Everything is stalling and falling apart financially, the entertainment world is clearly feeling the bite and SAG is pushing for a strike after how many months of talking and soft-shoe shuffling to no end? Now they’re striking?

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button “is brilliant and beautiful and beguiling and any other adulatory adjective you can chuck at a movie,” writes Empire blogger Nev Pierce.

“It makes you consider the world anew…at least for a moment (but probably for a lot longer). It is about love, yes, and it is about Death: an event as inevitable as the rising of the sun, as the turning of the Earth. To put it schmaltzily — in a way the film itself would never countenance — it says the grave need not triumph over your day today. Grasp the now. Live in each moment. Take a hand and hold it.”

A N.Y. Times audio interview with the Washington Post‘s Peter Baker covering the back-story about Hillary Clinton‘s decision to accept the Secretary of State post under president Barack Obama .

Here’s a Daily Beast article by Ana Marie Cox about all the establishment righties who favor the Clinton appointment.

Conventional wisdom earlier this week had Twilight doing $55 to $60 million this weekend. Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote on Thursday that the weekend gross “could exceed $50 million.” Then a friend at Thursday’s Revolutionary Road screening predicted $70 million and I said, “You think so? With just girls?”

Turns out she was right. Fantasy Moguls‘ Steve Mason is reporting a $33 million Friday haul (including Thursday’s midnight showings) and a projected $70 million haul by Sunday evening. A separate studio estimate puts the weekend total at $83 million, counting the Thursday midnight shows, although that’s probably high.

“The smart money follows the 3-day Sex & the City formula,” Mason writes, “with $22.1 million Saturday, down about 33% Friday-to-Saturday, followed by a 30% Saturday-to-Sunday dip to a possible $15.4 million. That would bring the weekend haul to an impressive $70.58 million.”

At Friday’s Revolutionary Road after-party at 21, the legendary old-time haunt on West 52nd Street that, for me, will always summon memories of the backroom scene between Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success. Funded by Paramount Vantage, the event was another Peggy Siegal special.

N.Y. Times columnist David Carr, Revolutionary Road costar (and almost guaranteed Best Supporting Actor nominee) Michael Shannon — Friday, 11.21.08, 10:35 pm

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, Revolutionary Road star (and all-but-certain Best Actress nominee) Kate Winslet.

Revolutionary Road director Sam Mendes — Friday, 11.21.08, 11:05 pm

HE reaction #1 and #2.

Spoiler alert: If there’s one problem facing Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler in terms of older Academy viewers (i.e., 50-plus), it’s probably the scene involving metal staples. I say this as an admirer of this scalding character drama, and as a major supporter of Mickey Rourke‘s shot at landing a Best Actor nomination. But without going into specifics, the scene I’m alluding to didn’t draw me in or win me over by any stretch. It’s just a speed-bump thing so I recovered and moved on, but the memory of it…wow.

New York‘s “Vulture” guys have offered 28 reasons why Twilight the movie is better than Twilight the book[s]. In other words, one of the most hardboiled, cynical-minded, showbiz-covering blog teams in the western hemisphere likes it also. See what’s happening here?

$48 dollars to listen to Peter Bogdanovich talk to Jerry Lewis at the Times Center (242 West 41st Street) tomorrow night? I’ve spoken to Lewis (once) and read many interviews with him, and he’s always seemed a little too snippy and smug about everything. And I’m wondering, no offense, if it’s worth paying nearly $50 bills to hear him talk. If you’re going to go off the cliff with jacked-up prices why not charge $78 or $68? Why not $90? I’m not getting a sense of proportion. Order tickets online or by phone at 718.784.4520.

As expected, Twilight is polling on Rotten Tomatoes about 55-45 negative-positive. Obviously a serious difference of opinion, but it’s interesting to see how this and that high-cred critic thinks it’s silly or worse and others are touched by it, or at least respect its strategy and understand what it’s going for. Like The Philadephia Inquirer‘s Stephen Rea, for example, saying “it’s about as intense a series of onscreen clinches as the movies have seen in ages…but amazingly, it feels real — the actors pull it off.”

But the two best paragraphs written about the film have come from Time‘s Richard Corliss, to wit:

“Twilight…observes movie laws as aged as Edward, who was initiated into the realm of the undead in 1918. Defiantly old-fashioned, the film wants viewers to believe not so much in vampires as in the existence of an anachronistic movie notion: a love that is convulsive and ennobling. Bella could be any Hollywood heroine in love with a good boy whom society callously misunderstands. She’s Natalie Wood to Edward’s James Dean (in Rebel Without a Cause) or Richard Beymer (in West Side Story). Cathy, meet Heathcliff. Juliet, Romeo.

“This brand of fervid romance packed ’em in for the first 60 years of feature films, then went nearly extinct, replaced by the young-male fetishes of space toys and body-function humor. Twilight says to heck with that. It jettisons facetiousness for a liturgical solemnity, and hardware for soft lips. It revives the precept that there’s nothing more cinematic than a close-up of two beautiful people about to kiss.

“The movie’s core demographic is so young, its members may not know how uncool this tendency has become. But for them, uncool is hot. And seeing Twilight is less a trip to the multiplex than a pilgrimage to the Lourdes of puberty. It’s the girls’ first blast of movie estrogen.”

The universal theme in Revolutionary Road is conveyed in a mid-point scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Frank, taking a walk in the woods, sardonically mentions “the hopeless emptiness of the whole life here.” In response to this Michael Shannon‘s truth-telling loose cannon, walking with Frank, says that “plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

Snicker if you want and call this a variation on the Woody Allen/Annie Hall view that all of human existence is divided into the camps of the miserable and the horrible, but the Road theme that will connect, I believe, with general ticket buyers and Academy members is the general feeling that “this is not working, this is not it, this is not fulfilling — and we need to free ourselves from the trap.”

This is obviously a time of change and turnover, and if anything brought about the election of Barack Obama it was a majority of people recognizing and saying the above in a present-day context. Moviegoers will initially relate to Frank and April Wheeler as tragic figures, but as you get into the film an idea takes shape that they’re also echo-metaphors for what’s vaguely wrong now, or at least as symbols of the need to get rid of what’s taking us all down.