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“Art is an inherently amoral and ruthless enterprise, however much we may want to believe otherwise.”

This is a quote from Andrew O’Hehir‘s 12.29 Salon analysis of the Zero Dark Thirty shitstorm. Many of us go to films hoping to be blown away or mesmerized or emotionally melted down, period. We just want the movie to work. We’re not uninterested in its political leanings, or oblivious to same, but most of us, I think, are willing to process this as connected-but-separate dish.

Others want their movies above all to stand on the right side. They want their art to be moral and compassionate. In exactly the same way, I feel, that the Soviet bureaucrats of the 1930s wanted their art to celebrate the glorious wheat farmers of the Ukraine. The Stalinists who’ve ripped Zero Dark Thirty for allegedly being pro-torture are cut from the exact same cloth.

I will bow down to any film that kicks ass. Okay, I won’t bow down to a brilliantly made film that advances an evil agenda, but if the film is as obviously well made as, say, Leni Reifenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will, I will at least have mixed feelings about condemning it. But a film that is morally ambiguous or indistinct will never anger or alienate me. And I don’t care what kind of politics it espouses. I am just as much a fool for Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire, one of the most rousing rightwing thrillers ever made, as I am for Oliver Stone‘s W. or Nixon.

In a 12.27 N.Y. Times interview with Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow, Brooks Barnes writes that Bigelow and ZD30 screenwriter-producer Mark Boal “have succeeded — perhaps a bit too well — in renewing a conversation about America’s use of torture to fight terrorism.”

But Bigelow “was not particularly keen to discuss torture over lunch, she said, partly because she wants her work to speak for itself and partly because she is aware that any public comments could just add fuel to the fire.”

I love and admire Bigelow, but c’mon. The anti-ZD30 rhetoric has obviously been raging over the Christmas holidays, and it’s become clear that the Hollywood Stalinists have probably succeeded in tarring and feathering ZD30 by persuading those who refuse to venture beyond party-chat points that the film is pro-torture (which it’s NOT) and is therefore pushing a politically incorrect narrative. So at this point a little lighter fluid by way of a quote given to Brooks Barnes would hardly fucking matter.

If I were Bigelow I would at least acknowledge that the Stalinists have probably wounded ZD30 badly enough to deny it the Best Picture Oscar, and that I hope they’re happy about that. I would also thank the Stalinists for giving us all an education about the hidden side of their nature.

On top of which if there’s one thing that the Stalinist attack pieces have made clear, it’s that ZD30 isn’t speaking for itself in terms of this topic. As Barnes observes, ZD30‘s torture scenes “are presented with no obvious political tilt, creating a cinematic Rorschach test in which different viewers see what they want to see.”

The only time Harry Carey, Jr. half-got me was when he played young Dan Latimer in Howard Hawks‘ Red River (’48). He’s on his horse, gently calming the herd…”whoa, dogies, whoa”…when Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) come up to chat. Latimer tells Dunson that when they reach Missouri and everyone gets paid he plans to buy his wife a pair of red shoes.

An hour later the cattle go on a stampede and Latimer is trampled to death. They find what might be his body but can only presume it’s him because he was wearing a checkered shirt. Dunson tells Garth to give full pay to Latimer’s wife, “just like he finished the drive…and, uh, … anything else you can think of.” Garth replies, “Like a pair of red shoes?”

And that was it. Carey never had a better part or brought it home in as an actor quite as fully. He wasn’t a great performer, just a good-enough one. But getting stomped into mulch by hundreds and hundreds of cattle hooves, godawful as that experience had to be, gave him dignity, or gave it, rather, to poor Dan Latimer.

Carey’a becoming a regular in the John Ford hambone stock company from the late ’40s through the mid ’60s sealed his fate. All he could do was play amiable or spirited second bananas on horseback.

Harey Carey, Jr. was a very well-liked fellow. On this point agreement was wide and far. Much of his likability (among boomers, at least) came from his playing the kindly ranch counselor Bill Burnett in the Walt Disney Mickey Mouse Club serial The Adventures of Spin and Marty. He made three other films with Hawks — Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Rio Bravo. He lived a long and fruitful life, and died today at age 91. God rest his soul.

The good news is that Criterion has a Badlands Bluray coming out on 3.19.13. The bad news is that they’ve cleavered the aspect ratio down to 1.78 to 1. The good news is that I still have my copy of a 1999 Warner Home Video Badlands DVD, and it’s presented at 1.37 to 1. [See jump page.]

I don’t know for a fact that this WHV DVD presents the definitive full-frame, open-matte version of Terrence Malick‘s 1973 classic, but it sure looks good. I’ve watched it three or four times and can tell you it has acres and acres of spacious headroom.

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What happened to The Guilt Trip, the Seth Rogen-Barbra Streisand relationship comedy that opened nine days ago and has…what, fizzled? It was killed by 64% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics and has only made a lousy $14.5 million since opening nine days ago so I guess you can call it a bit of a wipe-out. Okay, a shortfaller. It’ll probably end up with…what, $25 million? It cost $40 million to produce plus distribution and marketing costs.

Nobody wants to watch a dramedy about a Jewish mom badgering her emotionally aloof son, right? Looked a little sleepy? Not funny or novel enough? Streisand used to be a draw, but she’s been out of the leading-lady game since the mid ’90s. I think it’s telling that I forgot to run a Guilt Trip review when the embargo broke. I was okay with it. I just forgot. Okay, I couldn’t muster the energy to write it. I guess that’s why it died. Nobody cared that much.

Pic was exec produced by Rogen and Streisand, directed by Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) and written by Dan Fogelman.

It’s basically a Jewish mother-and-son car trip movie. Rogen plays an inventor, Andy Brewster, who’s trying to sell a natural-elements cleaner to the big chains without much success. When he discovers that the beloved ex-boyfriend of his widowed mom, Joyce (Streisand), is living and working in San Francisco, he invites her to join him on a cross-country trip as he tries to sell his cleaner (which has a really hard-to-remember name that kinda sounds like Science Cleaner but is actually Scioclean or something like that) so they can wind up in San Fran and reunited with the old boyfriend.

And yet the way Joyce nags and nudges pisses Andy off and puts him in a bad mood half the time. The film has a nice ending, though — I’ll give it that. Adult chuckles, low-key tone, character-driven, no vulgarity, not classic or landmark but likable and moderately entertaining and occasionally heartfelt.

I was grateful for Rogen’s low-key personality, although he plays it a little too somber and dour here and there. I was grateful that it didn’t go all crude and sloppy in search of lowest-common-denominator animal laughs.

I saw The Guilt Trip 27 days ago at a special invitational screening in Century City that Rogen and Streisand attended.

Quentin Tarantino attempted one of his career-resuscitation moves when he cast Breaking Away‘s Dennis Christopher and 48 HRS. and Drugstore Cowboy costar James Remar roles in small Django Unchained roles. Very good for all three. But I’ve watched Django one and a half times and I never recognized Christopher or Remar. Certainly nothing they said or did popped through. I had to read about it, etc.

(l.) Dennis Christopher as Dave Stoller in Peter Yates’ Breaking Away (’79); (r.) as Leonide Moguy in Django Unchained.

That’s because my eyes were half-open and my attention was at half-mast. I shut down early in order to shield myself from the lemme-outta-here Quentin wank effect. I didn’t give a damn who was saying what or playing whom and wearing a sheet with misplaced eye holes or aiming a rifle at whomever. I just wanted to it to stop.

I guess now that I know to look for Christopher and Remar I’ll take take notice if I watch Django again, but the odds of that happening are slim to none.

Scott Feinberg‘s 12.27 Hollywood Reporter story about how Academy members are having difficulty with online Oscar voting (possibly due to forgetting passwords, but with more than one industry source describing the site as a “disaster,” says Feinberg) is the equivalent of a weatherman reporting rainshowers on election day.

It simply means that some of the older voters (who tend to vote in a conservative, status-quo, go-along way) might possibly throw up their hands and not vote, which probably means a slight weakening of support for lazy-default favorites like Lincoln, Life of Pi and Les Miserables. I can’t imagine what else it might portend. Older people have always had and always will have trouble with passwords and whatnot, and software guys always have and always will create websites that they know deep down will give a bit of grief to low-tech, slow-on-the-pickup users. They’ll never admit it, but software guys enjoy this on some deep perverse level.

There are only five blazingly well-crafted, obviously levitational 2012 films that truly deserve to be Best Picture nominated. Not eight, seven or six…five. One of these is Michael Haneke‘s Amour, although I’m presuming it’s been relegated in most minds to the Best Foreign Language category. The second of these, Leo Carax‘s Holy Motors, has barely been seen and hasn’t a chance. Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina has been seen, but has been widely dismissed by too many critics (to their eternal discredit) that it’s almost certainly a non-starter.

That leaves Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty and David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook. These are the only two main-event sluggers with that special blend of craft, command and transportation that people remember decades later.

The Gold Derby “experts” who are currently asserting that Lincoln‘s Steven Spielberg is in the lead position for Best Director know a lot less than you might think. In my mind they’re lazy defaulters who are hanging out in the lobby and going “I don’t know but I guess this is how the dullest people are thinking…right?” You can’t give a Best Director Oscar to a hack billionaire whose next film will reportedly be Robopocalypse just because he made a good Abraham Lincoln film. Try to restrain your impulse to show obeisance before power. You will not receive a check in the mail if you vote for Spielberg and he takes the Oscar.

The Stalinist-committee claim that ZD30 should be dismissed because it endorses torture is one of the most vile p.c.-hysteria charges in Hollywood history. But it has stuck to the wall because too many people are letting the sound bite into their heads without considering the particulars, and because Sony management has apparently decided to let ZD30 absorb the slings and arrows without rushing to its defense.

I’ve said more than enough about Silver Linings so let’s let it lay, but it’s the only contender that really generates its own kind of energy and delivers according to its own particular personality terms, and which offers a kind of social-cultural undercurrent (i.e., we’re all crazy-hyper under the skin) that lingers after the credits.

Ben Affleck‘s Argo is a professionally composed, highly satisfying period caper film — hats off, due respect, thumbs-up.

Tom Hooper‘s Les Miserables is madly, wildly loved thing that has alienated too many people (i.e., roughly 25% to 30% of critics and industry types), although it does come together exceptionally, I feel, during the final 40 minutes.

If you separate the performances by Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, James Spader and David Strathairn, watching Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln is like listening to the tick-tick of a grandfather clock.

Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi will be Best Picture-nominated in order to round out the field — let’s leave it at that.

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master is a major auteurist-muscle-flex film with a lead performance (i.e., Joaquin Phoenix‘s) that combines anti-social alienation and alcohol-sipping with the behavior of slithery, tongue-flicking serpent-geek, and which peaks somewhere between the halfway and two-thirds point and doesn’t really come together in the end.

Benh Zeitlin‘s Beasts of the Southern Wild deserves a little-engine-that-could Best Picture nomination, but it won’t happen. Tough game, hot kitchen.

Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained is an ugly cheeseball exploitation film that uses slavery as a protection-pass cloak that permits QT to wallow in all kinds of wink-wink blood, venality and racial venom for close to two hours and 40 minutes.

In a 12.27 “Top Ten Worst movies of 2012” piece, Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet has called Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina a “dud.” No, it isn’t. It’s a brave and visionary film (in my view the bravest film of the year) that people with Brevet’s sensibility have, to their profound shame and discredit, tried to characterize as some kind of dud embarassment with a litany of flip, snarky comments.

There should be laws and prosecutions and penalties for this kind of thing, I swear to God.

Anna Karenina is in no way, shape or form a shortfaller. The shortfallers, trust me, are the critics. It’s a “serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes,” as I wrote on 9.6.12.

I’ve never called Silver Linings Playbook a romantic comedy, although it is comedic and unmistakably romantic at the end, and it does, to its detractors’ discomfort, use a familiar and formulaic romcom-type ending (although David O. Russell shapes and renders it in a novel, engaging, live-wire way). It’s a much smarter and deeper thing than your typical Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigel film, for sure, and much more skillfully made. But you wouldn’t be wildly off if you called it a “romantic comedy.”

I would call Silver Linings a manic romantic dramedy about anxiety, obsession, family and sports-betting superstition. It obviously doesn’t walk or talk and go for the easy-lay emotion like the other romcoms, but it’s certainly an oddball cousin in the family.

Which is why I find it staggering that Vulture‘s Claude Brodesser posted a piece today called “Can the Romantic Comedy Be Saved?,” and he didn’t even mention Silver Linings Playbook.

My first thought after I caught SLP in Toronto was “finally, a romantic comedy that I can not only stand but I actually like…this is how they should be made!” Brodesser-Akner could have disagreed and written that SLP actually isn’t a romcom and explained why, or mentioned it as a genre outlier or whatnot. But he doesn’t even acknowledge its existence. To him SLP is so far outside the bounds of what a romantic comedy is that he doesn’t even mention that Russell’s film at least vaguely qualifies for the reasons I mentioned above. He doesn’t even bring it up for the purpose of dismissing it. Amazing! Because he’s dead fucking wrong.

In this Sunday’s N.Y. Times Oscar section, critic Manohla Dargis provides a nice reputational upgrade to David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook by comparing it Michael Haneke‘s Amour, or more precisely by evaluating them as equally strong and honorable films.

Amour and Silver Linings Playbook “are as different from each other in mood, look, feeling, cinematic technique and visual style as is possible to find in theaters,” Dargis observes. “[And yet] both are love stories. One shows love and a shared life at their inception; the other shows life, and the love that it sustained, ending. How Mr. Haneke and Mr. Russell convey the central relationships in their movies opens a window onto how each director expresses meaning through the dialogue and the performances; through human gestures and camera moves; through what is inside the frame and how everything in it is arranged (carefully or with feigned informality); through editing and its rhythms; through music or its absence.”

Dargis finishes by comparing two sitting-at-a-table scenes featuring the male and female leads (Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in Amour), and how the former is a beginning and the latter is the beginning of the end.

I’m posting this and providing the link because it’s a very wise and well written piece, and also, to be honest, to make things a little more difficult for the SLP haters. Anything I can do to denigrate, diminish or otherwise take this crew down, I’m there.