If an opener has an under-60% Rotten Tomatoes rating, it’s probably a wash. If it’s under 30% it’s a must-to-avoid. But if it’s at 10% or lower, some kind of exceptional chord has clearly been struck. (Note: as the RT rating will change as the day wears on, I’ll re-adjust and rephrase.)

Movieline‘s latest Oscar Index is a typical example of how clubhouse, path-of-least-resistance spitballing manifests when you’re tasked with reconfiguring these charts week after week. It’s all about familiar emotional default. Take your standard Spielberg kowtowism, ignore the tendencies on view in his last war film (i.e., the one about Martians, particularly the happy finale) and throw in the recently-dropped War Horse trailer, the horse all but crying in close-up…obviously the Best Picture contender to beat. Simple, easy and who’s to dispute?

In my somewhat more real-worldish Oscar Balloon chart Moneyball and The Descendants share the top two positions followed by War Horse (because the saps will always champion shameless-emotional-appeal movies of this sort), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Help, The Artist (its fate will depend on how well it does with the public) and Midnight in Paris. I’ve heard that the tone of The Iron Lady is “light”, but that needn’t be a problem in itself, if true. J. Edgar is in limbo for the time being, based on something I heard last weekend. I’m not sure that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will be judged as Best Picture-type contender — it’s more of a Gary Oldman-for-Best Actor show.

Almost a month ago I ran my review of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March (Sony, 10.7). It opens tomorrow so here it is again: “[This] is a smart, taut political thriller — well-acted, gripping (particularly after the shit starts hitting the fan in Act Two) with a chilly, bitter edge. Plus it packs a stiffer punch than Beau Willimon‘s Farragut North, a 2008 political play that Clooney and Grant Heslov adapted for the screen, and in so doing added a third act involving sexual indiscretion.

“Is Ides about us on some level? Does it reflect or shed light upon some universal current that we’ve all come to know and understand? No — it’s a high-end, thoroughly adult popcorn movie, and that’s totally fine. There’s nothing to bitch about or put down here. Well, you can but why? To what end?

“The plot is about three shrewd political operatives (played by Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti) working for a pair of Democratic Presidential candidates during the Ohio primary. One of them is an (relatively) blunt-spoken liberal played by Clooney, called Mike Morris, and the other we never meet up close.

“What is Ides basically saying? That big-time politics can be a rough snarly game, and that being dedicated and hard-working doesn’t mean jack — you can still get taken down if you don’t play your cards extra-carefully. And the game isn’t just rough and snarly as it basically stinks.

Here’s where the mild spoiler stuff begins, if you care…

“The piece starts to get interesting when Gosling’s Stephen, a young hotshot aide to Clooney, slipping into a semi-casual affair with Holly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood ), a 20 year-old who works for the Morris campaign as an intern. And then we learn that someone else has had it off with Holly…all right, I’m not saying any more.

“But is a little action on the side really shocking in a campaign environment? Or in the world of politics itself? Post-Anthony Weiner what’s so bad about a politician (or his campaign manager or whomever) having an affair or a one-nighter with a more-or-less willing participant? Sounds pretty tame to me.

“One of the strongest lines in the film, spoken by Gosling, goes something like ‘you can go to war or ruin the economy or protect the rich, but you don’t get to fuck the interns.’ But don’t you? I mean, isn’t that par for the course? And does anyone really care? I realize, of course, that some people do care, still, but I sure as hell don’t, and no one who’s been around does so, you know, let it go already.

“The bottom line is that The Ides of March does the job of a good political thriller — it grabs and rivets and enthralls — and that’s fine with me. And it ought to be fine with everyone else. It’s worth the price of admission.”

13 and 1/2 months ago I wrote that “something’s wrong, it appears, with William Monahan‘s London Boulevard, a Graham King-funded crime drama which finished principal in August ’09 and has long been presumed/rumored to be a fall 2010 release. That seems unlikely at this stage.” It did open in England in late November of last year, but it got killed by most critics, earning a 32% rating.

I speculated in my piece that “Monahan’s superb screenwriting talent” — his script for Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed won an Oscar — “hasn’t fully translated over to directing, and that his inexperience combined with anal tendencies caused problems on the set (or so says a London source), and that reactions to the unfinished film were such that extra shooting was deemed necesssary (ditto), and that King has decided to pull the plug on 2010…and punt instead for 2011.”

IFC Films, which bought distribution rights from King’s co-owned Film District, will open London Boulevard on 11.11.11.

The film is a London-based crime drama about an ex-con named Mitchel (Colin Farrell), just out of the slammer, who’s trying to go straight but “the gang won’t let him,” etc. (That cliche really is the basic plot.) He lucks into a job as a combination handyman and security guard for Charlotte (Keira Knightley), an actress who’s fallen into a odd kind of career slumber, and of course falls in love with her, and she him. All the while running more and more afoul of some Mr. Big gangster prick (Ray Winstone).

Costars include David Thewlis ( as a kind of Max von Mayerling character), Anna Friel, Ophelia Lovibond, Ben Chaplin, Sanjeev Baskhar and Jamie Campbell Bower.

I saw it last night and whoo, boy. There’s plenty of time to run a review, but I certainly saw what the problem was soon enough. Monahan is more concerned with style than story, it feels oddly misshapen and off-balance at times, the color looks oddly washed out, Monahan uses The Yardbird’s “Heartful of Soul” on the soundtrack three times, and the film devolves into a bloody body-drop festival about halfway through and — this is telling — Monahan casts himself (or someone who looks an awful lot like him) as a Knightley-stalking paparazzo who stares but never shoots.

The odd thing is that the script, which I read during the summer of 2010, read like “a sturdy, character-based, unhurried crime drama mixed with romance and hints of dark poetry. Well-sculpted dialogue, sprinklings of echo and nuance and melancholy, a little touch of Mona Lisa in the night.” Any good script can be fucked up in the shooting.

“They did some extra shooting in London between [in the summer of 2010],” a London guy told me. “They also did very brief additional shooting in L.A. with, I believe, a stand-in for Keira Knightley. You’ve read the script so you know that it’s a back shot of KK’s character standing, if I remember correctly, of the balcony of the Chateau Marmont.

“I did hear there were a lot of problems during the shoot and that Monahan was beyond paranoid, involving himself in every single aspect of filming, which, of course, meant that shooting took forever.”

I’m sure this trailer deceives in ways I haven’t yet discerned. I’ve heard so-so things, but within these two minutes and 7 seconds, My Week With Marilyn looks fairly okay. It has poise, snap, craft. And a convincingly conservative yesteryear quality. And Michelle Williams‘ performance as Marilyn Monroe, you can sense, might eventually be regarded as a head-to-head, playing-a-famous-person comptetitor of Meryl Streep‘s Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

As noted, I won’t see it at the New York Film Festival this Sunday due to flying back to LA on Saturday.

Two details from tonight’s announcement about Universal intending to release Brett Ratner‘s Tower Heist on-demand only three weeks after it opens in theaters on 11.4, or on 11.25. One, the viewing price, according to L.A. Times‘s Ben Fritz, will be $59.99. And two, it will only be offered to Comcast subscribers in Atlanta and Portland. But exhibitors know what this means — the thin end of the wedge.

“Where Tyrannosaur‘s Peter Mullan has previous experience in playing self-destructive types (i.e., My Name Is Joe), Olivia Colman has a dramatic blank slate — and she smashes it. Best known for her Peep Show persona, Colman is the most disarming of presences — an outwardly jolly woman who hides a well of sadness within her. [Director] Paddy Considine‘s punishing close-ups frequently see her friendly veneer wobble; the mask slips, the voice breaks, the eyes well up.

“She gives a heartbreaking performance, swathed in sorrow, free of grandstanding and full of nuance. There’s no doubt it’s worthy of awards. I simply have no idea where it came from – it’s a bit like discovering the guy who plays Super Hans has won the Nobel Peace Prize.” — from Ali’s 10.5 review of Tyrannosaur on theshiznit.co.uk.

My bad for going to a 6 pm screening of London Boulevard and then visiting a little Italian place on West 50th for 90 minutes and not hearing about the death of Steve Jobs until I walked by a bar on Tenth Avenue and saw the ticker-tape news on a TV. Needless to say my life has been made easier, smoother and immeasurably enhanced by the innovations that Jobs and his Apple guys brought to our world. A thousand “thank you’s” on my knees.

I’m sorry that Jobs had only 56 years on the planet, but damned if didn’t take what he had inside him and scatter it all over the world like Johnny Appleseed. He did what he was put here to do. He really lived it.

Update: Sasha Stone has sent me a portion of Jobs’ commencement address to Stanford in 2005. “He’d had surgery and was told his cancer was gone,” she writes. “Six years later he’s dead. Read it, remember it, never forget it, send it to your sons.” Here it is:

“This was the closest I’ve been to facing death,” Jobs said, “and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

“Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’

“It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Take this with a grain, but Whatculture‘s Matt Homes is reporting that the title of James Bond #23 may be Skyfall. “Sony recently registered a bunch of URL’s with variations on ‘Bond film-Skyfall’,” he writes, “and with the naming of the film to come imminently, it really does feel like Skyfall is just days away from being announced as the official title.

“You might remember Quantum of Solace‘s name was figured out one day early when websites spotted Sony had taken out the domains Quantum of Solace.” He says that “Sony has ignored our verification emails (it’s been 6 hours since we emailed them), and something definitely seems to be up.”

Once again, a ’50s and early ’60s TV series that currently means absolutely nothing to anyone except aging boomers who watched it on black-and-white Sylvania TVs as kids is being made into a feature film. Variety‘s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Warner Bros. and Robert Downey are trying to assemble a Perry Mason movie with the idea of creating a franchise.

Earth to creators: the heyday of the Perry Mason TV series happened between 50 and 54 years ago. Who under the age of 50 gives a hoot now? And with so many popular cop shows and investigative procedurals on network TV, what’s especially feature-ish about the adventures of a smooth and brilliant attorney a la Raymond Burr? I guess we’ll find out.

Speaking of Burr, I wonder if Downey’s Mason will be straight or gay? The latter would be cool.

The odd part of Sneider’s story reads as follows: “Like the original series of books by Erle Stanley Gardner, Perry Mason will be set in the rough and tumble world of early 1930s Los Angeles.” But the reason that show was popular in the first place was the blending of those Kabuki-like, super-predictable Perry Mason formula plots with the mentality of the convention-seeking, preferring-to-be-unchallenged ’50s TV audience. They belonged to each other. This isn’t a ’30s property — it’s woven into the mindset of the Dwight D. Eisenhower era.

“The producers are currently looking for a writer,” Sneider reports, “whose script will be based on an original story by Robert Downey Jr. and David Gambino. Downey Jr. and Susan Downey will produce with Robert Cort, while Gambino, Eric Hetzel and Joe Horacek will exec produce with Susan Feiles and Chris Darling.

Eight producers isn’t very many by today’s big-studio standards. Couldn’t WB expand the roster to include a few more?

The Wiki page exposes a pattern to Gardner’s novels: (a) Attorney Perry Mason’s case is introduced; (b) Mason and his crew investigate; (c) Mason’s client is accused of a crime; (d) Further investigations ensue; (e) The trial begins; (f) In a courtroom coup, Mason introduces new evidence and often elicits a confession from the lawbreaker.