In Contention‘s Guy Lodge has called Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg “a shaggy, often very funny addition to the recent mini-genre of manchild movies.” And Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has termed it “an outstanding L.A. movie.”

“As a study of stasis and of people conscious of not living the lives they had imagined for themselves,” McCarthy continues, “Greenberg offers a bracing undertow of seriousness beneath the deceptively casual, dramatically offhand surface, even if the characters’ vague ambitions and aimless actions leave the film seeming relatively uneventful on a moment-to-moment basis.”

Lodge writes that “Baumbach’s acrid humor has mellowed a little in the California sun, but his preoccupation with the social failings of the chronically self-absorbed is undiminished.”

As Roger, “a fortysomething layabout with undetermined mental issues and a repeatedly stated resolution to “do nothing for awhile,” Ben Stiller “gives this sneakily ingratiating effort a shot at a general audience,” McCarthy notes, “but it will be most appreciated by followers of distinctively flavored, off-center indie-style fare.”

Mumblecore veteran Greta Gerwig “makes her move toward the mainstream with work likely to divide, or at least puzzle, viewers. A big young woman who’s attractive enough but not at all in the usual glamorous-actress mode, she offers no perceptible performance in the popularly received sense; you don’t detect impulse, calculation, yearning, hidden feelings or anything else beneath the surface. She just seems completely real, behaving the way people do, just reacting to things as they happen.

“Either Gerwig is a total natural — most likely — or she has the most invisible technique of any modern actor. Either way, interest will surround her subsequent work.

“Baumbach and co-writer Jennifer Jason Leigh “convey a strong sense of what it’s like to live in [this] city. Except for the opening shots, which seem specifically designed to spotlight Los Angeles at its smoggy worst, Greenberg‘s metropolis is presented from ground level without editorializing and with a fine balance between the beauty and the blight, the ease and the hassle, the luxury and the basic, the stimulating and the banal.”

Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer “has some of the same elements as Chinatown in that it’s about “a hero who is never quite as smart as he believes because he’s looking at only a small section of the puzzle, without realizing that there is more to it than he can take in.

“The script, by Polanski and novelist Robert Harris, does offer clues – but it resolutely puts us in the ghost’s shoes. The Ghost Writer can be frustrating because you only know as much as the main character right up until the final scene. But when it all becomes clear, all the jagged edges go away and the film comes into focus as the well-honed thriller it has been all along.” — from Marshall Fine ‘s 2.16 review.

You want frustrating? The Ghost Writer opens on 2.19 and I’ve received no screening invites from 42West or Summit…zip. Calls and e-mails to various parties have revealed no further information.

There’s a legit transcript of Benicio del Toro‘s visit to the Howard Stern Show last Thursday morning, provided by marksfriggin.com. Here are the YouTube recordings: #1, #2, #3 and #4.

Hard info #1: Benicio “said he was going to do a movie with Scorsese” — a presumed reference to the dreaded Silence — but that got “pushed.” Hard info #2: Benicio said “the Three Stooges thing”,” which he said is basically “three episodes” stitched together, is “still alive but they don’t have a date for that.” Here’s a portion of the transcript:

“Howard read that Benicio’s father was an ogre. Benicio said he was strict but not an ogre. Howard said he read that Benicio’s father called him gay when he said he wanted to be an actor. Benicio laughed at that. He said his father never called him a fag. Howard said his father wanted him to be a lawyer. Benicio said that’s what all parents want.

“Howard said he can picture Benicio with a 10-inch penis that’s wide. He said that Robin Quivers is 10 times better than Emily Blunt would ever be. Benicio got a laugh out of that. Fred threw in some porn clips where a woman was howling like a dog which made him laugh even more.

“Howard asked Benicio if he did Emily Blunt while he was in costume. Benicio asked him to stop with that. He said he never did anything to her.

“Howard asked Benicio about who he’s dating and what’s going on with that. Benicio said he is dating but he’s not talking about who it is. Howard said when you’re with a chick and you bang her after a couple of weeks, you don’t do other women. Benicio agreed with him but he didn’t sound like he was really behind what he was saying.

“Howard told Benicio he should move on to other women if he’s not that into the chick he’s with. He said that he shouldn’t lead them on. Benicio said you have to be moved by the girl. He said if it doesn’t happen then what do you do. Howard said you move on. Howard asked Robin if she would let Benicio do her for just one night. Robin said she’s not looking for that.

“Howard told Benicio to stick with the Wolfman thing and just drag it out all he can. He said he could do Wolfman vs. Mike Tyson and he’d watch it. He said he doesn’t have to keep doing other things.

“Howard said he’s going to predict that this movie is going to come in at number 1 this weekend. Benicio said the only problem is that it’s rated R. Howard said that shouldn’t be an issue. He said kids will sneak into the movie.

“Howard read a quote from Benicio where he talked about how he has to calm down with women. He read the quote and Benicio said the problem is that he can do his own thing. Benicio said that someone else must have written that. Howard said it was a direct quote. Benicio told him to get it on audio. He said he doesn’t think he ever said that.

“Howard asked Benicio what his game plan is. Benicio told him to collaborate with him. He said he was going to do a movie with Scorsese but that got pushed out. He said the Three Stooges thing is still alive but they don’t have a date for that.

“Howard asked Benicio if he can really play Moe. He said he hasn’t worked on it. Howard told him he thinks that they’re the greatest. He said he read that it was going to be Jim Carrey as Curly and Benicio as Moe. He said that he’s not sure that Jim will commit to gaining the weight for the part. Benicio said he hasn’t spoken to him about it. Robin asked who was going to play Larry Fine. It was going to be Sean Penn. Benicio said he thinks that’s a good cast.

Benicio said that he knows it won’t be like the original. He said that “all due respect, my movie” — a reference to The Wolfman — “wasn’t as good as the original. Howard said he has to think it’s better. Benicio said he really doesn’t. Howard told Benicio that he would have flung your fuckin’ ass out of there today if he had screwed up the movie. Robin said that she actually fell in love with the character in the movie.

“Howard asked how you do a Three Stooges movie. Benicio said that it was going to be a remake of some of their short movies. He said he didn’t have exact answers for what it would be about. He said that he would be his own Moe and not be doing an impression of the real Moe. Howard said he just has to have the essence of Moe.

“Gary came in and said that Benicio had to go. He said that they gave them 10 extra minutes. Gary said that he had to go somewhere else. Howard said he has the next movie idea for Benicio: Wolfman vs. The Three Stooges.” “That’s a good idea,” Benicio said. Howard asked, “Should I be the next host of American Idol?” “Definitely,” said Benicio.

“Christina Hendricks thinks all the talk about her body is a little embarrassing,” writes New York‘s Amy Larocca. “‘It kind of hurt my feelings at first,” the Mad Men star remarks. ‘Anytime someone talks about your figure constantly, you get nervous, you get really self-conscious. I was working my butt off on the show, and then all anyone was talking about was my body!'” Which is why Hendricks wore hot lingerie to illustrate the piece (and grace the cover of the current issue).

Larocca, by the way, has also written a shockingly cruel and thoughtless observation about a certain actress whose emotional well-being is near and dear to the politically-correct HE brownshirts. Larocca needs to be slapped down, and I know just the boys for the job.

55 minutes of battery time left means there’s no time to tap out a 750-word Shutter Island review. But here’s that David Edelstein New York pan that’s giving pause to the Friends of Marty crowd. I agree up and down — SI is a long slog and then some. Because it’s purely a movie-atmosphere exercise with zero narrative intrigue (anyone could spot the third-act twist in the trailer), it’s almost as difficult to get through as Kundun.

“Some great directors, as they age, strive to simplify and refine their technique in the hope of getting closer to their subjects,” Edelstein begins, “but Martin Scorsese has happily — perhaps even with relief — moved into a long and not-so-emotionally taxing formalist phase (with fat studio paychecks). He seems to have been drawn to Shutter Island by the chance to quote from quasi-horror asylum B movies like Shock Corridor and Bedlam, and to play the kind of straight-ahead illusion-versus-reality games he leaped clean over in his early expressionist masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

“Dennis Lehane‘s novel, about a Boston detective who travels to an insane asylum on a craggy island to investigate the disappearance of a female patient, is a doodle, a Paul Auster Lite breather between his tortured Mystic River and the panoramic The Given Day. But Scorsese draws it out to two hours and twenty minutes of Hitchcock-like tracking shots and bombastic music and shrieking storms and detectives in long coats and fedoras trudging past leering mental patients.

“It’s all deliberately artificial, of course, and the fifties noir tropes do gradually morph into something weirder and more hallucinatory. But even when the detective-story foundation begins to crumble and the gumshoe protagonist (Leonardo DiCaprio) becomes racked with visions of concentration camps and bloody children and babbles about Communist subversives and Nazi experiments, Shutter Island is still suffocatingly movieish.

“DiCaprio had a breakthrough in the much-maligned Reservation Road: He sanded off some layers of polish and dared to be raw, wobbly, in the moment. He’s every bit as good here — he’s just not very interesting. He trudges around with his sidekick (Mark Ruffalo) interviewing characters played by great actors pretending to be bad actors (only Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley’s strangely paternal psychiatrist are fun to watch), and it’s all setup for the big reveal of the last 25 minutes. The ending is powerful (it should be, given how Scorsese lingers on the corpses of little kids), but Shutter Island is a long slog.

“The sad thing is that Scorsese could have connected emotionally with Lehane’s narrative. Without spelling things out, the story comes down to whether fierce self-dramatization can lead to revelation, catharsis, and healing — a question raised obliquely in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. But Scorsese can’t get past the thicket of old movies. He’s farther from reality than his hero is.”

I’m typing this from seat 9A (window) on an American flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth to LaGuardia It’s 6:15 pm — somewhere over Arkansas. $12 and change to connect the laptop; $8 and change for the iPhone. The pages are coming up a bit slowly, but it’s better than nothing.

I can see right now where the Shutter Island discussion will go. Hip, older urban critics like Marshall Fine will do the usual solidarity thing (i.e., their standard response whenever a reasonably decent film by a venerated director comes out) and pass out “Friends of Marty” buttons at screenings and so on. And that’s fine. A fair portion of their readers, of course, will feel a wee bit puzzled if not burned when they shell out their twelve bucks, but that’s the rough and tumble of it.

I did my farewell hugs with the Santa Barbara Film Festival team last night. For the most part at a big noisy wrap party at a place called Eos. I was forced to leave when a large crowd started dancing to Kool and the Gang. Thanks to Roger Durling, Carol Marshall and the others who made my ten-day stay a pleasant one. (Excepting that goon who got in my face the other night.) Short hop to LAX, LAX to Dallas, Dallas to LaGuardia — back around 9 pm.

A leftover pic from eight or nine days ago.

At last night’s SBIFF staff party at Eos.

Also from last week.

Since mid December I’ve been 90% convinced that Kathryn Bigelow would take the Best Director Oscar with the Best Picture prize going to Avatar for mostly political reasons (3D game-changer, all-time champion earner, injector of economic vitality into the industry, tens of millions of dazzled international fans). Whenever there’s a toss-up contest, the majority of Academy voters always favor the political.

But hearing last night that The Hurt Locker had won the Best Edited Feature (Dramatic) Eddie Award over Avatar made me go “wait a minute…I’m sensing an alignment of the planets here.” It was actually that plus a web-journalist colleague confiding two or three days ago that she’s convinced that Hurt is the most likely winner.

All along I’ve presumed that a little movie that’s only made $12-plus million can’t win. Now I’m thinking “wow, this year may be different” and “money may not be everything.” It’s still called the Academy of Arts & Sciences & Money, of course, but I’ll howl like a coyote and melt all over the carpet if The Hurt Locker wins.

And then I’ll go back to Extra Virgin and ask those women who told me last November they’d never heard of The Hurt Locker much less seen it and say, “So, guys…?”

I took some very sloppy and haphazard footage of Crazy Heart‘s Jeff Bridges during this afternoon’s Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute. I’m sorry. It happens. I guess I didn’t try hard enough. One reason that Bridges’ on-stage discussion with In Contention‘s Kris Tapley‘s was over in a flash is that Bridges “had a dinner reservation” so Tapley kept it short so as not to hang him up. Good manners.

Bridges said he thinks his Crazy Heart performance is among his “top five.” Tapley didn’t ask what the other four were, so here’s my…fuck it, here’s my top eight Bridges performances, in this order: (1) The Big Lebowski, (2) The Last American Hero, (3) Crazy Heart, (4) Rancho Deluxe, (5) Against All Odds, (6) Fearless, (7) The Fabulous Baker Boys, and (8) 8 Million Ways to Die.

Having read the Coen brothers‘ True Grit script and obviously knowing what Bridges can do (especially when inspired), I’m predicting that his performance as Rooster Cogburn will, eleven months hence, be commonly regarded as one of his finest.

Someone working for the Copenhagen film magazine Ekko allegedly reported today — get this — that Martin Scorsese is open to the idea of remaking Taxi Driver with Lars von Trier as some kind of creative partner. Or vice versa.

Can’t be real. Has to be bullshit.

The report, allegedly emanating from the Berlin Film Festival, says Scorcese and von Trier are in attendance, and that the two men had discussed the possibility of a remake. And it gets more twisted. The Ekko story allegedly says that Robert De Niro would again play the title role — presumably a reference to Travis Bickle.

In an initial reaction, von Trier’s Zentropa producing partner Peter Aalbek said he could “neither confirm nor deny,” but that an official announcement would be made soon.

The 67 year-old Scorcese is in Berlin for the world premiere of his new psychothriller, Shutter Island. I don’t know what von Trier is doing there, if he’s there at all. This whole thing could be a total figment of someone’s imagination. It’s such a repulsive idea, it’s embarassing to even float it as a joke.