Jeffrey Wells

“The Dark Knight was not a great movie,” Marshall Fine explains to the fan boys who wanted it nominated for Best Picture. “It was only half a good movie. It was not as good as Batman Begins. It was not as consistently entertaining as Iron Man.

“There’s a solid 90-minute movie buried within the 150-minute slog that is The Dark Knight. And even that wouldn’t have been worthy of an Oscar nomination.

“Personally, I’m still trying to figure out why so many people got so worked up about this bloated, self-important movie. It kind of blew, in the same way that Spider-man 3 kind of blew.

“Sure, it was dark and broody. And then, for a change of pace, it was darker and broodier.

“The Dark Knight had more prelims than a Don King undercard. You had to sit through Batman slugging it out with what seemed like dozens of faceless, generic henchmen before he actually worked his way to the Joker. It was as if Batman tried to cut in line to buy Springsteen tickets – and then had to take on everyone else in the line – before confronting the Boss himself.

“If you want to make a movie about Two-Face, go ahead and make one. But don’t graft it on to the Batman-Joker movie, like some weird Ray Milland/Roosevelt Grier clone. By the time Aaron Eckhart was burned into a special-effects nightmare worthy of early Sam Raimi, you mostly wished he’d just die and shut up. Or spin off to his own movie.

“Too much of this over-earnest outing was devoted to convincing people to take it seriously. It practically screamed, ‘This is literature! This is art, by God!’

“Meanwhile, writer-director Christopher Nolan left out a couple of key elements. Fun, for one. Excitement, for another. If I wanted to listen to Nolan’s dissertation on the nature of heroism in modern society, I would have gone to grad school with him.”

The final art for Wayne Kramer‘s Crossing Over (Weinstein Co., 2.27), which, speak of the devil, I’m seeing early this evening. The screening starts in 25 minutes so I’d better hump it over there.

London Times reporter Tim Teeman reported yesterday that an “ambitious plan to pump ‘significant” profits from the film Slumdog Millionaire back into the Mumbai slums where the film is set has been revealed by Danny Boyle, the film’s director.

“Boyle said investors, who are set to benefit from millions in box office profits, were planning to meet in London next week to discuss how much money to put into a special fund and how best to distribute the cash. ‘We want to set it up as soon as possible,’ Boyle said. ‘What absolutely mustn’t happen is that the money disappears, or people think this is a p.r. stunt.'”

Lively jib-jab hokum about Brangelina and the Oscars (and the expectation that the numbers for next month’s Oscar telecast will be in the toilet) from seasoned entertainment writer Tim Appelo. We all have wallowing moments. Not everything we write can be Pulitzer-level. Appelo is a good fellow — he’s forgiven.

Falco Ink was mistaken about the asker of the “frostbite” question (“If you had to sacrifice one body part to frostbite at Sundance, what would it be?”) that was satirized by director-writer Armando Iannucci (In The Loop) in the Guardian and linked to this morning. It wasn’t “international” journalist Gaynor Flynn but L.A. Times staff writer Richard Rushfield .

Rushfield did in fact interview Iannucci and Loop costars James Gandolfini and Mimi Kennedy at Sundance. Here‘s the L.A. Times video in question. And here‘s another L.A. Times video in which Rushfield asks the same frostbite question of Paris Hilton.

Thanks to Jeffrey Ressner (formerly of Time, a stringer for Politico) for the research help.

An apparently crapola biopic of Roman Polanski called Polanski: Unauthorized is opening at West Hollywood’s Sunset 5 Laemmle Theatres on Friday, 2.13. I’ve seen only the trailer but that’s enough. Unrated, 89 minutes.

Screeners are available for review.

Last Friday (1.23) Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond, HitFix awards blogger and editor Gregory Ellwood, Hollywood Reporter and Gold Rush blogger T.L. Stanley, Feinberg Files blogger Scott Feinberg and Gold Derby maestro Tom O’Neil sat down to discuss the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards. Where are the friggin’ embed codes? I hate it when they don’t provide these.

Any list of the worst movies ever nominated for Best Picture that doesn’t include Dr. Doolittle, Around The World in Eighty Days, and The Greatest Show on Earth just isn’t paying attention. Many other Best Picture nominees from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, I’m sure, belong in this category.

Sorry but I don’t agree with a fair-sized portion of this list. Just because Ordinary People beat out Raging Bull for Best Picture doesn’t mean it’s a bad film — it actually works very well for what it is and what it shoots for. I loved most of what Million Dollar Baby delivered — it’s easily one of Clint’s all-time best. Dances With Wolves may have seemed forced and hackneyed here and there, but had a naturalistic ethos and a certain emotional integrity. And Scent of a Woman is probably Martin Brest‘s best film ever, and it has a rousing finale that “works.”

During last night’s Clint Eastwood tribute at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre — a two-hour chat that started about 25 minutes late. 45% of the discussion covered Eastwood’s beginning years in the ’50s and ’60s, 25% to 30% focused on the early ’70s and his beginnings as a director, and 25% was devoted to his output of the ’80s, ’90s and 21st Century.

(l. to r.) In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, L.A. Times/Feinberg Files columnist Scott Feinberg, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling at Eastwoood reception at Cafe Luck.

Feinberg, Eastwood height disparity is less than it would have been five or ten years ago. Anyone with an elderly parent knows that inches give way as people they get into their ’70s and beyond.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

I was cupping my ears when Clint Eastwood spoke last night about his Nelson Mandela biopic-slash-sports drama, which will begin filming in March with Morgan Freeman in the title role and Matt Damon as rugby player/coach Francois Pienaar. And I didn’t hear Clint say that the title will be The Human Factor, which is what the IMDB thinks it will be.

Eastwood said it might simply be called Mandela or — this is much better — Playing the Enemy, which is the name of John Carlin‘s book about how then-president Mandela’s wily strategy of using a sporting event — the Sprinkboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup — to try and heal South Africa’s racial divisions.

Eastwood’s pattern of being pretty quick on the turnaround suggests that the Mandela pic will be released sometime at the end of this year for Best Picture contention. Maybe.

Interviewer Leonard Maltin didn’t ask Eastwood about his post-Mandela plan to direct Hereafter, a supernatural thriller in the vein of The Sixth Sense that’s based on a script by Frost-Nixon scribe Peter Morgan.

I was told last night at the Eastwood reception party that Clint may be looking to shoot it sometime next fall, or perhaps in early ’10.

ClintEastwood2 from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

When are people going to stop saying “two thousand and…”? It all stems from the cultural dictatorship of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey . We’re now in the year twenty-oh-nine and next year should be referred to twenty-ten. I don’t want to hear that it’s two-thousand ten. Enough of that.

The Guardian has posted a diary-like Sundance recollection by In The Loop‘s Armando Iannucci. Excerpt: “Next day, I team up with James Gandolfini and Mimi Kennedy, two of the U.S. cast. They play a Pentagon general and a US state department politico doing their not-very-best to stop a war happening. Mimi is hilarious and James is always charming and generous, and very patient with the press.

“Which is just as well. The first interviewer is from the L.A. Times. That’s an important newspaper so we all have to be on our best behavior. The reporter places a small mobile phone on a tripod. We look at each other, and get ready for the smart and incisive questioning. We are asked, ‘If you had to lose one body part to frostbite, what part would it be?” Somewhere out in the digital ether, there’s footage of the three of us all looking at each other thinking, ‘What in arse’s name has happened to the L.A. Times?'”

Update: What journalist pitched this question? Falco Ink says it was a woman named Gaynor Flynn “but she doesn’t write for the L.A. Times. She’s an international journalist, based in LA and Australia. In fact, Armando didn’t talk to the L.A. Times at all — not sure where he came up with that. First Sundance and maybe a little overwhelmed?”