Jeffrey Wells

Wrath of the Titans (Warner Bros., 3.30) was directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Battle: Los Angeles). Shot in 3D as opposed to 3D transferred. Sam Worthington‘s hair has grown out. Paychecks for Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, Danny Huston, Edgar Ramirez, Bill Nighy, Toby Kebbell and Rosamund Pike.

I don’t like trailers that begin with a kid singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Because any and all uses of that song in movies are always meant to deliver irony. The all-too-familiar kind. So right away there’s a deja vu vibe, and a general lack of distinction.

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I may not agree with all of the 2011 Chicago Film Critics awards, but I respect all but one. Which is more than I can say for the SAG nominations. Best Picture: The Tree of Life. Best Director: Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life). Best Actor: Michael Shannon (Take Shelter). Best Actress: Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn). Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks (Drive). Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life). Best Original Screenplay: The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius). Best Adapted Screenplay: Moneyball (Steven Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin). Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezski (The Tree of Life).

We all want smart, quirky, neurotic Cage (Adaptation, Matchstick Men) or serious wackadoodle Cage (Vampire’s Kiss), but nobody wants mythical horseshit CG flaming-motorcycle Cage.

Variety‘s Steven Gaydos pointed out this morning that the recently published Film Comment best-of-the-year poll of 120 top critics has Hugo at #9, The Artist at #27 and Moneyball at #38.

My response: “Well and good, but much of that relentless Hugo love stems from an impassioned conviction-belief on the part of most big-city critics, and summarized as follows: “Marty is our guy, a Film Catholic Extraordinaire, and we’ll stand by him to the end, no matter what.” So whatever and however and even with a film as oppressive or agonizing as Kundun, Marty gets a pass — that’s simply how it is. Clint Eastwood enjoyed the fruits of this same arrangement of trust and faith for many, many years (until, that is, the double whammy of Invictus and Hereafter). So don’t give me with the high Hugo approval ratings. This is an elitist, intra-fraternal Tammany Hall dynamic.”

Is David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo “entertaining and well-made?,” asks critic Marshall Fine. “Absolutely. For the audience that would never dream of seeing a foreign film, this movie will be the last word in Dragon Tattoo movie-making. And they’ll get a quality product.

“Aside from a few visual fillips, Fincher has not cracked Stieg Larsson‘s novel in a new way or plumbed it for previously undiscovered depths. His visual approach is different, but not so much that the material seems newly revealed.

“Is Fincher’s film better than Niels Arden Oplev‘s 2009 Swedish-language version? Not really. I’m not impugning Fincher’s intentions; I’m just saying that, as good as his film may be, it’s redundant and unnecessary. It’s a solid film – a well-made and highly suspenseful film. But I saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last year. And it was just as good.”

Wells dispute: Fincher, agreed, is working well below his abilities with Dragon Tattoo, but the chops and the fumes are of a higher order than what Oplev presented in his 2009 version. Oplev’s Tattoo was, for me, a satisfying, well-assembled thriller, but somewhere between a 7.5 and an 8, execution-wise. Fincher’s version is at least an 8.5 if not a 9. I mean, the opening-credits sequence alone puts the Fincher above the Oplev.

The biggest “what?” in Oscar Talk #74 (posted Friday, 12.16) is Anne Thompson‘s remark that Moneyball‘s Bennett Miller may not make the DGA and Academy Best Director finals given competition from Hugo‘s Martin Scorsese, War Horse‘s Steven Spielberg and…The Artist‘s Michel Hazanavicius?

Reality check: Enjoy The Artist and vote for it if you must, but the efforts of a director of “a cute gimmick stretched to feature length” (in the words of N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis) cannot be ranked above Miller’s immaculate Moneyball finessing. The Godz will simply not have it.

On top of which War Horse is mostly sentimental crap and Hugo is too long and labored and doesn’t really lift off the ground until the last 25 minutes so c’mon…get real.

Otherwise it’s fascinating to hear Tapley and Thompson differ sharply over The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — i.e., Tapley’s seething contempt for almost everything in it except for Rooney Mara‘s performance as Lisbeth Salander vs. Thompson’s appreciation of David Fincher‘s film being, in her view, a first-rate genre piece, and superior to the 2009 Danish-Swedish film

The recent announcement that Lawrence Kasdan‘s Darling Companion will open the 2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival stirred a “hmmm” reaction. 20 years ago a Lawrence Kasdan relationship drama starring Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest and Sam Shepard would have been released during award season, and Kasdan’s fans (i.e., 30-and-older quality seekers) would have been wetting their lips. It would have been at least a moderately big deal.

But Kasdan’s last truly tasty film, Mumford, came out 12 years ago. I will never stop respecting or believing in his craft and vision, but over the last decade he’s generally been regarded by the media mob as M.I.A. or “on hold” or past it. So right off the top I was wondering if this is a potential rebound or a place-holder or what. Because my suspicions at this point in time, no offense, are skeptical.

I don’t mean to speak dismissively of one of the strongest and most distinctive director-screenwriters of the ’80s and ’90s. Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, Mumford — that’s a hell of a 20-year run. For a while there Kasdan was looking like an American Jean Renoir. But writer-directors have only so much psychic essence, and the prevailing view is that after they’ve shot their wad (as most wads are lamentably finite), that’s it.

But let’s presume otherwise. Tomorrow is another day. Ya gotta believe.

The nominal focus of Darling Companion (Sony Classics) is obsessive dog love on the part of a middle-aged woman (Keaton’s character). Which means, I gather, that the actual focus is the unfulfilling nature of many relationships today among older, well-to-do GenXers and boomers.

Keaton, married to Kevin Kline in the film, saves a stray dog on the side of a freeway in Denver “and then the husband loses the dog,” etc. SBIFF executive director Roger Durling called it “a fantastic film to kick off the festival.” But how so exactly? Because the plot thumbnail suggests something quirky, eccentric and perhaps minor.

A Sony Classics press release called Darling Companion “comic, harrowing and sometimes deeply emotional.” It will screen at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre on Thursday, January 26.

This apparently posted two or three hours ago — an allusion to “Safe Sheep Haven.”

I’m too whipped to write my review today of Angelina Jolie‘s In the Land of Blood and Honey, but I can tell already that my generally positive reaction, which I wasn’t expecting to have, is a minority view among critics who’ve posted today. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy is at least somewhat admiring.

“It’s clear within the first few minutes of In the Land of Blood and Honey, a blunt and brutal look at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, that this is a serious piece of work and not simply a vanity project for its debuting writer-director, Angelina Jolie,” he begins.

“But while the personal story at its core carries some nuanced shadings, this impressively mounted production gradually reveals itself first and foremost as a compendium of atrocities, a catalogue of pointless abuse and killings no one did much to stop for three years.

“Fueled by her well-known attachment to humanitarian causes, the director trains an intense light on a situation most outsiders at the time preferred not to deal with and now would rather forget about, which means that Jolie would literally have to lead people by the hand into theaters for this Film District release to do any theatrical business beyond the already committed.”