw how the town’s name is actually spelled. If only!