Mubarak was just a figurehead so don’t be too ecstatic. There’s an entire culture of corrupt weasels still running things and wetting their beaks, just like before.

The usual pattern when a smallish U.S. distributor picks up a critically-praised indie at Sundance or Berlin is to bury it for several months, and then release it early (and in a way that barely catches your attention) the following year in some kind of simultaneous cable-demand-and-theatrical break. Let’s hope that Strand Releasing does better by Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur, which I saw and fell in love with when I saw it last month at Sundance.

Strand’s Jon Gerrans and Marcus Hu have just acquired the British-made drama in Berlin. Please guys…don’t bury it. Don’t make it seem so minor and marginal that nobody will care when it peeps out like a mouse in early ’12. Try and release it Harvey-style sometime this year. People like me will support this film with real passion if you do. But if you wait until next year the gas will be out of the tank.

My Sundance quote: “The most original adult love story I’ve seen in ages, and a drama that deals almost nothing but surprise cards — a tough story of discipline, redemption and wounded love. Cheers to director-writer Considine for making something genuine and extra-unique. He’s not just an actor who’s branched into directing with a special facility for coaxing good performances — he’s a world-class director who knows from shaping, cutting, timing, holding back and making it all come together. Powerful performances from Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan are one reason that it curiously touches.”

I’ve been invited by the Weinstein Co. and Peggy Siegal to all the King’s Speech gatherings over the last two or three months, and each time I filed respectful and appreciative reports. But I heard zip about the NYC Geoffrey Rush gathering that happened earlier this week. This was due, I presume, to my having equated the announcement of The King’s Speech‘s 12 Oscar nominations with the arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague in August 1968. And yet I’ve always liked the film for what it is (i.e., in context), and the filmmakers and the Weinsteiners, etc.

I think you just have to smile and raise a glass and do the old noblesse oblige in these situations. We all know The King’s Speech has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag; ditto Colin Firth for Best Actor. Venting about this is just a form of emotional therapy, and will obviously have no bearing. No need to be unfriendly.

The people who cut this Arthur trailer apparently have something against star Greta Gerwig, who has the role Liza Minelli played in the 1981 original. Gerwig has about four seconds of trailer time, but I’d much rather hang with her than the more front-and-center Jennifer Garner, who has the Jill Eikenberry role. So what is this? Already I’ve got my hate socks on.

I’m watching it and I’m going “why?…what for?…who gives a toss?” Russell Brand and Helen Mirren, Russell Brand and Helen Mirren, Russell Brand and Helen Mirren, Russell Brand and Helen Mirren…I really don’t like this! Thin sitcom, no soul, a fantasy about money, shallow gags. (Or so the trailer suggests.) Arthur (no website?) opens on 4.8.

The most richly detailed and eye-candyish of the three is MGM Home Entertainment’s Last Tango in Paris. Warner Home Video’s Network Bluray reps a modest but noticable improvement over the most recent DVD, and their All The President’s Men Bluray has darker tones than the DVD with stronger, punchier colors, better detail and a pleasant filmy texture. They all street on 2.15.

Thursday, 2.11, 11:20 pm

Here are DVD Beaver reviews for Last Tango in Paris, Network and All The President’s Men. Oddly, Gary W. Tooze writes that the Tango Bluray has “a less conventional appearance with an extremely grainy and thick image via MGM’s new 1080p Bluray…less concerned with pristine visuals and more prone to textures and capturing stylish spontaneity…there is still some noise but not all films achieve their best presentation value via digital.” What? I loved the look of this disc. I’ve never seen Tango look better.

I was hoping for a glimpse of Jennifer Lawrence‘s Mystique get-up, and I got JFK’s speech on the Cuban Missile Crisis instead. Already they’ve pissed me off.

Earlier today I enjoyed re-reading a December 2002 HE piece about Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman‘s Adaptation. No biggie and nothing related to today except it reminded me how smarty-pants types have this tendency to pick on highly original films, or to misunderstand them, and that it always seems to take them a while to get past their issues. I called it “The Truth About Charlie.”

“Let’s cut to the chase about Adaptation (Columbia, opening Friday) and jump right into the Big Problem. The word over the last several weeks, partially fortified by my own opinion, has been about how wonderfully funny, trippy and original this Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman film is. Now, however, we’re hearing from a second wave of viewers talking about how nifty it all is until the third act, when Adaptation goes off the rails and falls apart.

“I don’t feel this way and didn’t even want to bring this up for fear of lending credibility, etc., but lately several people (including Time‘s Richard Corliss, The New Yorker‘s David Denby, my attorney friend Mark Kane and, according to credible sources, a good portion of the Motion Picture Academy, have been expressing these reservations, and the policy of ignoring them is now futile.

“And yet as recently as last weekend, I was still thinking about avoiding the issue out of respect for Kaufman, the Adaptation screenwriter who also wrote Being John Malkovich and Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, and who is played in the film by Nicolas Cage. In interviews Kaufman has been doggedly avoiding talking about whether or not a certain character — his on-screen brother “Donald” Kaufman — actually exists, either within the film’s reality or, considering that Donald shares screenplay credit with Charlie in the Adaptation credit block, in real life.

“But the review in this week’s issue of Time declares flat-out that Donald ‘doesn’t exist,’ and the new issue of Newsweek adds ‘there is no Donald,’ so the milk is spilt and the gloves are off.

“About two years ago I reviewed Kaufman’s Adaptation script and called it ‘one of the most inventive and out-there scripts I’ve ever read.’ The main character, I explained, ‘is Kaufman himself, and that’s a big whoa right there. A screenplay about a screenwriter trying to write the screenplay? But it’s much more than that.

“The ‘subject’ of Adaptation is an actual, one-time orchid-worshipper named John LaRoche (Chris Cooper), whose attempted theft of rare flora from a Florida state preserve eight years ago resulted in his being prosecuted by the state and, from that, a New Yorker profile of LaRoche and then a book called ‘The Orchid Thief’ (Ballantine), by staff writer Susan Orlean (so named in the film and played by Meryl Streep).

“Adaptation is primarily about Kaufman’s struggle to adapt ‘The Orchid Thief’ into script form, but it’s also about LaRoche and Orlean and the importance of nurturing a devotion in life to something perfect and beautiful. It’s about the striving of mortals to merge themselves with the sublime — Kaufman in his way, LaRoche and Orlean in theirs. Like the screenplay, the movie is half about Kaufman’s situation and half about LaRoche and Orlean’s. But it begins and ends inside Kaufman’s head.

“Foremost among his issues is an earnest determination not to turn Orlean’s book into formulaic Hollywood pap — no guns or shootings or scenes with gratuituous sex, he proclaims. And no characters growing or learning life lessons, or coming to like or appreciate people they didn’t like at the beginning.

“Kaufman is also dealing with pressure to deliver from a producer and his agent (based to some extent on Kaufman’s United Talent Agency agent Marty Bowen), his loneliness and longings for various women (including Orlean), and his frustrating relationship with his no-account brother, Donald, a dim-witted devotee of the famous scriptwriting instructor Robert McKee (Brian Cox) who’s trying to write a screenplay of his own about a serial killer.

“The reality is that Donald Kaufman is a diversion — a phantom character along the lines of Andy Kaufman‘s alter-ego Tony Clifton. As Donald is also played by Cage, you can accept him as a feckless, oafish boob who is Charlie’s brother and is in fact writing a moronic serial-killer screenplay, or as a mirror reflection of some kind — a wish-fulfillment image or maybe a crassly opportunistic side of Charlie’s own nature.

“The nifty thing about Adaptation‘s third act — what I really love about it, and not what confuses me or hangs me up — is that Charlie’s difficulties in writing an ending for his bizarrely self-referential script are both cynically and sincerely ‘solved’ by Donald and McKee.

“It was clear from Kaufman’s script that he considers McKee to be nearly the villain of the piece. Kaufman obviously despises the screenwriting principles McKee espouses in his classes and in his book, ‘Story’, which many feel have resulted in thousands upon thousands of screenwriters churning out the same type of cookie-cutter plots with the same mechanisms and rhythms.

“The irony of Adaptation is that Charlie, desperate to pull his script together, goes to one of McKee’s classes and asks for his help. He also enlists the assistance of Donald, who flies to New York and gooses things along by interviewing Orlean at her office (‘She’s lying!,’ he announces triumphantly when he returns to Charlie’s hotel room) and then persuading Charlie to join him on a fast hop down to Florida.

“The goal of this excursion is to see what’s really going down between Orlean and LaRoche who, it turns out, are having a passionate affair and involved in the selling of hallucinogens. They’re also more than willing to kill the brothers after their secret is discovered. But there’s an upside to these Michael Bay shenanigans: the brothers wind up sharing a tender moment together, and Charlie comes to realize how much he loves his dopier, less-hung-up half.

“Believe it or not, there are people who’ve seen Adaptation who are taking these pumped-up events half-literally, and not as a metaphor for Charlie-the-screenwriter’s ultimate act of adaptation — i.e., devising an ending that most Hollywood producers would probably be satisfied with, or that Donald might have written, or McKee might have sanctioned.

“Time‘s Schickel says the ending is ‘a desperation move’…[one] ‘we are unprepared for and don’t believe.’ In fact the movie has spent its entire length setting it up, quite methodically.

“Other naysayers are interpreting the ending as a cynical lampoon of third-act solutions of this type. What they’re saying is that while most of the movie is very un-cynical — cleverly comical, earnest, touched by sadness, exploratory — the Michael Bay-ish third act is an abrupt shift of strategy and tone, and that whatever the reason for it the lack of harmony with what has gone before is unsettling.

“They’re not wrong. Kaufman’s ending comes from his bitter feelings about Hollywood. My pet theory is that he really couldn’t figure out how to lick Adaptation, and therefore concluded that ‘Charlie’ wouldn’t or couldn’t figure out how to adapt ‘The Orchid Thief’ to his complete artistic satisfaction. So he turned Orlean into a drug-snorting, gun-toting infidel and gave LaRoche a gruesome send-off in a Florida swamp.

‘

“In short, Kaufman abandons who they are as New Yorker-born, flesh-and-blood characters and throws them to the lions (or alligators, as it were). I think this strategy is terrific nonetheless because it totally tabulates for a movie that, in its Hollywood depictions, has been almost entirely about the Charlie way vs. the Donald way of making movies. And because, the cynicism aside, I completely believed in the Charlie-Donald cuddle-up scenes toward the end.

“A word of praise for Cage, who does a beautiful job of bringing these scenes to life and making us completely forget we’re looking at an actor playing to himself. Charlie-Donald is his best role in years, and easily the most emotionally affecting performance of this type in film history. The guy from Vampire’s Kiss has returned after having nearly Jerry Bruckheimer‘ed and Joel Schumacher‘ed his career to death. For this alone he deserves an Oscar nomination and a hearty pat on the back.

“Streep’s Susan Orlean amounts to the warmest and most spontaneous performance of her life, I feel. And I totally agree with predictions that Cooper will end up a Best Supporting Actor nominee, mainly because he deserves to be. And each and every secondary female in this film is note-perfect — Cara Seymour, Judy Greer, Tilda Swinton, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Catherine Keener, etc.

“And a special round of applause for Ron Livingston‘s performance as Marty-the-agent. His anal-sex remark got the biggest laugh by far at a recent packed showing of Adaptation at the American Cinematheque. And I don’t mean just the loudest but the longest. You know a joke has really connected when you can hear people still laughing ten or twenty seconds later.”

There’s no mistaking where Michael Angarano‘s anti-hero in Max Winkler‘s Ceremony (on demand 3.4, theatrical 4.8) is coming from. Relentlessly if not obnoxiously in love with an older, engaged Uma Thurman, Angarano’s Sam Davis is clearly descended from Jason Schwartzman‘s Max Fischer in Rushmore. How can Winkler deny the inspiration?

In a 2.10 Marie Claire interview with The Fighter‘s Melissa Leo, Thelma Adams has gone right to the big topic at hand.

The Fighter costar Melissa Leo

Adams: “It seems that the big criticism has been that you’re the frontrunner behaving like the underdog.”

Leo: “Whatever my position might have been as we came in closer to the date with some wins in my pocket, I was not being told frontrunner. I could just feel in my heart this opportunity that has so vastly eluded me. I spent a month-and-a-half flying back and forth from the set of HBO’s Treme in New Orleans to L.A. to ‘pimp myself out’ like we all are doing this time of year.”

Adams: “So, what made you finally pull the trigger on this ad campaign?”

Leo: “I had deadlines to meet. In Sundance, we wondered: Should we put the ad in or not? Sure, it would just be fun, let’s jump and shout, because all I was going to say was ‘Consider.’ Here I am. Recognize me as this. It’s all okay.”

Adams: “Cue the firestorm.”

Leo: “The people I talk to know that I’m barely getting through each day. I don’t know if I would have thought of it alone, and nobody was saying to me that I was a frontrunner. There is something very disconnected about all of it because absolutely none of it is me. I’m known as an actor that people don’t recognize and as the characters that I play.”

My personal preferences among Eric Lavallee‘s Cannes 2011 predictions include Dominik Moll‘s The Monk, Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible, Terence Davies‘ The Deep Blue Sea, the Dardennes brothers‘ The Kid With a Bike, Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin I Live In, Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life, Andrea Arnold‘s Wuthering Heights, Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin, strong>Gus Van Sant’s Restless and Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out.

I’m primarily pleased about HE’s new Cannes lodging. After learning yesterday that a Cannes apartment I’ve been sharing for the last two years is no longer available, I got lucky right away through a columnist friend and found a new place at almost the same rate and at a slightly better location (i.e., closer to the Palais).

Could The Daily have blown it any worse? That alleged Nikki Finke photo that they posted this morning, taken by Hunter Walker, is reportedly a fake. Finke has told Gawker that it’s not her, and Anne Thompson and TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman, who both know the Deadline founder, agree.

I suspected right away that the shadowed woman in the car wasn’t Finke. Her eyes are too vulnerable looking. That look she’s giving Walker seems to say, “Oh, no, wait…wait a minute…are you taking a picture of me?” She doesn’t look like a wolverine but some kind of blonde basset hound. She has the eyes of someone cautious, uncertain, a little scared of things. Like someone who works in a pet hospital or a beauty salon. Or who sits around the house and does nothing while her husband works.

In any event you’d think that Walker, apart from being wrong, could have taken a better shot than something this dark and hazy, though a Toyota windshield. Or that The Daily would have checked around before posting it, just to make sure.