14 months ago the New Zealand Herald reported via news.com.au that Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit — a two-part prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy that began filming last March — “is expected to cost $500 million (US) and has already racked up legal fees believed to exceed $100 million.

“The most expensive movie to date was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which cost $300 million (US),” the story continued. “The soaring Hobbit costs are mostly due to settlements with rights holders, whose wrangles with Warner Bros/New Line Cinema could have delayed shooting for another decade.

Pic will star Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield and Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. Several actors from Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy will reprise their roles, including Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Ian Holm, Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom.

“Following a dumb brute on its arduous journey from master to master (most of whom perish), War Horse has an unavoidable similarity to Robert Bresson‘s sublime Au hasard Balthazar,” writes Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman in a 12.21 posting. “Indeed, the sequence in which Joey — like Bresson’s donkey — is adopted by a willful, unlovable French peasant girl suggests the parallel might have occurred to Spielberg.

“The difference is not solely a matter of Bresson’s ascetic restraint and Steven Spielberg‘s shameless schmaltz, or Bresson’s tragic sense of life and Spielberg’s unswerving belief in the happy ending. Suffering witness to all manner of enigmatic human behavior, Balthazar is pure existence; Joey is an abstraction. Had Spielberg elected to show war (or life) from Joey’s perspective rather than use the horse as the war’s protagonist, the movie could have been truly terrifying.”

In a 10.18 HE posting called “Joey vs. Balthazar,” I wrote the following: “In Bressonworld, casual cruelty and inhumanity are visited upon a saintly little donkey. In Spielbergland, bombs explode at night, pretty photography commences, John Williams‘ music swells, and everyone falls in love with Joey-the-adorable-horse.

“It was my hope that Spielberg, needing to replace the wondrous effect of the pretend horses in the stage show, would shoot War Horse as a total horse-POV thing, allowing us to see our carnage and compassion anew through the eyes of an innocent. Dashed!”

MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz has posted an above average q & a with Girl With The Dragon Tattoo helmer David Fincher. Here’s the audio, and here’s the text version. Fincher obviously has a cough, and to judge by the sound of it I wouldn’t want to be in his vicinity without gloves and a surgical mask.

In my initial review of Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol I should have given it points for being very well cut, engineered and choreographed. It’s a shallow and steroid, but nicely mechanized. It’s shrewd, tight and hard. But another thought hit me as I watched it for the second time last night at the Zeigfeld. It’s a kind of sequel to T2: Judgment Day.

The action stunts in that landmark 1991 thriller were extreme and out there, but this was logically allowed by the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Terminator and Robert Patrick‘s T-1000 were cyborgs with super-powers and the ability to absorb all kinds of blows and body trauma.

And now, 20 years later, here we are with Tom Cruise, the star of M:I4, performing many similar stunts. He gets hit by cars, runs after moving cars, crawls up the side of a glass Dubai skyscraper with only one grip-glove, drives a car that drops 35 or 40 feet and crashes into a steel platform, etc. Okay, he limps a little bit toward the end but otherwise Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is much more cyborg than human.

The makers of M:I4 — Cruise, director Brad Bird, producer JJ Abrams — are anything but stupid. They know how dopey it is to show Cruise doing all this stuff, and they know that most audiences will roll with it. But the bottom line is that they probably felt they had no choice but to go full cyborg, and not just with Hunt’s stunts but those performed by costars Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Michael Nyqvist and Josh Holloway.

That’s because today’s big-scale action films are so stuck in the box, and so beholden to absurdist, gravity-defying dynamics, that super-flex action heroes are often obliged to perform stuff that only Schwarzenegger and Patrick were allowed to do in James Cameron‘s T2, but which no humans could have done because it would have been, like, ridiculous. Because Cameron is a realist. He shows us wild stuff, but he believes in logic and “rules.”

Director Andrew Jarecki, producer JJ Abrams during last night’s MOMA after-party.

But it ain’t ridiculous any more because the bar has been raised and there’s nowhere for action-movie directors, writers and producers to go except to keep upping the voltage and making action films nuttier and more cartoony.

This is why I said three days ago that there’s only one kind of thriller that can work these days — i.e., the human-scale, back-to-basics-and-believability model found in Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire and Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive. I love thrills and action and dangerous situations, but it’s so much better when you can truly believe (or at least mostly believe) what you’re seeing on a screen.

That said, Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol is going to be very popular and make loads and loads of money.

Thanks to the good friend who got me into the premiere and after-party last night. It was a nice time all around, and the food was fantastic.

Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise on Ziegfeld red-carpet.

Brad Pitt‘s Moneyball performance isn’t just a lock for a Best Actor Oscar nomination but a likely winner, I believe. The reason is Pitt’s other big 2011 performance — an unhappy, frustrated, dictatorial suburban dad in Terrence Malick ‘s The Tree of Life. It’s been touted by many (including Grantland‘s Mark Harris in a well-hidden 12.20 post) as the better of the two, and yet Pitt’s awards heat is all about Moneyball. Bottom line: No other potential Best Actor nominee has a similar two-for-one equation going on

“Given a role with such wrenching father-son dynamics, it must have been tremendously tempting to play only the red-meat stuff [in The Tree of Life] — the explosions, the clenched need for control, the abusiveness, the small tyrannies,” Harris writes. “Pitt does all that impeccably, but he never forgets that the inadequate father he’s playing is also a man who cares for his children, who teaches them things, who can’t bear not to be a good provider. Pitt doesn’t soft-pedal the character’s potential for cruelty, but he lives so deep inside the role that even when he’s behaving monstrously, he lets you see the self-loathing, the sense that he’s nursing a wound that will never heal.

“Nobody in the supporting-actor category did more nuanced, layered, complicated work this year. But instead of being at the center of the discussion, his performance is on the fringes, because the system has decided that Pitt will be ‘taken care of’ with a Best Actor nomination for Moneyball. He deserves that nomination. He deserves this one even more.”

Update: A cople of hours ago a friend wrote that “George Clooney, of course, has two films too including Ides of March so Pitt isn’t the only one with two perfs in the Best Actor ring, and Clooney has an advantage having written produced , directed and costarring in his. You might want to make note before your commenters do.” I replied that he was right, of course, “but Clooney’s Ides performance is nowhere close to Pitt’s Tree of Life performance in terms of layered gravitas and praise for same…not even close. It’s a fine Clooney performance, but nothing to drop your pants and go crazy for.”

Movieline‘s Louis Virtel has posted a piece titled “50 years Later, What’s The Greatest Scene in Judgment at Nuremberg?” That’s easy, and the answer has nothing to do with any performance. I’m referring to a moment of “pure cinema” that happens in an early courtroom scene, or roughly between 6:05 to 7:11 in the clip below.

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German defense counsel Maximillian Schell is delivering his opening remarks in German. We listen to him speak a line or two and then translators providing the English version, back and forth, two or three times. Then the camera announces that the film is shifting gears by sharply zooming in on Schell, and wham — he’s suddenly speaking English. During this one instant director Stanley Kramer puts aside the basics and talks directly to the audience. It’s the only innovative brushstroke in an otherwise conventional (although very well written and acted) drama.

I’ve found (i.e., been sent) a quote from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo extra Donald Josephson in a recent article in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter. Here’s a crude Google Translate version, and here’s the excerpt:

“The most fun was to keep up with Rooney Mara in the green room, where the actors wait between shots…and [to] hear her anxiety over whether she would be better than Naomi Rapace. She had lots of those ‘mirror mirror on the wall’ moments in there. Mara asked her assistant all the time, ‘Do we not do better when we did this scene? Do I not look better than her? Am I not better? Am I not young? Are not I cool?’ And the assistant just replied, ‘Yes, yes, yes! You’re the best, you’re the best!'”

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond doesn’t write articles that report about this or that film teetering or losing steam in the Oscar race. He writes articles that ask “is this or that film teetering or losing steam in the Oscar race?” But combine Hammond’s piece with a similar one from TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, and you have “a situation”, I’d say.

The bottom line is that however Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud & Extremely Close (Warner Bros., 12.25) fares in a commercial or award-winning realm, it began showing too late (and DVD screeners were sent out too late) to stir sufficient conversation as the Golden Globe and SAG nominations were being decided. It was blanked by both orgs. No critics group has so far awarded any aspect (including Max Von Sydow‘s supporting performance as an elderly mute, which attracted early buzz), although EL&IC has (or had) been nominated by the BFCA, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, the Houston Film Critics Society, the Phoenix Film Critics Society and the San Diego Film Critics Society in this and that category.

Daldry was quoted yesterday morning by N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” columnist Melena Ryzik about the delay: “I’m a fiddly director,” he said. “Any director would like to keep shooting. If it were up to me I’d keep shooting for another year. But we had to finish.”

So far Extremely Loud has a dismaying 50% Rotten Tomatoes rating. The balance could shift as more reviews arrive between now and opening day, but negative reactions from the Associated Press’s Dave Germain,Variety‘s Pete Debruge and Screen International‘s Brent Simon speak for themselves.

That said, the film got an intensely positive, highly emotional response from a mixture of press, guild members and Joe Schmoes when I saw it at the Los Angeles County Museum on 12.8. There was an older, overweight woman sitting behind me who moaned at times during the screening, and then she stood up and cheered when the film ended. I don’t relate to people like this, but Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close will almost certainly connect with paying audiences if this woman was at all representative.

I can’t imagine anyone in my circle having the slightest interest in sitting through Underworld: Awakening (Screen Gems, 1.20). Apart from the black-leather default geek-eroticism radiated by Kate Beckinsale-as-Selene, blah blah. I always think “hmm” when a film has been directed by two guys (in this case Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein). But the poster looked great as I waited for the R train last night at B’way and 49th.

My curiosity about Baz Luhrman‘s 3D version of The Great Gatsby hasn’t abated. I’ve suggested before that the coolest thing in the world would be for Luhrman to just shoot F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel plain and straight and not go all wackazoid like he did on Australia. Maybe if I read Luhrman and Craig Pearce‘s screenplay I could get a sense of what’s being prepared. A recent draft would be appreciated.