If an alternate version of Michael Mann‘s The Insider had been made with different actors (but ones just as good as those who acted in the 1999 version, and if it was directed by Mann and written by Eric Roth) and released in 2011, it would win the Best Picture Oscar…hands down. 2011 has been a good-but-not-great year, and I don’t think there’s any question that Mann’s film would sweep aside The Artist, The Help and War Horse like so much seaweed.

Especially if it had a distributor smart enough to throghly explain to everyone that The Insider is not about the evils of tobacco and tobacco-company executives (which Jason Reitman still believed two years ago) but about corporate interests smothering the integrity of corporate-owned journalistic organs like 60 Minutes.

I explained it all in a January 2010 post, but I happened to watch The Insider earlier today on DVD and it hit me all over again how good it was.

The Insider was nominated for Best Picture but lost to American Beauty.

I’d forgotten that The Green Mile and The Cider House Rules were actually nominated for Best Picture that year. The Green Mile! The death row electric-chair movie with Tom Hanks and the cute mouse! What were Academy members thinking?

Put it this way: If you think a 2011 version of The Insider still would have theoretically lost to The Artist or The Help or War Horse, what pre-2011 film could come along and kick the asses of these three in this year’s Best Picture race? if it hadn’t been released before, I mean, and had magically arrived fresh this year?

In 2000 The Insider was nominated for seven Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and Best Sound…but not Chris Pummer for Best Supporting Actor despite his having won awards for hsi Miek Wallace performance from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics.

Absurdist, steroid-injected action thrillers like Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol are over. They’re obviously thriving commercially as we speak, but they have nowhere to go except in the use of more powerful steroids and more CG ridiculum, and that’s a dead end. There’s only one kind of thriller that can work these days — i.e., the human-scale, back-to-basics-and-believability model found in Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire and Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive.

Action nerds born in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s will disagree, of course, but they’re running around with a kind of ComicCon myopia, which amounts to a kind of poison in their veins. They sincerely believe that action films aren’t worthy of consideration or patronage unless the thrills and spills in a just-opened film vigorously competes with (or more preferably tops) the last flamboyantly unrealistic action film. It has to dismiss if not piss on physical law and be emphatically cartoony and hard-drivey to a fare-thee-well. There is no way out of this morass.

So the nihilistic strain in this Brad Bird-Tom Cruise film can’t be ignored or waved away. And yet (a) I loved the boxy IMAX footage, particularly in the early stages, (b) the sequence with Cruise climbing up the glass exterior of that Dubai skyscraper is highly exciting, despite intense and relentless efforts to convince the audience that what you’re seeing is ludicrous; (c) the older Cruise gets (he’s nearly 50), the more interesting his face becomes, especially due to the fact that his nose has gotten bigger and beakier; and (d) Jeremy Renner gives the best performance.

If I was a Republican, being on the cover of Success would fill me with satisfaction. Ditto my latest film, Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows, being projected to earn $42 million and change by Sunday night [3,703 situations = an average of $11,450].

And I could roll with it badly trailing” the opening-weekend tally of the original (i.e.,$62.3 million). Ir’ll do well enough to justify a third installment, and then the Holmes franchise can diversify (TV series, video game, clothing line) and my portfolio will continue to expand with all kinds of investment and stock options.

“Robert Downey Jr. is currently carrying two movie franchises — the Marvel Iron Man proto-Avengers thing for Paramount and the brawling steampunk Sherlock Holmes series for Warner Brothers — so it is perhaps understandable that he is showing a touch of fatigue,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O Scott.

“In the new Holmes adventure, A Game of Shadows, his imperiousness is hard to distinguish from boredom, and he seems to be in a hurry to spit out his lines, take his lumps, throw his punches and collect his paycheck.”

I reported last July that Ron Dassa‘s Laser Blazer, the once-great DVD/Bluray store on West L.A.s Pico Blvd., was on its last legs. And now, sadly, the store’s website is announcing a 12.25 shutdown.

“After 23 years of business, we have decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” the statement reads. “You can still shop with Laser Blazer at LDDB.com for LaserDiscs and our Amazon store for Blu Ray and DVDs. Starting January 31, 2012 you can visit our rebuilt site here to purchase Blu Ray, Laserdisc and DVD collectibles. We are sad to close our doors, but are looking forward to continuing our relationship with our loyal customers in cyberspace.”

Two days ago as I was running around and preparing to fly to Manhattan I read Claude Brodesser Akner‘s New York piece about how David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dagon Tattoo isn’t tracking all that well with women. This, Brodesser reports, is why Sony has moved the opening day up to 12.20 — i.e., to get a little jumpstart on the word-of-mouth.

My immediate thought was, “Wait…it’s not tracking well with women? Under-40 women are supposedly the core audience for this film, no? Aren’t they the the ones who’ve been reading the Dragon Tattoo books for the last three years? I’ve seen them myself in cafes and airport lounges and on subway cars. So I don’t get it.”

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Brodesser nonetheless reports that “insiders tell Vulture that the real reason for the move is that the studio is concerned about the $125 million film’s inability to get more traction with females, who have been largely responsible for making Stieg Larsson’s trilogy a global hit in the first place.

“And yet [the book’s] female fans seem to be backing away from Fincher’s dark film adaptation” he writes. Brodesser qotes a former studio marketing chief saying that the film “has had a problem with women since it came on tracking.” Awareness is deep and wide, “but only 36 percent of [older or younger] women expressed ‘definite interest’ in seeing it. Men are about five percentage points lower in awareness in both demos, and yet at about the same percentage of definite interest.”

“The movie is hardly tracking to be a bomb,” Brodesser writes. “The issue is more that by scaring off women, it could be leaving money on the table, or at least in purses and handbags.”

So what’s the problem exactly? Most likely “the unforgivingly creepy and dark marketing for the movie that has scared off female fans of the book,” Brodesser writes. He quotes a marketing exec saying that “hyper-realistic violence against women is very different from the average horror movie. They’re escapist, ‘movie-date’ oriented. This is different, and I suspect the female numbers…are inflated by title recognition, not actual desire. Do women really want to see a movie like this at this time of year?”

So I happened to stop and look at the Dragon Tattoo poster last night as I was waiting for the J train. All along I’ve been processing this film as a sequel to the Danish-Swedish original and as the latest Fincher and so on. So I took two steps back and just looked at that gray-and-black image, and I began to understand all of a sudden why some women might be a little antsy about the film.

The tones in the poster look quite grim and somber and oppressive, in a way. This, of course, doesn’t represent what the film is, at all. In my mind there can no such thing as a lifeless or oppressively drab or excessively somber-toned David Fincher film. But if you look at the poster from the perspective of moviegoers who are staunchly opposed to any kind of thoughtful, all-things-considered reactions to this film — people who refuse to think beyond their instantaneous gut response to the ad materials — then I understand the reluctance.

I’m sorry but my 12.12 phoner with Albert Brooks is generally easier and more enjoyable than this Brooks-Poland chat. But Poland gets some great stuff about the particulars of financing and the various frustrations and roadblocks that Brooks suffered through in the ’70s and ’80s.

I presuming this was recorded before the SAG nominations, as Brooks seems to be in a relatively good mood.

What a great relief and comfort it is that a significant portion (though not a majority so far) of the elite critics are giving War Horse the slapdown that it deserves.

The Playlist‘s Todd Gilchrist says Steven Spielberg‘s film “comes to us overloaded with nostalgia [and] a joylessly persistent sense of nobility…Spielberg dials up the sentimentality to almost unbearable levels [as] War Horse is the type of film for which the term ‘Oscar bait’ was invented, precisely because it feels like there’s no motivation for it to exist except to win awards.”

And Variety‘s Justin Chang says it’s “beautifully composed” but “falls short of the sustained narrative involvement and emotional drive its resolutely old-fashioned storytelling demands.”

And yet it’s ironic that the barbed-wire scene has drawn oddly divergent opinions from Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy and Box Office‘s Amy Nicholson. McCarthy’s review is mildly approving (or at least forgiving) but he finds the barbed-wire scene problematic, and yet Nicholson praises it in the midst of an otherwise blistering pan.

“The best ten minutes of the movie are pure theater,” Nicholson says, “in an eerie stretch when two enemy soldiers meet in No Man’s Land for a horse rescue operation. If you can forgive that amidst this mass slaughter of man and beast, the entire front takes a time-out to save one living thing, the scene is a masterpiece of hushed tension and bleak humor. And tellingly, it’s the one scene in the movie that doesn’t announce how you should feel.”

And yet McCarthy notes that “when Albert and a German youngster recklessly venture out into No Man’s Land to try to save Joey, who has entangled himself in barbed wire, the essential realism of the cinema begins to show up the symbolic artificiality and essential implausibility of the young men’s private detente.

“Onstage, the barbed wire incident is properly appalling emotionally and morally, but decidedly abstracted due to the dramatic lighting and virtuoso puppetry; onscreen, the reaction is more, ‘oh, poor horse, and why can’t warring nations get along just as these two fellows do?'”

McCarthy adds that “what follows next runs even deeper into audience-pleasing wish-fulfillment and sentimentality, topped by a grandly phoney ending that will set many tears flowing but feels overweening artificial, partly because of the Gone With the Wind-style colored lighting in which it’s bathed.Along with the universal thematic notes, the eager-to-please elements assert themselves increasingly as the film marches forward; neither aspect was necessary to stress.”

Dark Knight Rises star Christian Bale and a couple of homies and a cameraman were roughed up yesterday by plainclothes Chinese thugs. Bale was trying to visit Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese lawyer and civil rights activist who’s been under house arrest in China for over a year, blah blah, same old, etc.

They goons chased the Bale gang in their van for an hour after the altercation. If I’d been at the wheel I would have gone all Ryan Gosling on their asses. I would have suddenly stopped, shoved the van into reverse and tromped on the accelerator and slammed the rear of my van into the goon car. Or better yet, I would have circled around and slippped in behind the goon car. like Steve McQueen did in Bullitt, and tailed them. Or I would have taken out a pistol and shot their tires out.