An Invictus screening begins in 28 minutes (i.e., 6:30 pm) so I don’t have time to write anything about my chat yesterday afternoon with Crazy Heart costar Maggie Gyllenhaal. Okay, I can repeat the general feeling out there that her performance as a 30ish single mom who falls in love with Jeff Bridges‘ roly-poly alcoholic country music star is a quiet, unforced, true-heart thing. More lived-in than “performed.” A supporting standout, in the view of most I’ve spoken to.

Crazy Heart costar Maggie Gyllenhaal at the end of our sit-down yesterday at a low-key place on Tenth Avenue — Tuesday, 11.25.09, 3:25 pm

Gyllenhaal also has the most beautiful eyes I’ve been close to in a long time. There’s something extra-vivid about them live. The last time I saw eyes this radiant and intense was when I got close to Elizabeth Taylor at a Manhattan party in the early ’80s.

I shot some video of our discussion but it’s taking forever to load and convert. Later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Mary Walsh is a Canadian comedian who’s created a running bit out of ambushing Canadian politicians as her character, Marg Delahunte. She recently tried this with Sarah Palin during a book signing. I say again — Palin is a flesh-and-blood incarnation of Martin Sheen‘s President Gregg Stillson in David Cronenberg‘s The Dead Zone.

A fundamental reason why so many people of taste and refinement have been talking with great admiration about Peter Capaldi‘s In The Loop performance as the sewer-mouthed Malcolm Tucker is due to envy and dream-fulfillment. Capaldi’s tirades have not only made him a dark-horse contender for a Best Supporting Actor nomination but instructed (or reminded) some of us that profanity can be artful — it can be delivered with absolute precision and beauty. You just need a team of brilliant writers feeding you the lines.

In The Loop‘s Peter Capaldi

Swearing can be emotionally cathartic for the speaker, but it’s almost always ugly for the listener. Which is why Capaldi’s imaginative and vigorous motor-mouthing in In The Loop is such a trip. Most if not all of us sound coarse and ill-mannered and pathetic in a 15 year-old boy sort of way on those rare occasions when we swear about something or someone. It would be wonderful — bliss! — if we could swear like Tucker on occasion, or even just once.

The Loop artisans and masons, of course, are the writers. Capaldi just makes their stuff sound right, but of course that’s what all acting basically is, isn’t it? Yesterday Dark Horizon‘s Paul Fischer posted an interview with Capaldi that went like this at one point:

Fischer: “Now, this film is as much about language as it is about character. I’m just wondering how much input did you have into the way that he speaks? I mean – and his use of language. Was there any improv at all, or was it all there on the page?”

Capaldi: “It’s largely all done on the page, particularly with Malcolm, because the writers take a lot of time and put a lot of labor into constructing for him, very, very baroque sentences, and ways of speaking. So, my job is to sort of do a congenial check, to make it look as if this highly-polished text is just tripping off my tongue. So – yes, there’s always a gray area.

“[Actors] throw in bits and pieces. How we do the show, or how we did the film, which is the same way we do the show, is that we nail the text. That’s our first responsibility. We shoot a couple of passes where we nail the text. And thereafter, we’re allowed to do sort of rougher versions, where we can loosen up and throw in our own words, if we like. And also, throughout the process, we have days when we improvise around the material. And sometimes a line or whatever comes up that works, and the writers put that into the shooting script. But I wouldn’t — you know, I would say it’s their work, largely.”

What Tennessee Williams plays and film adaptations didn’t feature a handsome (or pretty) young Southern-studcat figure in a prominent role? I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Night of the Iguana, of course. The 1961 film of Summer and Smoke only had Laurence Harvey so that too was an exception. Boom, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots…what others?

In Jodie Markell‘s Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (Paladin, 12.30), the object of desire is played by 28 year-old Chris Evans.

It’s hard to define what makes an appealing movie poster, but the one for Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein‘s How To Fold A Flag just “does it right” on some level. One look and I said to myself, “I want to see this.” It makes what is clearly a left-humanist portrait of Iraq War veterans seem very plain and true and backyard American. Who’s the artist or agency, I wonder?

“With How to Fold a Flag, a diffuse yet fascinating account of four U.S. Army vets readjusting to civilian life, documakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein continue their sympathetic, insightful examination of individuals involved — as soldiers or civilians, willingly or otherwise — in the Iraq War,” Variety‘s Joe Leydon wrote from Toronto last September.

How to Fold a Flag: in theaters 2010 from Nomados Film on Vimeo.

“Unlike The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair or Bulletproof Salesman Tucker and Epperlein’s latest effort comes across as a kind of sequel to their 2004 debut feature, “Gunner Palace, which focused on soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery unit assigned to one of the volatile areas in post-Saddam Baghdad.

“Pic does suggest that each of its subjects will survive, and maybe even thrive, as they continue to distance themselves from what they did, and what was done to them, in Iraq. But for some of them, full recovery is a distant, albeit attainable, goal.”

In the same way that one formerly Democratic U.S. Senator (Connecticut’s Joseph Leiberman) and two conservative Democratic Senators (Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and Arkansas’ Blanche Lincoln) have stubbornly pledged to kill the public-option portion of the health care bill in defiance of common sense and against the wishes of almost everyone, I was the only Envelope Gold Derby Buzzmeter pundit to say “no” to Precious as a Best Picture finalist. In so doing I singlehandedly kept it out of the unanimous column.

I voted as I did not because Precious won’t be Best Picture nominated — of course it will — but because portions of it are so ugly and unpleasant and horrific to sit through that they literally made me convulse. Someone had to stand up and at least symbolically say no. To me the Precious crimes — i.e., the ones committed by Mo’Nique in the context of the film — are not relatable aspects of the human condition. They are so malignant that it’s very hard for me to nod and go “fine, good, well done” even within the remove of dramatic depiction.

I didn’t vote as I did because Precious isn’t a powerfully-acted film that’s finally about caring and compassion — it is that, at least in the third act — but because I feel that a depiction of parenting this cruel and sadistic and beyond-the-pale deplorable — in effect a slow murder of a child by her own mother — must be responded to with an initial vote that says “uhhm, well, okay, it’s a good film and I realize that Dave Karger and all the others are right…but not now.”

Here’s a summary of the yesterday’s L.A. Times/Envelope Gold Derby Buzzmeter poll results, which will be refined and updated as things move along.

The only two unanimous choices for Best Picture (i.e., chosen by all 20 pundits) are Up In The Air and The Hurt Locker. The other big-vote getters are Precious, Invictus, Nine, Up, An Education, Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man.

Again….where is A Serious Man? You’d think that critics and pundits, at least, would understand that (a) now (i.e., mid November to early December) is the time to mix tea-leaf predictions with convictions and persuasions of their own, (b) a lack of soothing emotionality (and a chilly, analytical or even clinical vibe in place of same) is sometimes a hallmark of great, world-class filmmaking and (c) the fact that A Serious Man is ruthlessly brilliant and hilarious and honed like an effin’ diamond…you’d think that critics and pundits might recognize this fact and, you know, have it count for something in their calculations? No?

The leading Best Actor contender is A Single Man‘s Colin Firth, followed by Up In The Air‘s George Clooney, Invictus‘s Morgan Freeman, Nine‘s Daniel Day-Lewis, Crazy Heart‘s Jeff Bridges and The Road‘s Viggo Mortensen,

And in the Best Actress, An Education‘s Carey Mulligan is in the lead, but only a notch ahead of Precious star Gabby Sidibe. Next comes Julia & Julia‘s Meryl Streep, The Last Station‘s Helen Mirren and Bright Star‘s Abby Cornish.