I rarely venture into, much less dwell upon, box-office cheerleading, but you have to pay tribute to the worldwide monster haul of Sam Mendes‘ Skyfall, which doesn’t even open here until Friday. The 23rd film in the 007 series pulled down a wowser $156 million this weekend, which puts the 10-day overseas total at $287 million. If that’s not staggering news, it’s fairly close to that. And the Skyfall revenues have given Sony Int’l its all-time biggest year ever — $2.6 billion through today. Overall Sony has sold $3.6 billion in movie tickets and a shot at reaching its first $4 billion year ever.

An 11.3 column by N.Y. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called “How Romney Would Treat Women” says it pretty well, I think.

Kristen Stewart looked fetching tonight as she joined her On The Road co-creatives — director Walter Salles, costars Garrett Hedlund and Amy Adams, producer Rebecca Yeldham — in front of an AFI Fest audience before the screening (which didn’t begin until 8:40 pm) at the Chinese. And once again her body language suggested that she hated being there and was vaguely ashamed of being a famous actress. She always gives off that vibe. Lemme outta here.

On The Road costars Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Amy Adams — Saturday, 11.3, 8:35 pm in front of crowd at Chinese.

On The Road “is masterful and rich and lusty, meditative and sensual and adventurous and lamenting all at once,” I wrote on 5.23 12 from Cannes. “It has Bernardo Bertolucci‘s ‘nostalgia for the present’ except the present is 1949 to 1951 — it feels completely alive in that time. No hazy gauze, no bop nostalgia. Beautifully shot and cut, excitingly performed and deeply felt.

“It’s much, much better than I thought it would be given the long shoot and…I forget how long it’s been in post but it feels like ages. It’s so full of life and serene and mirthful in so many different ways. I was stirred and delighted and never less than fully engrossed as I watched it, and it’s great to finally run into a film that really hits it, and then hits it again and again.”

I guess I’ll have to pay to see Wreck-It Ralph tomorrow. I’ve heard too many good things from too many knowledgable people. It’s the #1 movie this weekend with an expected $48 million by Sunday night. A friend said it might not be “all that Academy-friendly,” but let’s see how it pans out. Flight, in 2nd place, will make about half of Ralph‘s money, or a projected $23 million.

I remember now — Mr. Potter! Right? I refuse to check online. Memory or nothing.A fair number of people have seen Flight by now so how does it measure up? Please try and specifically respond to the following paragraph, which I posted on 10.31:

“All drunks have the same choice, and all movies about drunks tell roughly the same story. Should they keep drinking and come sooner or later to a bad end, or do they man up and accept that they have a problem and do something about it? But Denzel Washington‘s alcoholic has three choices. Keep drinking and doing lines. Openly admit that he not only has a problem but was drunk and buzzed on cocaine when he saved all those lives. Or lie his way out of any possible fines, severance and prison time and then admit he has a problem and do something about it.

“[So] there’s no good way out for Whip Whitaker, and most of the time people want their lead characters to do something that they themselves could live with, or at least could accept. We’ll see what happens.”

I was all over Amy Berg‘s West of Memphis (Sony Classics, 12.25) during the Sundance and Santa Barbara Film Festivals ten months ago. And now I have to get my energy up again, starting, I suppose, with a visit to this evening’s 7:15 pm screening at the AFI Fest. Easily one of the year’s best docs.

Industry Friend: “Why aren’t the pundits considering Javier Bardem for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his Skyfall villain? Silva is the most exciting baddie in any movie in a long time. Javier is one of the world’s greatest and his performance here is alchemy.” Wells response: He’s superb, agreed, but his Bond baddie isn’t as meaty a role as his Oscar-winning performance as Anton Chigur in No Country For Old Men. People see it as a vivid but lesser effort.

A rousing screening of Silver Linings Playbook (Weinstein Co., 11.16) happened last night at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian theatre with director David O. Russell, star and Best Actor contender Bradley Cooper (giving his career-best performance) and costar John Ortiz posing for photos, etc. I went because I wanted to take a couple of friends, and because I wanted to feel a positive reaction after that awful Aidikoff Screening Room experience and that raging argument in the downstairs garage.

Backstory.net‘s Jeff Goldsmith, who sat just to my right, called it “great.” David Ehrenstein sat to my left. Devin Faraci sat three or four rows in front of me, and a post-screening tweet indicated he’s the latest arrival on Silver Linings Sourpuss Island.

I can spot a cerebral dweeb frowner from 100 yards off, and there’s something about the last 25 minutes of this film (which are formulaic but satisfying because so much emotional and mental fervor and skillful spadework has led up to it) that irritates the pissheads to no end. I’m speaking (and I mean no offense) of a microscopic critical sub-culture here. It’s not a crime that they can’t feel the cumulative effect of this film. But it is short-sighted if they try and dismiss how expertly fused and feverishly acted and directed this thing is…crackling, hilarious, and yet sometimes dark and unstable and despairing. And then not.

I’m fully convinced that SLP is going to ride into theatres on a tsunami when it opens two and a half weeks hence. It really, really works, and is the only film of the season (besides Anna Karenina) that has truly lifted me up and over.

There was an Academy-members-only screening Thursday night at the Laurel Canyon home of sound editors Michael and Nancy Ross (who also hosted that Not Fade Away screening & after-party that I attended a few weeks back), and I’m told that someone called it Capra-esque. Maybe, yeah…but Capra Redefined for the 21st Century and a Culture of Edge and Anxiety. I hate Capra myself. I think people who fall for It’s A Wonderful Life are easy lays and overly susceptible. But if you want a fairly good explanation how and why SLP comes together, read Brian Ondorf’s 10.24 review on Bluray.com.

Favorite Ondorf line: “When Russell calls on cliche to dig out an ending, he does so with extraordinary skill and euphoric cinematic energy.”

Before the showing Russell told the crowd how Matthew Quick‘s book first came to him from Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, who of course are both gone now. But still with us through this film.

A veteran director friend who attended the Ross screening texted as follows this morning: “Silver Linings Playbook was terrific…has to be the front-runner [now]. Jennifer Lawrence must be favorite for Best Actress Oscar…she hits it out of the park…movie comes doubly alive when she’s on-screen. Bradley for a Best Actor nomination but no win. De Niro probably. Lawrence dead certain. Stand-room-only with Academy voters fighting each other for seats. Cheers at the end.”

The Ross screening was co-hosted by Colleen Camp, Nancy Meyers and Lisa Tomei, I’m told. and was presided over by Oscar strategist Lisa Taback.

I didn’t know French TV actress Berenice Marlohe before catching her relatively brief but quite striking performance in Skyfall (Sony, 11.8). Dark hair, 5′ 9″, fierce and passionate eyes, a faint glint of Eurasian heritage…wham. Which is why Terrence Wackadoodle has reportedly added her to the cast of “his latest film,” whatever that might be.

It could be Knight of Cups, which, given Malick’s tendency to dither endlessly in post-production, might not be ready for viewing sometime (I’m not joking) in 2014.

Marlohe, 33, has a settled, sophisticated vibe and a deepish, cigarette-smoke voice. And beyond-intense cheekbones. She appears in the Hong Kong and Macau sequences in Skyfall. She’s one reason why I’ll be returning for a second screening of Skyfall on November 5h.

Will Marlohe survive Malick’s whimsical approach to keeping or discarding characters in his films? The 60ish Malick clearly likes the ladies and especially exotic, eccentric, foreign-born ones (hence his focus on not just Olga Kurylenko but Romina Mondello in To The Wonder) so probably. And you have to assume that Christian Bale and Natalie Portman are safe. But Cups costars Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara….who knows?

The first thing I liked about Hitchcock (Fox Searchlight, 11.23) was the way director Sacha Gervasi and screenwriter John J. McLaughlin embraced the dry, droll attitude that Alfred Hitchcock adopted and exploited while hosting his anthology TV show in the ’50s and early ’60s…that jaunty, slightly perverse commentary thing. Perfect. Just right.

The second was the mixing of occasional dark Ed Gein fantasies within the narrative, which didn’t add up but provided a slight air of macabre. The third was a sense of general intrigue — you knew right away that Hitchcock was up to something more than just rote storytelling. And I loved the ending.

The main problem, I feel, was the curious but interesting decision to focus only partly on the making of the legendary Psycho, which everyone on the planet assumed would be the thing since the film is based on Stephen Rebello‘s “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.”

Fort a good half of the emphasis (and this is where things get dicey) is on the strained relations that arise between Mr. Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife-partner Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) when she decides to work on a writing project with the younger, somewhat libertine-ish Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston), who’d co-written the scripts of Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and Strangers on a Train. Alma has been Hitch’s devoted partner, supporter and artistic collaborator for decades and she wants a vacation — a little writing excitement on her own. It’s not sexual infidelity at all — it’s creative infidelity. And it really gets Hitch’s goat.

It’s odd that Alma would decide to “cheat” with Cook, as it were, just as her husband is beginning work on what they both believe is the most financially risky project of his career — a grisly black-and-white murder drama that Hitchcock is largely financing through his own Shamley Productions, but more precisely from the mortgaging of his Bel Air home. But Alma does it anyway. Her rallying cry could be “now is the time to go off and stretch my independent creative legs! When my husband’s back is against the wall!” But as I sat and watched and kicked it around I started to say to myself, “Why is Alma’s little writing project on the side and Alfred’s consternation…why is the movie spending time on a little domestic issue that nobody in this theatre gives a damn about?

I sure didn’t. It was fairly well-handled for what it was, okay, but it was a mistake. I could feel the vibe around me — people weren’t engaged. I was there to re-experience the ups and downs of making a great film and to have fun watching the acting-out of all the stories I’ve read and heard about for years. I’m the kind of guy the filmmakers are looking to please, no? A knowledgable film buff looking for a good geeky time. But no — we’re basically given a kind of truncated Cliff Notes version of the making of Psycho. A scene here, a bit there, a familiar backdrop or prop or costume, several Hitchcock quips and bon mots about this scene or that actor. And a lot of dialogue about financing. And three or four discussions with obstinate people who don’t get it.

As far as I can discern there were two reasons why a film everyone thought would be about the making of Psycho is only partly about that. The first, I’m guessing, is that Gervasi, Laughlin and their producers, Montecito’s Tom Pollock and Ivan Reitman, decided that they had to deliver more than just a historical procedural. They had to create something with an emotional core or flow to it, and therefore something different and unexpected. I said before that I respect the attempt — I just didn’t care about Alma and Alfred’s relationship issues that much. Except, that is, for that one great scene when Alma tells Hitch off — Mirren’s big stand-out.

But the real reason, I suspect, is that Hitchcock pretty much had to focus on the Alfred-and-Alma stuff because they were legally boxed in by the Hitchcock estate. (Which is controlled, I gather, by Hitchcock’s 84 year-old daughter Pat and perhaps others in the family). I was told at the Hitchcock after-party that the Hitchcock estate didn’t want what they believed were negative portrayals of Mr. Hitchcock’s manner or nature, and so they legally prevented the filmmakers from (a) shooting recreations of any shots in the original Psycho, (b) using footage from the original film, and (c) using the still-standing Psycho house and Bates Motel set on the Universal lot.

What this boils down to is that Hitchcock in effect has an invisible antagonist. Unseen, off-screen, never alluded to and not visually suggested in any way, but an antagonist all the same. I don’t know but I strongly suspect that without the roadblocks thrown down by the Hitchcock family, more of Hitchcock would have been about challenges and thrills of creating Psycho and probably, I’m guessing, a better film overall.

I was bothered, by the way, that Gervasi didn’t try harder to duplicate the marquee design of Manhattan’s DeMille theatre when Psycho opened. Special logo art was created for the DeMille marquee; in Gervasi’s film the marquee is a traditional one with red and black letters hanging on metal frames.

I tapped out a beginning of a Hitchcock review late last night and then crashed. The plan this morning was to jump right back in, bang out a thousand words or so and move on. Instead I got caught up in a swirl of research and links and photo searches (and maybe denial on some level), and I was soon sinking into quicksand along with Daud from Lawrence of Arabia. And now I have to do a Cristian Mungiu interview so I’ll give it another shot when I return.

In the meantime, Hitchcock has received praise from Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, mild approval from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd MCCarthy and a pan from Variety‘s Justin Chang.

For those who can’t scale the paywall, a Chang excerpt that I mostly agree with: “Loosely based on Stephen Rebello‘s terrifically exhaustive 1990 book ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,’ the screenplay by John J. Laughlin (a co-writer on Black Swan) is understandably hard-pressed to accommodate every fascinating aspect of the pic’s production history.

“Still, it’s disappointing that the film never gets beyond a superficial re-creation [and] that essentially contradicts the reality that Psycho‘s limited means, far from exposing the director’s incompetence, in fact revealed the extent of his mastery. As such, Hitchcock offers almost zero insight into the peculiar workings of creative genius, or of the rich, taboo-shattering legacy of the film whose making it documents.”

It’s not so much that Laughlin and director Sacha Gervasi “never get beyond” a superficial recreation as they’ve clearly chosen to go with a series of spotty, glancing reenactments of the making of Psycho in order to make room for the jealousy-and-love story between Alfred(Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren). As I started to say last night, I respect their decision to try and deliver a fresh take on an oft-told story. The question is whether or not viewers will find this angle sufficiently interesting.

“Nothing quite rivals the election…[it’s] the season finale of the biggest primetime reality show…I’m not trivializing it, but there’s nothing in pop culture…there’s no song, no TV show, no blockbuster movie that quite rivals it for suspense and saturation…it’s a buddy movie with a twist…the uptight white guy and the cool black guy [who], whatever you think of them ideologically or politically, are pretty interesting characters.” — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott speaking during 11.2 “Sweet Spot.”

Sweet Spot guys David Carr, A.O. Scott.