Yesterday afternoon’s viewing of the second half of Mike Mills‘ Beginners (Focus Features, now playing) was just as nourishing as my Thursday night viewing of the first 60 minutes. So I’m still in the tank for this heartwarming, patchwork-quilt relationship film — no Sunday morning quibbles or after-thoughts.

Beginners‘ director-writer Mike Mills, Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling during yesterday afternoon’s after-party.

Hands down, this is one of 2011’s best films so far.

I caught Beginners late yesterday morning at Santa Barbara’s Riviera theatre. And then sat through a q & a between Mills and Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling. And then attended a party for Mills at Durling’s home in Goleta.

I can’t see how Beginners‘ costar Christopher Plummer won’t end up as one of the five nominees for 2011’s Best Supporting Actor. He certainly deserves to be, no matter who else comes along. Plummer taps into an array of late-life emotions but primarily (and very convincingly) joy of living and acceptance of the present and past. He should have won for his Mike Wallace portrayal in The Insider so he’s due.

My only problem was not being able to understand some of Melanie Laurent ‘s dialogue in the second half, what with her French accent and the not-great sound system at the Riviera. But there was pleasure all the same in realizing how many moods and colors she has in her actor’s kit bag. Quentin Tarantino got exactly two colors from Laurent in Inglourious Basterds — terror and a silent, steely-eyed commitment to getting revenge. Fascinating.

In this Godather II screen-test clip, Sam Fuller‘s Hyman Roth is a bit too affable, too menschy…no scent of menace or perversity. He could be the manager of a minor-league baseball team. I’ve watched two or three big-name actors run through lines and try stuff out on movie sets prior to shooting, and I was reminded each time that most readings aren’t anything to write home about.

In other words, even the best actors aren’t instant “get it right the first time” geniuses. Like anyone else they need to find their way through trial and error and refinement, etc.

A trailer for a mopey-griefy 2012 Valentine’s Day movie? That’s almost nine months from now. Reminder: Rachel McAdams has always looked better with nut-brown hair, but super-dark or black hair (which she has The Vow) doesn’t work.

Is it okay if I like Super 8 (Paramount, 6.10) for the stuff that really matters and not so much for the scary-spectacular CG hoo-hah? Super 8 was greenlit because of the latter, of course, but what matters most to me (and, I suspect, deep down, to director JJ Abrams) is the material that was woven into this Goonies-meets-Close Encounters-With-a-Mistreated-Alien-Dog film to give it heart, and to make it feel like a special Spielbergian, small-town, emotional time-machine visit.

Lots of stuff is shown in Super 8 and a lot of plot teasers are thrown around, but the fundamental things apply. And what makes Super 8 worth seeing and then some are the echoes of an era in big-budget, big-studio filmmaking (20 to 30 years ago) when things weren’t quite so mechanistic and formulaic and CG-driven, when at least some effort was put into character and feeling and intimacy and plots that felt half-credible, etc. Super 8 isn’t wildly or triumphantly successful in the latter sense (certainly not in the final act), but it gets a lot of other things right. Internal, delicate things…feelings, needs. And that, in my eyes, makes it a better summer film than most.

Everyone will be talking first and foremost about how Super 8 is a first-rate Steven Spielberg tribute. And about Elle Fanning‘s knockout performance, which has already made her into the most sought-after teenaged actress in town. And the way the advanced puppy-love relationship between Fanning’s “Alice” and Joel Courtney‘s “Joe” feels almost as poignant and emotionally tangible as the one between Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place In The Sun. The urgent, argumentative repartee between Joe’s film-nut friends. Kyle Chandler‘s performance as Joe’s small-town sheriff dad (who should have been given a couple more quiet, stand-alone scenes). The always handsome, beautifully-framed and lighted widescreen photography by Larry Fong. The John Williams-like score by Michael Giacchino.

Because right away you can tell Super 8 is going to spin that ’70s Spielberg web while trying like hell to make you feel and empathize with what Joe, the 12 year-old protagonist, is going through (his mom having just been killed in a factory accident as the film begins), and make you see things through his eyes. The unfortunate part is the devil’s bargain that all big studio movies are caught up in, which is the regrettable instinct to use all kinds of familiar sound and flash and fury in order to sell tickets to justify the budget. I tolerated this aspect while feeling very much comforted by the Joe-and-Alice stuff. Presumably I won’t be alone.

This is why I suspect Super 8 will play very well with general audiences, and why it currently has an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes with Time‘s Richard Corliss calling it “the year’s most thrilling, feeling mainstream movie.”

And that’s very good because I could kick hell out of several aspects of the plot if I felt like it. I don’t care to do that, as noted, because the thing-locked-inside-the-traincar element is for the primitives, but boy, could I do a Jake La Motta-meets-Tony-Janiro on the third act! But I can’t get into it without spoiling.

The opening 20 to 25 minutes (i.e., before the train wreck sequence) really are quite captivating (for me anyway), and JJ does capture that late-’70s-to-early-’80s Spielberg vibe throughout. I think that’s what he was primarily doing here (along with recalling his own youth), and that the movie might have turned out better in a plot sense if JJ had been harder on himself by bringing in a couple of snarly, seasoned, no b.s. screenwriters…guys who would have sauntered over to Bad Robot on Olympic like Jack Palance in Shane and put their feet up on the desk and said, “Yeah, the Joe-and-Alice emotionalism and the Spielberg homage stuff is intact, but we have to sit down and address the dramatic fundamentals and make it all work without regard to paying tribute to Close Encounters and E.T and The Goonies….it has to stand on its own two feet as a movie of its own.”

“That’s exactly fucking right,” a critic friend wrote me yesterday. He complained about some third-act elements that I won’t divulge, but concluded by saying that “the ending was so bad, it soured me on the entire film…it makes absolutely zero sense. But the stuff with the kids was wonderful. It almost felt like Abrams didn’t trust himself enough to make a movie without a giant monster in it.”

I’m watching the new Bluray of John Huston‘s The Man Who Would Be King (’75), and marvelling…where do I start? At Oswald Morris‘s vibrant, immensely comforting photography and how each and every shot seems so perfectly, naturally framed. And how young Christopher Plummer, who plays a moustachioed Rudyard Kipling, looks compared to his chuckling, white-haired self in Beginners. That’ll do for now. I’ve got a screening to catch.

I was going to post a longish riff on X-Men: First Class as a follow-up to last night’s truncated rave, but it’s 2pm and I have to get ready for the 4pm IMAX screening of Super 8. Tomorrow morning then. Nobody is obliged to like anything if they aren’t receptive, but I’m nonetheless startled by how completely immune L.A. Weekly/Village Voice critic Karina Longworth is to this obviously together and tightly written film.

I knew five minutes into Mike Mills‘ Beginners (Focus Features, opening today) that it was more than just a slightly cutesy-poo “dealing with my newly declared gay dad who has a non-verbal talking dog” movie that the trailers have been selling. Marketing execs! If there’s any way they can persuade you that a rich and well-sauced meal is a candy bar, they will.

And they succeeded! Before seeing Beginners they had me thinking that a surprisingly mature, time-shifting, patchwork-quilt film with a gently probing nature and off-kilter moods would be a banal straightforward thing — a sitcom. Thanks, guys. What would the movie business be without you?

Okay, Beginners is a little twee anyway despite being all those things. But it really surprised me, pleasantly, by having so much more up its sleeve than just wanting to gently charm and cajole. I really hate movies that try to offer a gentle whimsical study about nice people being likable and caring, etc. Beginners, thank fortune, isn’t one of these. Yes, it can seem a bit too poised and even calculatingly kind-hearted from time to time, but more often that not it’s closer to affecting than affected.

Based on Mills’ own story and focusing on his stand-in, a moderately youngish illustrator type (Ewan McGregor), Beginners is in no hurry to grab you. It weaves its way into things, taking a kind of shuffling sideways route. It isn’t so much about a son dealing with a recently “out” gay dad (Christopher Plummer ) who’s half-fumbling his way into a new realm after the death of his wife as it is about McGregor’s relationship with a wonderfully relaxed and self-aware new girlfriend (Melanie Laurent).

Or it was, rather, at the point I had to leave, which was about the 60-minute mark. I had to catch a 9 pm showing of X-Men: First Class. But I’ll be seeing the second half in Santa Barbara tomorrow afternoon, and then an after-party for Mills at the home of Roger Durling, head of the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

But I know quality goods when I run into them.

John Edwards‘ grand jury indictment today for conspiracy and illegal campaign contributions and generally behaving like a titanic lying asshole, all to cover up his Rielle Hunter pregnancy-hideaway scheme of ’07 and ’08, is, of course, manna from heaven for Aaron Sorkin‘s The Politician.

Now Sorkin has his arc — a ghastly and tragic fall from grace for a one-time golden boy of Democratic politics. One strategic-screenwriting response on Sorkin’s part, as TheWrap‘s Brent Lang suggested earlier today, is that he has now a bookend framing device. Or perhaps a factual narrative through-line to cut to and away from. He can’t just end his film with a title-card epilogue that says Edwards was indicted, etc. That would be lazy.

The indictment news is so effing great. I’ve wanted to see Edwards suffer for a long time, and this feels like some kind of beautiful shiatsu massage underneath a waterfall. I want Edwards to suffer and cry and moan and grovel and bleed, and to be spat upon by people in parking lots.

I think we’ve got Richard Phillips figured out for the time being. He buddies up with somewhat damaged or degraded hotties struggling on the fringe of respectability and looking to refine their image by appearing in artified, Antonioni-esque short films that are sure to get a fair amount of internet play. Phillips knows how to shoot ennui-laden mood photography so he steps in, gets it…bang.

The difference is that Lindsay Lohan can act while Sasha Grey has so far only shown that she can (a) look solemn and pouty for Steven Soderbergh and (b) feign exhilaration in the porn-lube realm.

Today doesn’t mark any special anniversary for James Whale‘s Frankenstein. The 80th anniversary of its commercial debut will happen on 11.21.11. I just happened to come across this faded newspaper ad for its debut at the Mayfair (renamed the DeMille in the late ’50s) on Broadway and 47th.

For whatever reason I’d never read or understood until today that poor Colin Clive died of alcohol-related tuberculosis in 1937. He was only 37 years old, for Chrissake, so he was only 30 or 31 when he played Dr. Henry Frankenstein in Whale’s film A drinking problem would partly explain why Clive looks no younger than 40 and could even be 45 in Frankenstein.

I’m too whipped to write a review, but 20 minutes ago I tweeted the following: “X-Men: First Class is the best superhero origin flick ever, arguably the best X-Men flick of all. Tight, lucid, gripping every step of the way. Director Matthew Vaughan exonerated for past sins. Magneto may be Michael Fassbender‘s best performance ever (or perhaps 2nd to his Hunger perf…I haven’t thought it through). I liked 1st half more than 2nd half, but I was never bored or irritated. It really works — every element fits together like the parts in a good Swiss watch.”