You just know John Ford was thinking to himself, “Huston, okay…I’ve liked a lot of his pictures. A libertine but talented and ballsy. Knows horses. But Hopper made life hell for poor Henry Hathaway, and then came Easy Rider, which I didn’t fully hate because he seems to love the Southwest like me. Or his cinematographer does. But now I’m hearing about The Last Movie. I dunno. Might be a one-trick pony.”

(l. t. r.) Dennis Hopper, John Ford, John Huston in 1971. (Posted by KinoImages.)

Steven Spielberg has made a highly respectable grandfather-clock film that has inspired subdued or muffled reactions from one-third of the industry/journo crowd, so naturally Movieline has him down as the Best Director front-runner. Ang Lee is the winner of the 2013 Attaboy Award for having directed a respected, vaguely spiritual tiger-in-a-lifeboat film that has absolutely no chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar, so it makes perfect sense that he’s ranked above David O. Russell, director-writer of easily the smartest and most skilllful “up” film of the year….yeah!

I don’t want to hear one single comment about my Lincoln-Spielberg views. I realize I’ve made them perfectly clear, but Movieline‘s Donald Liebenson has put up his latest Oscar Index and it says what it says. I can’t sit mum on the sidelines because four or five HE readers might say “enough already.” The season’s the season, and it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

If anyone is stuck for Sundance Film Festival lodgings in Park City between Saturday, 1.19 and Saturday, 1.26, I know of two one-bedroom units at the Park Regency. $1200 each for seven days. Not huge but decent-sized. Good for two people (or three in a pinch). An excellent central location — a four-minute walk to the Park City Marriot and a twelve-minute walk (or a one-stop bus ride) to the Holiday Village Cinemas and the Yarrow Hotel.

“I don’t understand why [Lincoln] didn’t just end when Lincoln is walking down the hall and the butler gives him his hat,” Samuel L. Jackson recently told L.A. Times reporter Steven Zeitchik. “Why did I need to see him dying on the bed? I have no idea what Spielberg was trying to do. I didn’t need the assassination at all. Unless he’s going to show Lincoln getting his brains blown out. And even then, why am I watching it? The movie had a better ending 10 minutes before.”

Vanity Fair‘s Marnie Hanel reported today that an article on Oscar.go, the official website of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, accidentally and prematurely disclosed that Django Unchained costume designer Sharen Davis has nabbed a Best Costume Design nomination. The page in question has since been taken down, and the person responsible is taking Diazepam as we speak.

If only a similar-type mistake had revealed something big, like the Best Picture or Best Director nominees! The Oscars nominations will be revealed six days hence, or at 5:30 am on Thursday, 1.10.

Speaking to N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply about Gangster Squad (Warner Bros., 1.11), director Ruben Fleischer‘s period melodrama (i.e., set in the late ’40s and early ’50s), producer Dan Lin says “if we do this right, it’s a contemporary gangster movie.”

The instant I read those ten words, I went “Jesus Christ, game over.”

Because I’m guessing that doing it “right,” in Lin’s view, means re-tailoring Harry Truman-era L.A. so it feels like a cool walk-through exhibit at Universal Citywalk. You know…synthetic slick, flash in the fucking pan, dumbing things down for the 21st Century primitives. It means re-styling, filling in the grooves and re-attitudinizing 20th Century Los Angeles so under-40s are in no way challenged, and so they can slide right into it.

I wrote last May that Gangster Squad is a kind of “get Mickey Cohen melodrama” in the vein of Brian De Palma‘s The Untouchables. But after that I speculated that Fleischer’s film will be a “make a lot of noise and look cool and sexy and studly while making a lot of noise and looking cool and sexy and studly” movie. Now I’m thinking it’s going to be that only a little dumber and more primitive. (I won’t see it until Tuesday evening, 1.8.)

Cieply says that the film contains “moral ambiguities ,” but Fleischer and company “have also tried for something new. Their Mickey Cohen is not the historical gangster who inflated his celebrity by displaying his pet’s doggy bed in Life magazine and ran a pathetic racket that involved raising money for a planned movie (never shot) about his own life.

“In Gangster Squad Cohen becomes mythic evil, a Batman villain. His victim is Los Angeles, a glamour doll of a metropolis that is being strangled, like Gotham City in The Dark Knight series. And it is saved, but also sullied, by tommy-gun-wielding cops,” blah blah.

How is this “something new”?

In other words, as Robert Downey, Jr.’s version of Sherlock Holmes is to the older, more traditional versions played by Basil Rathbone, Robert Stephens or Nicol Wiliamson, Gangster Squad is to The Untouchables, Public Enemies, L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Falls. A romp through a semblance of old times, but “rebooted with contemporary cool,” as Cieply puts it.

So Tina Fey and Amy Poehler‘s Golden Globes material is still taking shape, but the basic idea, apparently, is to go with a generic 21st Century approach to humor — dry, casual, ironic, referenced — and pretty much stay away from being Ricky Gervais-y or funny. Unless the purpose of this clip is to lower expectations so everyone will be pleasantly surprised when the 1.13 show happens.

It would be nice to catch Steven Soderbergh‘s Side Effects (Open Road, 2.5) before I leave for Park City on Tuesday, 1.15, as I’ll be swamped with Sundance and then the Santa Barbara Film Festival through Saturday, 2.2. Yes, I could see it during the five-day run-up to 2.8, but Soderbergh’s films are always special enough to warrant early viewings. So next week (1.7 through 1.11) would be good. Take back tomorrow, etc.

Oh, my God…the 2012 Writers Guild nominations were announced around 10:05 am and here it is 10:29 am and I haven’t posted anything yet. What was I doing the last 24 minutes? Staring into space? You have to re-post breaking news within 10 or 15 minutes, tops. If you don’t you lose cred, and if you keep this up you’ll eventually be panhandling in Palm Springs. This is serious.

With a high percentage of the WGA’s 12,000 members having presumably voted, nominees for the WGA’s Best Original Screenplay award are (1) John Gatins, Flight (2) HE’s own Rian Johnson, Looper, (3) Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master, (4) Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom and (5) Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty. SHOULD WIN: Boal for Zero Dark Thirty. LIKELY WIN BASED ON TEA LEAF READINGS & PREMONITION: Boal for Zero Dark Thirty.

WGA Nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay are (1) Chris Terrio, Argo, (2) David Magee, Life of Pi, (3) Tony Kushner‘s Lincoln, (4) David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook and (5) Stephen Chbosky, Perks of Being a Wallflower. SHOULD WIN: Russell for Silver Linings Playbook. LIKELY WIN BASED ON TEA LEAF READINGS & PREMONITION: Sleepy defaulters will give it to Kushner for Lincoln, middle-of-the-road mentalities with go for Terrio’s Argo, and those who appreciate swift narratives and tight construction and the necessary acts of cutting stuff that doesn’t work and making up stuff that does will go for Russell and Silver Linings.

The WGA Award Ceremony will happen on Sunday, 2.17.

In 1972 a man spoke to a woman in a bathroom and said, “You want some man you love to protect and take care of you. You want this golden, shining, powerful warrior to build a fortress where you can hide so you don’t have to ever be afraid. You don’t have to feel lonely or empty. Well, you’ll never find him. You’re alone. You’re all alone. And you won’t be free of that feeling of being alone until you look death right in the face. I mean, that sounds like bullshit, some romantic crap. Until you go right up into the ass of death. Right up in his ass. Until you find the womb of fear. And then…maybe…maybe then, you’ll be able to find him.”

Two years later a woman asked a professional man, “Are you alone?” And the professional man said, “Aren’t we all?” The issue was settled.

I say this every year and people rarely listen, but here goes anyway. There are at least 56 or 57 intriguing films playing at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (which starts in two weeks). I’m there for nine days so if I really kill myself I might see 27 or 28. That’s 28 or 29 films I probably won’t see. Why aren’t p.r. reps offering to let folks like me see their entries in advance? Because they think it devalues a film to show it early.

A friend, by the way, has heard “very very good things” about Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight (costarring and co-written by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, directed & co-written by Linklater). He’s also heard that David Lowery‘s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Nate Parker, Keith Carradine) “is the film people are touting as this year’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.”