Gus Van Sant‘s Restless is apparently about “a terminally ill teenage girl (Mia Wasikowska) who falls for a boy (Henry Hopper) who likes to attend funerals and their encounters with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot (Chin Han) from WWII.” Some IMDB guy wrote last April that it’s “absolutely phenomenal…without a doubt it’s Van Sant’s best since Elephant.”

So what about AMPAS concerns that the Oscar Awards have been usurped and/or happen too late in the game, and everyone’s complaint that all the year’s best films are always back-loaded into the last three or four months of the year. I just thought of an idea that could not only solve this situation but turn the whole situation into a win-win.

Have two Oscar awards shows every year — a Phase One Oscar telecast in early to mid October, say, that would honor films released from January 1st through August 31st (that’s right — an eight-month period), and a Phase Two Oscar telecast in late February covering the 9.1 to 12.31 period.

Sounds too expensive and laborious, right? As Robert De Niro‘s Jake LaMotta would say, “That’s in your mind.” Because at least this idea would spur distributors to release better films during the first eight months, and once the public got used to the idea of the Oscars being a twice-yearly thing, the Oscar brand would be supremely recognized as the definitive awards show above all the others. The Oscars would no longer be the last guys to dress up and hand out awards — they would be the first and the last.

Okay, don’t spend quite as much money on the Phase One Oscars. Stage them at the Santa Monica Civic auditorium or someplace that’s almost as cool as the Kodak theatre but not quite. And then just for extra hoopla emphasis, sometime during the Phase Two Oscar telecast bring out all the winners of the Phase One Oscars and have them take a bow.

NYC entertainment journalist driving down to Washington, D.C. on Saturday, 10.30, for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert‘s “send all Tea Party righties to green re-education camps” rally. I wouldn’t mind sharing car rental costs. Plus I’m thinking about crashing somewhere in D.C. for the night. I don’t want to drive all the way back the same day, and I don’t need/want a slick hotel. I’m just looking for a bed and good wifi and a shower — that’s it. But the room has to be located somewhere cool. Georgetown would be nice, but what do I know?

Hey, is there any kind of press credentialing going on for this thing? So I can get a place closer to the stage and maybe take some good stills and decent video, etc.?

You will bow to Paramount’s Jackass 3D — i.e., the $21.8 million it earned yesterday and the $53 million it’ll probably take in by Sunday night. And you will suffer along with Summit’s second-place Red, which took in an estimated $7.3 million Friday and is looking at $20 million by tomorrow night. And some of you will pay to see the third-place The Social Network, which dropped only 32% yesterday. And others will flock to Disney’s Secretariat, which dropped only 29 % for a fourth-place finish.

This video of Transformers 3 star Shia LaBeouf splashing hot coffee on a corpulent paparazzo was on all the sites until yesterday afternoon, when it was taken down. But now, for the time being, it’s viewable again. Paraparazzi are scum. This is the coolest thing LaBoeuf has ever done, onscreen or off. Yes, it would have been a tiny bit cooler if he hadn’t run after dousing the guy.

Diseased cynicism secretes out of Red like the flu, like poison. Anyone who says this bullshit comic-book actioner thing is “funny” is suffering from total corrosion of the soul. Nothing paycheck movies of this type sap and impurify our precious spiritual fluids. They’re a scourge and a pestilence. I really and truly mean that.

It’s fine with me that Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and the others got paid for appearing in this thing, but there’s no reason why anyone with even a modicum of taste would want to pay to see it. Words can’t convey how deeply depressing it is to watch Mirren blast automatic rifle fire with a blank expression and without any stress or vibration passed along to her body or face.

I hated this film so much that I got out of my seat and laid down on the screening-room floor (i.e., at the Dolby room on Sixth Ave. and 55th Street) and took a nap at the halfway point. It was that or leave, and I had nowhere to go. I really couldn’t stand sitting there any longer and letting this film infiltrate my system.

“I’ve watched the five-and-a-half-hour Carlos twice now, and am completely convinced that it’s a great film, in serial caps, as it were; and looking at Assayas’ other work, I’m growing in my conviction that Assayas isn’t just one of the most vital filmmakers working today, but that he’s one for the books, as the saying goes — a major figure in his country’s cinema, and world cinema.” — Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny in a 10.13 posting.

“It isn’t that Mr. Assayas doesn’t have strong opinions, only that because he wants to move beyond familiar axioms — Carlos the monster, Carlos the cool — he shows history as it’s happening, active and dynamic, rather than how it will be subsequently narrated. Those opinions come through forcefully and at times, with such bluntness, it can throw you.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a 10.15 posting.

Sincere gratitude to the Movieline crew for having posted high-quality scans of old Movieline articles from the ’90s, including my own “Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood” article, which ran in March 1992 or thereabouts.

Believe it or not, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a six-day tribute to Cannon Films from 11.19 to 11.24. What’s next — a black-tie tribute at Alice Tully Hall to Elie Samaha? From the online program guide: “Israel’s answer to Simpson and Bruckheimer, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and their production and distribution company, Cannon Films, bestrode the 1980s with gleeful exploitation-movie schlock and quality auteur cinema from Godard, Cassavetes, Mailer and Ruiz.”

The idea, I’m guessing, is to stay away from the films of Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris, Albert Pyun and Charles Bronson and crap like Masters of the Universe, Superman IV and Over The Top and focus on the small handful of semi-decent flicks that Cannon cranked out — i.e., Barbet Schroeder‘s Barfly, Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train, Richard Franklin ‘s Link, Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance and — if you want to be extra-accomodating — Tobe Hooper‘s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Forget Jean-Luc Godard‘s King Lear, which I dismissed as a masturbatory time-waster and, as a senior Cannon employee put it at the time, “a total fuck-you letter to Menahem.”

Here’s that piece I ran last August about my experience as a Cannon staff writer from ’86 to ’88, called “That Cannon Stamp.”

The chronology: (a) President Obama met with the Waiting for Superman team (including the kids) on Monday, (b) I posted a photo the next morning, (c) the White House website posted this video late Tuesday afternoon, and (d) Paramount publicity sent the link around late yesterday afternoon. That’s how it went down.

The video shows that Paramount honcho Brad Grey and Waiting for Superman director Davis Guggenheim were also (naturally) part of the group.

London-based photographer Dafydd Jones took this shot of Paul Newman, Natasha Richardson and Lauren Bacall on a Hudson River boat-cruise party to celebrate the launch of Tina Brown‘s Talk magazine on 9.2.99. To me this photo says that every day above ground is cause for celebration.