“It’s often hard for actors to accept their own strengths. There’s a tendency toward self-destructive behavior in very talented people. Look at Marlon Brando, Orson Welles or Montgomery Clift. They were brilliant and self-destructive. It’s a mystery why that is. But it is also true for Mickey. Some actors lose their way and they never put it together again. But by playing a guy in The Wrestler who is no longer what he was, Mickey has been reborn.” — Diner director Barry Levinson writing about Mickey Rourke in today’s N.Y. Times.

I don’t trust IMDB commenters, but if I wasn’t suspicious of them I’d be very enthused about seeing John Hillcoat‘s The Road (Weinstein Co.), which, as we all know, was bumped out of an ’08 release last fall and hasn’t yet been given an ’09 release date. The talk from unreliable people who claim they’ve seen a recent cut is more than encouraging.

Harvey Weinstein will do what with it, I wonder? My guess is that he’ll push the opening all the way into the fall for an Oscar run. (Which is what the original plan ostensibly was.) But if it’s as good as the IMDB phantoms say it is, wouldn’t it make sense to show it in Cannes three months from now?

Slumdog Millionaire won seven BAFTA awards in London this evening, including Best Picture, Best Director (Danny Boyle) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Simon Beaufoy). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, nominated in 11 categories (same as Slumdog), won three tech awards — Best Production Design (Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo), Makeup & Hair (Jean Black, Colleen Callaghan) and Best Visual Effects (Eric Barba, Craig Barron, Nathan Mcguinness, Edson Williams).

Man on Wire won the Outstanding British Film award. The Wrestler’s Mickey Rourke won for Best Leading Actor — the man’s renewed life and career continues. Kate Winslet’s Reader performance won for Best Leading Actress. The all-but-Oscar-locked Heath Ledger and Penelope Cruz won for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.

I’m in Holly Springs, Mississippi. I have to haul it back to Memphis airport for my 1:30 pm flight to La Guardia. That’s all she wrote until this evening. I need to say one thing about the people I’ve met in Tennessee and Mississippi. They’re kind, gentle, polite, alpha. It’s been a pleasure to know them and feel their vibe. That includes my very gracious hosts at the Oxford Film Festival.

2.7.09, 6:35 pm

2.7.09, 7:15 pm

Yesterday morning Cinematical‘s Elisabeth Rappe wrote an appropriate mockery piece about Mary, Mother of Christ, an actual movie-to-be that will open on 4.2.10, according to a 2.5 story by Variety‘s Michael Fleming and Tatiana Siegel.

Camilla Belle as Mary. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in the dual roles of Gabriel and Lucifer. Peter O’Toole as Symeon. (Who’s that?) And Al Pacino and Jessica Lange “currently in talks” to play King Herod and Anna the Prophetess. The director is Alejandro Agresti (The Lake House, Valentin).

It’s best not to presume anything, of course, but there’s just no controlling the involuntary recoil reaction to a project like this. The thought of a bearded Pacino in royal robes…good God. What an embarassment for he and Lange both. The top gigs aren’t coming their way so they’re more or less forced, if they want to keep flush, to take gigs of this calibre. As Rappe notes, Pacino as King Herod is “in the territory” of John Wayne as a Roman centurion in George Stevens‘ The Greatest Story Ever Told.

“It’s rare to hear journalists and critics vocally turn against a film at the Berlin International Film Festival,” Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez wrote a little while ago. “Catcalls and hisses, while more common in Cannes, are actually rather rare on the international festival circuit. So, it came as a bit of a surprise to hear a loud ‘boo,’ then whistles, followed by tepid applause and another ‘boo’ this afternoon at the end of Lukas Moodysson‘s Mammoth.”

Fascinating lead graph, but there’s no payoff. All Hernandez says is that the ending is what offended. Okay, but that’s it? Was it a failure to satisfyingly conclude, or an ending that contained a plot turn that people found deeply offensive? Did costars Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Willams drop trou and moon the camera? Surely there must b a way to convey what ticked people off without divulging the particulars.

“After the showing, the debate began and filmmaker Moodysson admitted that he’s been surprised by audience reactions to his new movie.”

Hernandez describes Mammoth as “an ambitious English-language story shot on three continents. Bernal and Williams portray an upwardy mobile New York City couple with a young daughter who is cared for by a Filipina maid. Desperate to return to the Phillipines, the noble nanny cooks, cleans and raises the American girl in order to make enough money to some day return to her own kids back home.”

Okay, yeah….and?

Simon Beaufoy‘s Slumdog Millionaire script, based on the novel “Q and A” by Vikas Swarup, tonight won the Writers Guild of America award for best adapted screenplay. It beat out screenplays for Frost-Nixon, The Dark Knight, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Doubt.

“I recommend Scene It? Box Office Smash for Xbox,” writes Ben Lyons on a Daily Beast “Smart People Recommend” page. “It helps me improve my movie knowledge, and it’s a lot of fun to play either alone or with some of the homies when they come over.

“With Xbox Live it downloads new questions all the time over the Internet, so no matter how many times I play it, it always has new puzzles and questions. The material is sometimes really challenging, even for someone like me who watches about 300 films a year. Even if you’re not as big a fan of movies as I am, the anagrams and games within the game are a lot of fun. I challenge anybody who dares to step into The Lyons Den to a game of Scene It? on Xbox… Let’s get it on!”

In a portion of a piece about the downish aspects of being a movie star called “Being Famous Mostly Sucks,” N.Y. Times columnist David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger’) writes that “the money is nice and all, but what if you want to just be with your pals and have a good time? That is never going to happen if you leave the house.

“It’s not that fans are trying to bum you out by getting an arm on you. They are just being themselves, which is to be riveted by the sight of someone who they have seen on their television. Everyone who approaches a famous person has a need for validation. I saw her, him or it. We had a moment. She seemed really great or horrible or freakish. We all want a taste of this, not so that we can savor it, but so that we can report back to our friends. And some of the motives, especially of the press, are less than friendly.

“As a writer, the Bagger has found that just about the time he is ready to sink his fangs into somebody, the area he is about to chomp on is already full of bite marks. That does not excuse a freak like Christian Bale, who is on the web dripping in vulgar entitlement, but it makes the whole celebrity disengagement a lot easier to understand.”

Just a few more licks to post on this cranked-up, trumped-up Oxford Film Festival media-panel fracas, and that’ll be it for good:

(a) I forgot to mention in my initial post about this yesterday morning that I tried using my AT&T air card service (which I pay $60 bucks a month for) and that it worked for a while and then it didn’t. I’m used to the fact that it’s a temperamental device, but when it crapped out on me along with the hotel wifi and the ethernet cable connection, something collapsed inside. I felt as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse were circling and going for the kill.

(b) If I had it do over again, I would have gone to the friggin’ media panel and listened to moderator James Rocchi do his brilliant pontificator routine while I waited for a chance to get a word in edgewise in front of 50 or 60 people who’d been partying like the panelists into the wee hours the night before. When I said to a couple of fellow panelists (Rocchi and someone else) on Friday morning that I wouldn’t doing the panel due to fatigue and rage and a general deadness-of-the-brain, I wasn’t coming from a place of firm resolution but from what you might call a mood pocket. Mood pockets are temporary emotional foxholes — not a home or a fortress or any kind of fortified structure but a place you’ve just sort of crawled into for a bit. If Rocchi or Kim Voynar or anyone had come up and said, “Look, you have to do this and the hell with your mood pocket!,” I probably would have shaken myself out of it and done the damn thing. But nobody said zip. One of the panelists told me a few hours ago that they were all in shock — novocained! unable to respond! — and that’s why nobody said anything. I’m not saying the no-show wasn’t my call entirely, but if I had been one of the others I wouldn’t have numbed out if one of them had been in a dispirited mood. You could go so far as to say that’s what friends do when you’re depressed and funked out — they come over and tell you to snap out of it, get over it, do the right thing. Sentimental me!

(c) Imagine I’m the film festival chief and you’re coming to my town to watch movies and take part in a panel discussion. I pick you up at the airport, take you to the local motel. You notice after unpacking your things in your room that the bathroom has a strip of yellow tape across the entrance that says “out of order.” You come up to me and ask what’s up, and I say “Uhhm, I know, it’s fucked up…but you can use the bathroom near the front desk in the lobby and” — I hand them a roll of peach-colored Charmin bathroom tissue — “there are also woods right outside, so you can always go there in a pinch.” Let’s say one of the panelists doesn’t show up the next day. Now, I might be disappointed in this, having paid for their airfare and hotel room costs and so on, but if I were honest with myself I might allow that an emotional cause-and-effect symmetry might have been a factor.

(d) “Regardless of the wifi-gate specifics, the cool kidz are ganging up on you,” a journalist friend wrote me today, “and the winners write history, so to speak, even if they’re idiots. I was initially horrified and then I thought about it in context. That things were so screwed up with the motel wifi that you thought something was wrong with your own shit is a major organizational error on their part. But you’re cool with the fest people, and frankly controversy is the BEST publicity known to man…but all these other critics? I haven’t seen them writing shit up all over the place, have you? They showed up for a panel, but have they been pimping that place large?

“If you post any further followup, the only recommendation I have from a debater’s standpoint is that you reiterate that the no-showing for the panel is something the festival organizers and you are cool about, and that you’d challenge these other folks to show any of their coverage of the trip or experience that isn’t Defamer fodder that has nothing to do with promoting the festival. You ‘agree’ with all the jerks that you answer to the festival folks, and according to them, you’re cool. So what’s the problem?”

(e) “Don’t let the bastard commenters get you down,” a seasoned journalist pal wrote two or three hours ago. “The Oxford coverage is great. If I wanted to read bland coverage of movies and other crap at a small regional film festival, I can go to Variety or the Reporter or one of those earnest film blogs that think covering every last lame movie is important. but your bizarre adventures (and your very fine tourist photos) is what makes your site so fucking readable. The only thing i would change is (a) add some photos of cute Oxford girls and (b) maybe an mp3 of Scott Weinberg or one of the other pissheads getting into a verbal harrangue with you over this thing.”

(f) “Hey Jeff, how are you? I just wanted to email you to make sure that you and your readers know that I am Scott Feinberg from the L.A. Times and NOT Scott Weinberg the guy who commented on your post about the Oxford Film Festival, since I’ve been getting emails for hours from people who think you and I are in a big fight, when in fact I consider us to be friends. Perhaps you can post a clarification?” Sorry, Scott — clarification posted.

“I’ve just watched the entirety of Che,”says HE reader Yu Zun, “and absolutely, unequivocally loved it! I cannot imagine watching the two films separately. Did the film’s monk-like aesthetic distance and commitment remind you at all of Barry Lyndon? I feel that both films, in their hands-off portrayal of the central character, ultimately present the most compassionate portrait we can ascribe to a human being. They can only be judged, if at all, through their actions, and by the viewer’s lens, and not by the generic filmmaker’s sermon.

“This — i.e., the sermon — consists of the dramatic, narrative elements that are supposed to humanize the hero. It’s the basic building block of a well-made and involving narrative film. But the stuff of great movies demands more — a personality and deeper thought beyond that label, and Che and Barry Lyndon do not partake in that sermon. They forego what we expect to find in a film that’s centered around one character. Che and Barry Lyndon are as removed from us as the people that live under our roofs. I thought that decision, in both films, was a very brave, perhaps even stubborn, choice.

“So Erenst Che Guevara’s actions simply ARE, and the man behind the action becomes a contradiction through what he does. In a way, the film is the character. There is no sermon, there is no gospel — just the facts. The film pays high respect to the viewers, by acknowledging that we are merely interpreters of identical facts — no more, no less. Whether it’s a high-art fuck-you or an act of faith, I suppose, depends on who you are.”

What’s going on right now is no friggin’ recession — it’s awful, galloping and worldwide. Or at least so says Donald Trump, whom I strangely believe more than the other rich guys and corporate shills we’re always hearing from.