Not the “scariest, snarliest bulldog in the pen” but “the most powerful man in the world”? When Clint Eastwood‘s Harry Callahan called the .357 Magnum “the most powerful handgun in the world”, I believed him. But the Hoover description seems grandiose.

Early last July ESPN’s Bill Simmons confided that he’d seen Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult (Paramount, 12.9), and that Charlize Theron ‘s lead performance was a career landmark for her. Trailers always lie but this one suggests, at least, what Theron’s performance might be. Is anyone getting a sense that Simmons may have been right?

“Remember when we said earlier about Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise and how he needed Jerry Maguire [to do that], and how you watched for two hours…?,” Simmons said. “And this is Tom Cruise throwing 98 miles an hour? Charlize Theron has never had a movie like that. Monster shoudn’t be her defining movie…she gained 35 pounds and made herself ugly [for that], and she’s beautiful. She’s never had a really good movie that she was really good in in which she was also beautiful.

“And it made me reevaluate her career…that’s how good I thought she was in [Young Adult]. She knows that you know that she knows she’s beautiful. I’m glad she made this movie. People will feel differently about her after they see it.”

No superhero movie can work if it appeals only to ComicCon fanboy types. It has do that deep-theme, double-intelligent, heavy-lifting thing (like Captain America did) to attract skeptics and haters like myself. I don’t see this happening with Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers (Disney/Marvel, 5.4.12) because Whedon is an unregenerate, comic-book-worshipping, fanboy-servicing journeyman — not an art-visionary director like Cameron or Fincher or Del Toro, strictly a fantasy-realm clock puncher.

And after all the X-Men movies, who wants to slog it out with another superhero ensemble piece?

The problem with Douglas Rain‘s HAL voice being Siri’ed, of course, is that he no longer has that voice. His 2001: A Space Odyssey dialogue was recorded 44 or 45 years ago, when Rain (born in ’28) was in his late 30s. He’s now 83, and his voice surely has that vaguely fluttering, higher-pitched old man timbre. Apple needs to find a Rain-sounding guy to pinch-hit. (Thanks to HE reader Mark Frenden.)

If an opener has an under-60% Rotten Tomatoes rating, it’s probably a wash. If it’s under 30% it’s a must-to-avoid. But if it’s at 10% or lower, some kind of exceptional chord has clearly been struck. (Note: as the RT rating will change as the day wears on, I’ll re-adjust and rephrase.)

Movieline‘s latest Oscar Index is a typical example of how clubhouse, path-of-least-resistance spitballing manifests when you’re tasked with reconfiguring these charts week after week. It’s all about familiar emotional default. Take your standard Spielberg kowtowism, ignore the tendencies on view in his last war film (i.e., the one about Martians, particularly the happy finale) and throw in the recently-dropped War Horse trailer, the horse all but crying in close-up…obviously the Best Picture contender to beat. Simple, easy and who’s to dispute?

In my somewhat more real-worldish Oscar Balloon chart Moneyball and The Descendants share the top two positions followed by War Horse (because the saps will always champion shameless-emotional-appeal movies of this sort), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Help, The Artist (its fate will depend on how well it does with the public) and Midnight in Paris. I’ve heard that the tone of The Iron Lady is “light”, but that needn’t be a problem in itself, if true. J. Edgar is in limbo for the time being, based on something I heard last weekend. I’m not sure that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will be judged as Best Picture-type contender — it’s more of a Gary Oldman-for-Best Actor show.

Almost a month ago I ran my review of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March (Sony, 10.7). It opens tomorrow so here it is again: “[This] is a smart, taut political thriller — well-acted, gripping (particularly after the shit starts hitting the fan in Act Two) with a chilly, bitter edge. Plus it packs a stiffer punch than Beau Willimon‘s Farragut North, a 2008 political play that Clooney and Grant Heslov adapted for the screen, and in so doing added a third act involving sexual indiscretion.

“Is Ides about us on some level? Does it reflect or shed light upon some universal current that we’ve all come to know and understand? No — it’s a high-end, thoroughly adult popcorn movie, and that’s totally fine. There’s nothing to bitch about or put down here. Well, you can but why? To what end?

“The plot is about three shrewd political operatives (played by Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti) working for a pair of Democratic Presidential candidates during the Ohio primary. One of them is an (relatively) blunt-spoken liberal played by Clooney, called Mike Morris, and the other we never meet up close.

“What is Ides basically saying? That big-time politics can be a rough snarly game, and that being dedicated and hard-working doesn’t mean jack — you can still get taken down if you don’t play your cards extra-carefully. And the game isn’t just rough and snarly as it basically stinks.

Here’s where the mild spoiler stuff begins, if you care…

“The piece starts to get interesting when Gosling’s Stephen, a young hotshot aide to Clooney, slipping into a semi-casual affair with Holly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood ), a 20 year-old who works for the Morris campaign as an intern. And then we learn that someone else has had it off with Holly…all right, I’m not saying any more.

“But is a little action on the side really shocking in a campaign environment? Or in the world of politics itself? Post-Anthony Weiner what’s so bad about a politician (or his campaign manager or whomever) having an affair or a one-nighter with a more-or-less willing participant? Sounds pretty tame to me.

“One of the strongest lines in the film, spoken by Gosling, goes something like ‘you can go to war or ruin the economy or protect the rich, but you don’t get to fuck the interns.’ But don’t you? I mean, isn’t that par for the course? And does anyone really care? I realize, of course, that some people do care, still, but I sure as hell don’t, and no one who’s been around does so, you know, let it go already.

“The bottom line is that The Ides of March does the job of a good political thriller — it grabs and rivets and enthralls — and that’s fine with me. And it ought to be fine with everyone else. It’s worth the price of admission.”

13 and 1/2 months ago I wrote that “something’s wrong, it appears, with William Monahan‘s London Boulevard, a Graham King-funded crime drama which finished principal in August ’09 and has long been presumed/rumored to be a fall 2010 release. That seems unlikely at this stage.” It did open in England in late November of last year, but it got killed by most critics, earning a 32% rating.

I speculated in my piece that “Monahan’s superb screenwriting talent” — his script for Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed won an Oscar — “hasn’t fully translated over to directing, and that his inexperience combined with anal tendencies caused problems on the set (or so says a London source), and that reactions to the unfinished film were such that extra shooting was deemed necesssary (ditto), and that King has decided to pull the plug on 2010…and punt instead for 2011.”

IFC Films, which bought distribution rights from King’s co-owned Film District, will open London Boulevard on 11.11.11.

The film is a London-based crime drama about an ex-con named Mitchel (Colin Farrell), just out of the slammer, who’s trying to go straight but “the gang won’t let him,” etc. (That cliche really is the basic plot.) He lucks into a job as a combination handyman and security guard for Charlotte (Keira Knightley), an actress who’s fallen into a odd kind of career slumber, and of course falls in love with her, and she him. All the while running more and more afoul of some Mr. Big gangster prick (Ray Winstone).

Costars include David Thewlis ( as a kind of Max von Mayerling character), Anna Friel, Ophelia Lovibond, Ben Chaplin, Sanjeev Baskhar and Jamie Campbell Bower.

I saw it last night and whoo, boy. There’s plenty of time to run a review, but I certainly saw what the problem was soon enough. Monahan is more concerned with style than story, it feels oddly misshapen and off-balance at times, the color looks oddly washed out, Monahan uses The Yardbird’s “Heartful of Soul” on the soundtrack three times, and the film devolves into a bloody body-drop festival about halfway through and — this is telling — Monahan casts himself (or someone who looks an awful lot like him) as a Knightley-stalking paparazzo who stares but never shoots.

The odd thing is that the script, which I read during the summer of 2010, read like “a sturdy, character-based, unhurried crime drama mixed with romance and hints of dark poetry. Well-sculpted dialogue, sprinklings of echo and nuance and melancholy, a little touch of Mona Lisa in the night.” Any good script can be fucked up in the shooting.

“They did some extra shooting in London between [in the summer of 2010],” a London guy told me. “They also did very brief additional shooting in L.A. with, I believe, a stand-in for Keira Knightley. You’ve read the script so you know that it’s a back shot of KK’s character standing, if I remember correctly, of the balcony of the Chateau Marmont.

“I did hear there were a lot of problems during the shoot and that Monahan was beyond paranoid, involving himself in every single aspect of filming, which, of course, meant that shooting took forever.”

I’m sure this trailer deceives in ways I haven’t yet discerned. I’ve heard so-so things, but within these two minutes and 7 seconds, My Week With Marilyn looks fairly okay. It has poise, snap, craft. And a convincingly conservative yesteryear quality. And Michelle Williams‘ performance as Marilyn Monroe, you can sense, might eventually be regarded as a head-to-head, playing-a-famous-person comptetitor of Meryl Streep‘s Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

As noted, I won’t see it at the New York Film Festival this Sunday due to flying back to LA on Saturday.

Two details from tonight’s announcement about Universal intending to release Brett Ratner‘s Tower Heist on-demand only three weeks after it opens in theaters on 11.4, or on 11.25. One, the viewing price, according to L.A. Times‘s Ben Fritz, will be $59.99. And two, it will only be offered to Comcast subscribers in Atlanta and Portland. But exhibitors know what this means — the thin end of the wedge.