“The contemporary Oscar economy runs entirely on charm,” Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale wrote late today. “Your movie can make $1 million or $1 billion, be a polarizing scourge or smothered in plaudits and acclaim. You can place ads everywhere, send thousands of DVD screeners and engineer a fortune’s worth of publicity. But by the time nomination ballots are mailed in late December, if you haven’t found a way to charm a vote out of an Academy member, then you and your film are about as long for the awards race as Angelina Jolie is for a burger-eating contest.”

I’m sorry but I’m not getting the same sense of ironic hooligan satire from Goon (2.24) that I did from the Hanson Brothers drawing blood in George Roy Hill‘s Slap Shot. But I’ll bet that the Goon guys (director Michael Dowse, screenwriters Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg) took their inspiration from the Hanson Brothers.

Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin‘s Undefeated (Weinstein Co., 2.17) is a deeply touching 90-minute doc about Memphis’s Manassas Tigers, an African-American high-school football team trying to up their wins. But it’s mainly about various team members toughing it out with personal struggles. And it really sinks in.

The first half is somewhere between good enough and not bad — very nicely shot and smoothly cut but still a familiar portrait of a rural underdog football team. Kinda seen it before. But the second half…whoa. That’s when all the threads pay off and the seeds sprout, and it really gets you. I started to choke up a bit during one scene, but I coughed and kept it in check. “Shit…this is affecting,” I said to myself.

The life of the party is Bill Courtney, a dogged, red-haired lumber mill owner who donates his time as coach of the Tigers. He’s really quite an educator and an orator and an inspirational father to his players. He really gets into their lives and gets them to deal with their temporary setbacks, foibles, challenges.

It covers a wide range but focused on three main “characters.” “Money” Brown, a right tackle who suffers a torn ligament halfway through his senior season. An angry junior named Chavis Daniels who did time in a youth jail during his sophomore year. And O.C. Brown, a 280-pounder (he reminds you of the kid in The Blind Side) who has the best shot at a college football scholarship but who has problems getting decent grades.

It’s basically a slice of a real-life Blind Side (as far as O.C. is concerned) mixed in with Peter Berg‘s Friday Night Lights but without the wackjob parents.

It even ends on a similar note to Berg’s film. It isn’t the winning or the losing, but how you play the game and whether or not you’ve given your all and stood tall in a proud way, etc. The doc isn’t really about football as much as character, intestinal fortitude, manning up, etc. And caring, really caring. Put a little love in your heart.

“You think football builds character. It does not. Football rreveals character.”

The Undefeated gang at Austin’s SXSW film festival in mid March 2011.

The L.A. all-media screening for Daniel Espinosa‘s Safe House happens tonight at 7 pm. Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds bagging a paycheck for a standard action thriller — i.e, a variation of the Training Day formula set in South Africa, CIA operatives instead of L.A. cops, same old same old, blah, blah explosions, etc.

Many critics have already seen Safe House and reviewed it and, according to Rotten Tomatoes summary, given it a failing grade. Universal’s request that reviews be held until Friday seems….well, odd in light of this.

Is Reynolds ever going to star in a really good commercial film? Buried was riveting as far as it went, but it burned the audience at the finale. Adventureland was the only other pretty good film that Reynolds has costarred in. Otherwise the man has built a career out of starring in nothing but paycheck movies.

Daniel Espinosa, the new Tony Scott, is Swedish.

Vera Farmiga did the work and cashed her check and put some of the money in her kids’ college fund. Brendan Gleeson did the work and cashed his check and put some of the money into home renovation. Sam Shepard did the work and cashed his check and put some of the money into dental work. Ruben Blades did the work and cashed his check and put some of the money into building a music studio.

Here’s a reminder that Robert Weide‘s Woody Allen: A Documentary will begin streaming gratis starting tomorrow (i.e., Thursday, 2.9) “for a limited time,” whatever that means. There will also be an encore broadcast on PBS CoCal on Saturday, 2.18 at 9 p.m. Here’s my review from mid November 2011.

Tony Gilroy‘s The Bourne Legacy (8.3.12) got a boost from Jeremy Renner‘s standout performance in Mission Impossible 4. That movie explained to the primitives (i.e., those who couldn’t be bothered to see The Hurt Locker) that Renner is solid and cool. The second best thing is this trailer, which makes it clear that Legacy is a Renner-for-Matt Damon substitution thriller with many of the same players (Joan Allen, Albert Finney, Scott Glenn ) as before.

The only thing that gives me a moment of pause, frankly, is the August 3rd release date — obviously a hedging-our-bets-but-hoping-for-the-best strategy. To me it amounts to Universal saying the following: “Renner is not Damon, and so we can’t go up against the big fat whopper titles in May, June and July. It’s better and safer to go with early August, which isn’t really a dog-day opening like mid-August or late August. As far as we’re concerned, August 3rd is the same as late July. August is generally regarded as a dump month, okay, but not in our minds, and certainly not in the case of this film.”

A Better Life‘s Demian Bichir was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar due to quality of performance, word-of-mouth and pressing the flesh at industry events. When I returned from Santa Barbara last weekend I asked about running some FYC ads to help things along, but was told it was too late in the Phase Two cycle to construct ads because it would take too long. This didn’t seem to make sense as a full two weeks remain before the balloting dealdine.

So yesterday afternoon I turned to freelance art director Dylan Wells and asked if he could throw together some Bichir ads overnight. “No problem,” he said. Dylan worked on two variations (A Better Life Bichir, GQ Bichir) in four ad sizes until 2 am this morning, and when I woke up they were all in my inbox. Some minor changes were implemented today, and now they’re ready to go.

I know that in all my years of dealing with online ads I’ve never heard of any ad creator delivering two sets of ads in four sizes in a matter of hours. It always takes a few days.

“The title role in Albert Nobbs goes to Glenn Close, who played it Off Broadway thirty years ago and has striven ever since to bring it to the screen. She co-wrote and co-produced the film, and is seldom out of our sight. But what do we see? Albert is a woman dressed as a man, in the Ireland of the late eighteen-hundreds, yet what Close serves up is neither man nor woman, flesh nor fowl, but a strange hieratic hybrid of no discernible identity.

“She walks as though freshly risen from the dead, patrolling the streets and corridors in a stiffened glide, with those dark, deep-sunk eyes of hers staring hard ahead. Albert is a waiter in an upmarket Dublin hotel, and the uniform adds starch to her otherworldliness: grief-black suit and tie, snowy shirt, and, for outdoors, a rolled umbrella and an ill-fitting bowler hat. What you feel, watching Close, is not that you are watching gender being bent into new, absorbing shapes but that you might as well have stayed home and leafed through a book on Magritte.” — from Anthony Lane‘s 2.6 review in The New Yorker.

Grantland‘s Mark Harris admires Meryl Streep‘s “old Maggie” acting in The Iron Lady, but he has difficulty with the other two-thirds of the film because it “lets its subject down by insisting that the most — no, the only — interesting thing about Prime Minister Thatcher is that she was a woman in a world of male power.

“There’s a campy scene in Mommie Dearest when the widowed Joan Crawford tells off an all-male Mad Men-era boardroom by bellowing, ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo!’ That’s a fun idea for a moment, but not for a whole movie. And for a subject as complex as Thatcher, it’s fatal.”

God, I love this moment. Faye Dunaway tapped into being fearsome in a ferocious, bigger-than-life way when she made Network, but this style of acting, for her, reached its ultimate manifestation in this scene.

I was one of the first to see Mommie Dearest in the late summer of 1981. It was an evening showing in Manhattan — at the Paramount headquarters screening room above Columbus Circle — and afterwards I remember sharing an elevator down to the lobby with four or five gay journalists, and how tickled they were by Dunaway’s butch-boss scenes (the afore-mentioned Pepsi Cola boardroom scene plus “no wire hangers EVER!”) Being kinda youngish, I remember putting it together around that time why gay guys feel an affinity with tough women. I also remember realizing that I never wanted to get into any kind of dispute with an angry gay guy…ever.

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, etc. I would rather face a pack of drunken rednecks with baseball bats. Gay guys are wolverines when they get mad. Don’t even think about it.

Last night I didn’t attend Film Independent at LACMA’s screening of Moneyball at the Bing Theatre at LACMA. (I’ve seen Bennett Miller‘s film five or six times.) But I did attend a pre-screening q & a with star-producer Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. Thanks to FIND’s Elise Freimuth and LACMA host, curator and gadfly Elvis Mitchell, I mean. Without their help I would have been out on the pavement.

Moneyball‘s Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill during last night’s q & a at LACMA’s Bing Theatre.

It must be said that Freimuth’s assistance aside, LACMA/FIND rules regarding press coverage are a pain in the rear. No photography or recording of any kind, they say (largely due to a fear of flash photography), plus the constant eyeballing of possible violations by hawk-eyed LACMA ushers. Sony, Pitt and Hill are looking for favorable coverage and attention, of course. And I was naturally looking to provide that (being a Moneyball supporter from way back), but LACMA/FIND regulations blocked and delayed this to some extent. I certainly didn’t feel free to audio record last night’s event. On the other hand Freimuth was gracious enough to provide the two Pitt-Hill shots on this page, so thanks much.

It must also be reported that LACMA/FIND (or Sony, perhaps) made a very strange call by deciding to include Moneyball‘s Oscar-nominated editor Christopher Tellefson and sound mixer Deb Adair in the pre-screening q & a. The place was packed to the rafters with hoi polloi and invited guests, and nobody wanted to hear them speak. The always-gracious Mitchell asked them three or four questions, of course, and Tellefson at one point offered a long, sprawling answer. And I swear to God you could hear the exact same response coming from every silent audience member in the room: “Why are these two sharing the stage with Brad Pitt? No offense and due respect but we didn’t wait in line for an hour or more to listen to these two…c’mon! Whose idea was this?”

It was fun to listen to the deep-voiced Beane, whom Pitt portrays in the film, and to savor his sense of humor and candor, and his observations and anecdotes. And Pitt and Hill’s commentary, etc. All to the good.

Here’s a video interview that Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson did with Pitt and Beane following the q & a:

The first in a series of This Is War billboard capturings in West Hollywood. The images are artful, I feel, when you consider the elements (billboard + neighborhood + natural light + cars) as a single integrated statement. Something very subtle but in some way measurable has happened due to the presence of these posters over the last few days. I can say no more.