Earlier today I posted a flattering Sean Penn quote about The Hurt Locker. He called it one of the all-time great war films, comparable only to Elem Klimov‘s Come and See, a1985 Russian film, and Hal Ashby‘s Coming Home (1978). In response to this a director friend wrote the following:

“I don’t know if it’s fair to categorize Coming Home as a war film,” he began, “but Elam Klimov‘s Come and See most certainly is. Furthermore Penn’s assertion that it’s one of the greatest of that genre is precise and fair. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the final hour of the film, much of it a second-by-second depiction of an atrocity in a Belarusian village, may be the finest filmmaking in the history of the art.

“Anybody who has devoted any study to Operation Barbarossa and is aware of the behavior both of the Einsatzgruppen and the partisans who fought them will tell you that it is about an accurate a depiction of these events as is possible. The ending of the film is magical. The title of this film (it was once called Kill Hitler) comes from the Book of Revelations, and the film has interesting Christian undertones throughout. Bizarre, since the film was the product of an atheist regime.

“Have you seen it? If not, you should hang your head in shame. It is mandatory viewing for anybody calling themselves a film scholar of any kind.”

No, I haven’t seen it. I will soon enough. I obviously have Penn to thank.

Peter Jackson doesn’t look small sitting next to Quentin Tarantino (who’s big but not huge) and Kathryn Bigelow — he looks like a Hobbitt. He looks so small it almost seems like a visual effect. And yet he doesn’t seem that runty in the shots in which he’s framed alongside James Cameron and Jason Reitman. (Lee Daniels is at Reitman’s left.)

Here’s part two and part three of this hot-shot director discussion produced by the Hollywood Reporter.

I’d like to see Tom Thurman‘s Nick Nolte: No Exit because I’ve always enjoyed Nolte’s brutish charm. I don’t care for this trailer, frankly — I hate it when actors joke about other actors in a too-chummy way, trying for light banter as they go along — but Nolte is one of the great madmen. I’ve been told that a disc of Thurman’s doc is arriving via snail mail

My admiration of Nolte began with his legendary performance as “Samurai Ray” Hicks in Who’ll Stop The Rain. Except the only available DVD of Karel Reisz ‘s film looks awful in parts. It’s nearly unwatchable for the first ten or twelve minutes.

So now four Sundance 2010 films will be quickly available on VOD following the festival’s end. Linas Philips‘ Bass Ackwards, which New Video and Zipline Entertainment will offer on multiple platforms starting on 2.1.10, was the first to be announced. Today IFC’s Sundance Selects revealed three more VOD quickies — Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross‘s Shock Doctrine, Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie‘s Daddy Longlegs (formerly known as Go Get Some Rosemary), and Daniel Grau‘s Les 7 Jours du Talion (7 Days).

Longlegs, a character-driven drama about becoming an adult, and 7 Days, a torture-revenge piece, will debut on VOD on Friday,1.22, after they first screen at Sundance. I don’t know when Shock is being VOD’ed but you’d have to figure sooner rather thanb later.

At a recent Palm Springs Film Festival gathering Hurt Locker producer-screenwriter Mark Boal introduced Sean Penn to The Wrap‘s Steve Pond, and they were off to the races. Boal’s film, said Penn, “is one of the three greatest war pictures ever made,” the other two being Come and See and Coming Home. (What about Paths of Glory and A Walk in the Sun?)

“It’s not an anti-war film, it’s not right or left…it doesn’t take sides,” said Penn. “It’s real life, executed skillfully and powerfully. It trusts that real life is incredibly dramatic, and it says to you, there are times when it might be the right thing to support war – but know that war hurts. The Hurt Locker hurts.

“It’s dealing with a territory where I spent time I am an envious person, and I wanted to criticize it. But I couldn’t, because it gets it right.”

The Directors Guild of America has blown off three directors who delivered two superb films — An Education‘s Lone Scherfig and A Serious Man‘s Joel and Ethan Coen — while nominating the director of a clearly divisive and problematic film — Precious helmer Lee Daniels — in large part (let’s be honest) because boomer-aged liberals in the DGA needed to put the west-of-Fairfax white-guilt factor to bed.

Are you going to stand there and look me in the eye and tell me Precious was a better directed film than An Education or A Serious Man? Don’t even reply because we know the answer and I don’t want to hear any bullshit equivocations.

I’m not totally dismissing Precious — it’s a moving, semi-decent film in portions — but I would strenuously argue that Tom Ford‘s A Single Man is a much more moving and accomplished work, and is surely more of a carefully finessed film from a visual-aesthetic viewpoint. A Single Man is Vanity Fair-level and Precious is Star magazine. Those red-carpet fantasy sequences with Gabby? I want to vomit.

The Daniels nomination is a political celebration of mediocrity by way of racial point-spreading. Nominate Daniels and you’re good to go. Don’t nominate Daniels and the word might get around that you’re a bit of a closet racist. Why risk it?

DGA members also nominated Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, James Cameron for Avatar, Jason Reitman for Up in the Air and Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds for its top feature award.

Four days ago the smoking-in-movies issue returned for the 37th time. It started with Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, bitch-slapping Avatar for Sigourney Weaver‘s character being a chronic smoker. Then New York‘s David Edelstein suggested that movies with cigarette smoking should get an automatic R rating. Then David Poland said “what?” And then Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale jumped in.

Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless

I’ve said this so many times it’s coming out of my ears. People should be free to do anything they want of a self-destructive nature — cigarettes, booze, compulsive eating, coke, heroin — as long as theykeep it to themselves. And actors should be free to do anything they want that will make a performance connect. But smoking has lost its coolness, and actors who lean on it repeatedly or compulsively are boring, and I’m starting to say “fuck ’em” when they pull one out and strike a match.

Here’s how I put it two and a half years ago:

“The only people I know in real life who smoke are (a) young and courting a kind of contrarian identity, (b) older with vaguely self-destructive attitudes, and in some cases beset by addiction problems, (c) serious party people with unmistakable self-destructive compulsions and tendencies, and (d) life’s chronic losers — riffraff, low-lifes, bums, scuzzballs. Cigarette smoking used to be extremely cool but no longer, and that goes for actors in movies too.

“All the above associations seem to kick in every time sometime lights up in a film, and it’s gotten so that I don’t want to watch characters in movies smoke at all. Unless it’s a period film or unless they look extremely cool doing it (a la Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless), but very few actors have that ability.

“I smoked for years and years but I don’t any more, and I don’t like the way cigarettes smell unless I’m in Europe. (It’s different over there). Smoking isn’t outright suicide but it’s the next thing to it, and every time someone lights up in a movie it half-pisses me off and makes me think negatively about the film in general, especially if this or that actor smokes all through the movie and looks and acts like a lowlife.

“Criminals in movies are always smoking because of (b), (c) and (d), but I think it’s way too easy for an actor to use smoking as a piece of business. It’s tedious and repellent. It makes me want to see the actor get shot or at least beaten up.

“I think the sun has really set on the sexiness of smoking in movies, and I’m starting to think that actors who light up all the time in front of the camera are second-raters.”

NY Times DVD/Bluray columnist Dave Kehr recently lamented the winnowing process by which thousands of obscure films have been shelved and forgotten because studios “felt that more obscure films wouldn’t be profitable enough to justify striking new prints and preparing new digital transfers.

“As a result huge swaths of our film heritage have vanished. After 10 years of DVD the studios seem to have concluded that all the films that will make money in home video have already been released; that number is a very small percentage of their output. Turner Classic Movies online says that of the 162,984 films listed in its database (based on the authoritative AFI Catalog), only 5,980 (3.67 percent) are available on home video.”

If you’d asked me to spitball the percentage of films on DVD compared to the total amount made, I would have said maybe 10% to 15%. But less than 4%?

We all suspect that the majority of titles that haven’t made it to DVD are marginal junk, but it’s a near-certainty that at least 5% of the unseen are worth seeing/renting/owning. Many are listed on the left side of Hollywood Elsewhere, in the lower-left mustard-colored section. The list of DVD Unreleased has been compiled and maintained over the last year or so by Moises Chiullan.

The films include Saint Joan (Otto Preminger, 1957), Macabre (William Castle, 1958), The Fiend Who Walked the West (G. Douglas, 1958), Five Gates to Hell (Clavell, 1959), Key Witness (Phil Karlson, 1960), Summer and Smoke (Peter Glenville, 1961), The Chapman Report (George Cukor,1962), Bachelor Flat (Tashlin, 1962 –on Hulu], The L Shaped Room (Forbes, 1963), The Chalk Garden (Ronald Neame, 1964), A Thousand Clowns (Coe, 1965), You’re a Big Boy Now (Coppola, 1966), The Whisperers (Forbes, 1967), Dark of the Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968), Skidoo (Preminger, 1968), Last Summer (Frank Perry, 1969), The Comic (Carl Reiner, 1969); The Revolutionary (Williams, 1970), The Landlord (Hal Ashby, 1970), Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Perry, 1970), Tropic of Cancer (Strick, 1970), I Never Sang for My Father (Cates, 1970), Pretty Maids All In A Row (Roger Vadim, 1971), Sometimes a Great Notion (Paul Newman, 1971), Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (Turman, 1971), ‘Doc’ (Perry, 1971), The Music Lovers (Russell, 1971), Savage Messiah (Russell, ’72 or ’73), Drive, He Said (Jack Nicholson, 1971), The Steagle (Sylbert, 1971), The Last Movie (Hopper, 1971), Made For Each Other (Bean, 1971), The Day the Clown Cried (Jerry Lewis, 1972), Hickey & Boggs (Culp, 1972), The Carey Treatment (Edwards, 1972), Play It As It Lays (Perry, 1972), Pete ‘n’ Tillie (Ritt, 1972), Slither (Zieff, 1973), Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (Pakula, 1973), Man on a Swing (Perry, 1974) and so on.

HE reader and correspondent Terry Woods reports “a friend just got back from an invitational screening of Avatar plus a James Cameron q & a. The director stated that his first cut of the film was 4 hours and 18 minutes. A fair amount of Sigourney Weaver‘s scenes were deleted and other secondary characters were pared down. A sizable number of special-effects scenes were also excised including a battle between Jake’s Avatar and some howling Pandoran animal. In fact the beast itself was excised completely from the final theatrical cut.

Presumably much of this material will resurface as an extended Avatar Director’s Cut DVD/Blu-ray, which would also include the Jake-Neytiri sex scene.

Winners at the 36th annual Eloi Choice Awards included Twilight (Favorite Movie, Favorite On-Screen Team, Favorite Franchise), Taylor Lautner (Favorite Breakout Movie Actor), Sandra Bullock (Favorite Movie Actress), The Proposal (Favorite Comedy Movie), Inglourious Basterds (Favorite Independent Movie), Hugh Jackman (Favorite Wolverine), Jim Carrey (Favorite Comedic Star), Miley Cyrus (Favorite Breakout Movie Actress….in what film?), and Johnny Depp (Favorite Movie Actor).