The question about IFC Film’s acquisition of Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me is whether they’ll trim down the beating scenes or run them raw.

And I think we all realize that Roadside Attractions will have its work cut out in selling Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone to Joe Popcorn. It’s a highly respectable drama with a strong lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence (who’s way too attractive to be a believable Ozark girl), but if I know anything about what the dumb-asses like to see…

This is one of the most seminal and resounding Republican theme songs ever recorded. It’s certainly an anthem for boomer-aged Republicans who were teenagers in the mid ’60s. The selfish assholes who never really got what was going on back then, I mean. John Boehner was 17 when it hit the airwaves. Rush Limbaugh was 15. Name me another pop song from any decade that expresses Republican thuggery and fuckitude more concisely.

One of the most deeply rooted images of my entire filmgoing life, and I’ve never seen a decent online frame-capture. (This is just a crummy snap off my plasma screen.) If I could find a exact rendering on canvas I’d hang it on my living-room wall.

Last night The Wrap‘s Eric Kohn spoke to the makers of Catfish — Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman — and Ariel’s brother Nev Schulman, who basically “stars.” He ran into the trio at a Park City ice cream shop (presumably Java Cow), and in so doing asked about suspicions that their film may have been partially staged or fabricated. Their collective answer was “nope, not at all, no way” and “we can prove it.”

Catfish guys Nev Schulman, Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman; object of Nev’s interest.

I have a problem with one aspect of Catfish that I didn’t mention during the festival. Before I mention this I should call it a SPOILER.

During the first 60% of Catfish Nev — a smart, confident and attractive 24 year old — falls into an intriguing online flirtation with a 20something lady who lives in Michigan. (Or so she says.) She has a pretty big honker but is otherwise thin and attractive. Their exchanges, as you might expect, become more and more emotional and sensual. Then they become explicitly sexual. And then suddenly things change.

Once this sinks in it’s quite clear that Nev is fairly glum — you could even say forlorn. And for me this didn’t quite calculate.

I asked myself why would a guy in the youthful prime of his life get so attached to and invested in a woman he’s never met, and whom he knows only through a gallery of online photos and a series of increasingly erotic e-mails? Who would be naive enough in this day and age to get emotionally caught up in a relationship so lacking in any semblance of provable reality?

This seemed especially curious for a guy who’s clearly smart and good-looking and creative and whatnot, and living in a city like New York with all kinds of hook-up options. I could imagine Clem Kadiddlehopper falling for this. Or an overweight dweeby type with halitosis getting caught up in an online fantasy because he might not have much going on. But a guy like Nev…? Doesn’t figure.

During the chat Korn asks Nev if Catfish is a cautionary tale for people who use social networks. “For me, it’s really about vulnerability,” he answers. “I didn’t consider myself a vulnerable person before this happened to me, and now I have to reassess how I put myself into the world.”

Avatar will finish first this weekend with an estimated $30 million, which will be nearly double what Mel Gibson‘s second-place Edge of Darkness is expecting to earn (i.e., $16 million) by Sunday night. The reputedly atrocious When in Rome will finish third with a projected $12,300,000.

James Cameron‘s left-wing sci-fi allegory will have something like $594,472,000 in the bag by Sunday night. Domestically, I mean. It will overtake Titanic as the all-time highest domestic grosser sometime before next Friday. I failed to take note due to Sundance rigors that it edged past Titanic‘s worldwide total ($1,843,201,268) on Monday, 1.25.

“We’re all forgotten sooner or later,” Burt Lancaster allegedly once said. “But not films. That’s all the memorial we should need or hope for.”

It hit me as I read this that there’s never a formal announcement that a person of talent and accomplishment has been forgotten or written off. The fact of an actor being “over” tends to slowly leak or drip into collective consciousness. It’s a very gradual, almost imperceptible process, but it tends to kick in because they haven’t made a film of any perceived value in so long that people have mentally crossed them off the list.

People sense this or privately acknowledge it, but no one ever says it. It’s the same thing as when an actor has a terminal illness — it’s considered ungracious to mention in mixed company. And yet there’s always that moment when suddenly everyone knows and accepts the fact that a given actor is all but done, unplugged, out of the game.

Sometimes “over” results from a combination of an actor having chosen poorly to the point that they’ve diminished their brand, or sometimes life itself decides to diminish it without their input or say-so. Sometimes it’s a matter of an actor having enough money to cruise in style for the rest of their lives, so they don’t seem to care as much as they used to. (A meandering life can be intoxicating if you’re loaded.) Sometimes they’ve gone over the age hill and aren’t being offered well-written roles in quality projects any more.

This latter is happening, I fear, to poor Harrison Ford right now. Why else would he make a piece of TV-movie shite like Extraordinary Measures? My heart goes out to him, and I’m hoping that The Dying of the Light, a Paul Schrader-written thriller to be directed by Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson), will be a rejuvenator.

If you’re Robert Duvall or Eli Wallach or Lancaster or George C. Scott, you’ll keep at it (and in mostly half-decent projects) until you drop. Some actors simply choose to work in anything rather than sit home and wither. What a comedown it was for the great James Stewart when he starred in The Magic of Lassie (’78). And yet acting in a crap film has to be better than doing nothing.

I find it astonishing that millions choose to step away from the grind and the challenge and just chill when they reach a certain age, actors and regular Joes alike. That’s like asking for it. I believe in dying at your desk, or, failing that, keeling over on a street in Paris on your way back from a great dinner with friends. I speak as a son who finds it difficult to control his emotions when he visits his mother in her assisted-living facility.

One immensely comforting thing about writing Hollywood Elsewhere is that I know I’ll never be forced or pressured to write a Hollywood column-equivalent of The Magic of Lassie. I regard HE as the writing-candor equivalent of a combination of The Fog of War, Duck Soup, The Big Sleep, I Heart Huckabees, Kiss Me Deadly, Cinema Paradiso, Wild in the Streets, Point Blank, Sweet Smell of Success, The Harder They Fall, A Serious Man and The American Friend.

It sounds a bit cruel to ask this, but who is more or less over as we speak? That sounds cavalier and insensitive, I realize, and yet people talk this way at industry parties all the time when the mood strikes.

Happy birthday to the great Gene Hackman, who turned 80 today. When I think of my favorite Hackman moment I always default to that heated argument scene with Denzel Washington in Crimson Tide. He’s been retired for five years — hasn’t done anything since ’04’s Welcome to Mooseport. Why would anyone as good as Hackman not want to work? Or at least be open to the right role if it comes along?

Arrived at LaGuardia this evening around 9:30 pm, took the M60 to 125th and Lexington, and then the 4 train down to Union Square, the L train into Brooklyn, etc. It’s Chicago cold out there. The temperature is in the mid teens, but it feels like zero. There’s something about travel that just drains your writing energy.

I’ve just happened upon Paul Schrader’s website — films, writings (reviews from ’65 through the early ’70s), photos. Excellent stuff.

This is four months old, but it’s still pleasing to note that others have used the term “water buffalo” to refer to grotesque, low-rent, self-absorbed moviegoers who interrupt your concentration during a film by talking and/or eating in a loud or rank way. (The term “wildebeest” also applies.)

I’ve seen Martin Scorsese‘s Shutter Island (Paramount, 2.10) and am holding my water. But the latest tracking is looking really good for it. Three weeks from opening and it has almost 40% definite interest in all four quadrants. This should translate into $30 to $35 million on opening weekend. Not everyone is going to like or love it, I’m guessing, but 40% DI in all four groups hasn’t been seen since…what, Sherlock Holmes?