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This is one of the saddest lonely-guy endings ever. It gets me every time. But I always felt that director Bill Forsyth didn’t quite mix the sound at just the right levels for the final shot of the village. The framing should have been a little tighter on the red phone booth, and the ring-ring should have been a bit louder with Mark Knopfler‘s music turned down just a tad. If you’re not listening carefully (or watching on your 1998 TV with the sound too low) the ring-ring is almost inaudible.

David Bordwell wrote the following three years ago:

“The original cut ended with Peter Reigert‘s Mac returning to his Houston apartment and staring out at the dark urban landscape — beautiful in its own way, but very different from the majesty of the Scottish shore,. There the original film ended, but the Warners executives, although liking the film, wanted a more upbeat ending. Couldn’t the hero go back to Scotland and find happiness, you know, like in Brigadoon? They even offered money for a reshoot to provide a happy wrapup.

“Forsyth didn’t want that, of course, but he had less than a day to find an ending.

“The movie makes a running gag of the red phone booth through which Mac communicates with Houston. Forsyth remembered that he had a tail-end of a long shot of the town, with the booth standing out sharply. He had just enough footage for a fairly lengthy shot. So he decided to end the film with that image, and he simply added the sound of the phone ringing.

“With this ending, the audience gets to be smart and hopeful. We realize that our displaced local hero is phoning the town he loves, and perhaps he will announce his return. This final grace note provides a lilt that the grim ending would not. Sometimes, you want to thank the suits — not for their bloody-mindedness, but for the occasions when their formulaic demands give the filmmaker a chance to rediscover fresh and felicitous possibilities in the material.”

I was so underwhelmed by David Frankel‘s The BigYear (20th Century Fox, now playing) that I forgot to review it. Howard Franklin‘s script about three bird-watching devotees (Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, Jack Black) tries to create an interest in who will catch sight of (or take pictures of, or simply hear) the most birds in a given year. But bird-watching tallies require no proof so anyone can fake a sighting or two. It’s an honor-system competition so who could care? How could such a passive pastime possibly be seen as a “race”?

I hated Frankel’s attempts to inject all kinds of artificial punch-up action. (To think that the director of The Devil Wears Prada might have actually directed Moneyball!). And watching Martin, Wilson and Black doing what they can to keep the energy levels up is like watching three hamsters running inside those cylindrical cages. I didn’t give a damn about any of it.

The general public didn’t either, to go by Deadline‘s Saturday morning report. It shows that The Big Year has come in eighth place with an estimated $3 million weekend haul. It cost $41 million to make before Canadian tax credits, according to a 10.13 “Company Town” article.

An intelligent believer in democracy representing the “Black Hispanic Tea Party” has titled this video “Sean Penn, Liberal Democrat, Calls Both Herman Cain and Obama Niggers.”

I saw Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Miller’s Crossing 21 years ago, once. And that was it. No seconds because I was soothed as opposed to aroused. I had a good time and enjoyed the hell out of Barry Sonnenfeld‘s cinematography and Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Albert Finney and John Turturro‘s performances, but it didn’t blow me away. I had it ranked just below Barton Fink and just above Raising Arizona.

I saw it again on Bluray this morning and everything changed. Now it’s a near-masterpiece. Now I plan to watch it every year or so for the rest of my life.

From the Wiki page: “The film alludes to Barton Fink in two ways. Firstly, a prominent newspaper article with the headline ‘Seven Dead in Hotel Fire,’ refers to a fire at the end of that film. And secondly, by naming the apartment building Tom lives in ‘the Barton Arms’.

“The city in which the film takes place is unidentified, but was shot in New Orleans as the Coen Brothers were attracted to its look. Ethan Coen commented in an interview, “There are whole neighborhoods here of nothing but 1929 architecture. New Orleans is sort of a depressed city; it hasn’t been gentrified. There’s a lot of architecture that hasn’t been touched, store-front windows that haven’t been replaced in the last sixty years.”

“Miller’s Crossing was a box-office failure at the time, making slightly more than $5 million, out of its $10 to $14 million budget. However, it has made a great deal of revenue in video and DVD sales.

“Film critic David Thomson calls the film ‘a superb, languid fantasia on the theme of the gangster film that repays endless viewing.'”

I don’t know what they’re eating or drinking in the Windy City, but the 47th Chicago International Film Festival has given a Silver Hugo for Best Actress to Olivia Colman in Tyrannosaur “for an outstanding performance hitting every note showing her vulnerability, her power and her humor.”

From a 10.14 story by N.Y. Times reporter Marc Santora: “The average rental price for a Manhattan apartment in September was $3,331, according to data compiled for The New York Times by Citi Habitats. Last year at the same time it was $3,131, and in 2009 it was $3,013.

“In the past year the increase has been especially sharp. In TriBeCa, for example, a one-bedroom in a doorman building averages $4,635, compared with $3,937 last September, and a similar apartment in Harlem is now $2,398, up from $1,786 last year, Citi Habitats found.

“The average rent for a two-bedroom in a nondoorman building is now $4,137, up from $3,560 last September, according to the MNS survey. In doorman buildings, the average rent for a two-bedroom is $5,857, compared with $5,321 a year ago.”

I pay $850 for a reasonably okay place in a great neighborhood that smells of healthy lawn plants and flowers and moist grass at night. The street is tidy and rubble-free and lined with beautiful trees, and the general atmosphere is beyond quiet — it’s serene. Lots of dogs and cats, and no kids to speak of. Manhattan can go eff itself.

Amidst a tsunami of Venice Film Festival pans of Madonna‘s W.E., some overlooked that fact that the Daily Mail‘s Baz Bamigboye wrote a rave. “It’s going prove divisive,” he admitted. “A lot of people will loathe it, simply because it’s been made by Madonna. But if they were to watch it with no knowledge of who directed, they would be pleasantly surprised.

“They might even find much of it enjoyable, although the odd moment may have them wondering if Madge has committed treason.

“It also happens to be one of the best-dressed movies of the year. The costumes, as you would expect from the original material girl, are eye-popping. In fact, the whole thing looks fantastic — it’s designer Viagra.”

IIf anyone’s half-wondering, Bamigboye is straight.

N.Y. Times sports writer Jonathan Mahler has hit on something in a 10.14 piece called “It’s All Moneyball Now.” The piece isn’t entirely about the political echoes in the film, but it nails something I’ve been kicking around for about a month now.

“Thanks partly to the cultural phenomenon of Moneyball, which demonstrated that teams didn’t need a big payroll to win, we’re all small-market fans now, no longer rooting for the hapless underdog — sorry, Mets and Cubs — but for the team that is doing more with less.

“It’s a subtle but significant distinction and it has unmistakable political overtones, especially during this time of rising class resentment. You didn’t have to spend the day dancing around the drum circle in Zuccotti Park to see Game 5 of the Yankees-Tigers division series in New York — with its constant cutaways to those slick-suited men hunched over their BlackBerrys in the Legends Suites — as more than just a baseball game.

“It may be time to update the old cliche that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel. Today, it’s more like rooting for Goldman Sachs.”

The difference between Hollywood Elsewhere and other sites is that HE will occasionally…uhm, make that very occasionally run ads for reasons that are somewhat questionable from a business perspective. Not within the hardcore Academy season (late October through February), of course, but once in a blue moon in the spring or summer or early fall I’ll do what I can for a film I like. Because sometimes (i.e., when a film is really exceptional) it feels better to show aesthetic allegiance and/or spiritual support than to run things strictly by the Gordon Gekko handbook. Call me irresponsible but every now and then a site like mine needs to walk the walk.

Former baseball player and manager Ken Medlock has been acting in character parts since ’75. But I didn’t notice him until he played Grady Fuson, the old-school Oakland A’s scout who clashes with Brad Pitt‘s Billy Beane. I was so taken with Medlock’s natural-seeming performance that I got his number from Moneyball director Bennett Miller and called him a couple of days ago. We did a phone interview yesterday.

Ken Medlock, Brad Pitt during filming of Moneyball.

During Medlock’s first scene (i.e., the conference-room discussion between Brad and the scouts) I said to myself, “I believe this guy…he’s got a casual attitude and a deep voice and doesn’t seem to care about ‘acting’…he’s the real deal.”

And then comes the scene when Grady, who’s no fan of sabermetrics or Jonah Hill‘s Peter Brand, has it out with Beane in the clubhouse, telling him he’s going to sink the A’s and get himself fired and almost coming to blows (or so it seems) before Beane finally cans him. Pitt gives the performance of his career in Moneyball, but he’s mostly backup in this scene because Medlock totally owns it.

Medlock is so good, in fact, that I think he should get some kind of trophy for giving 2011’s Best Supporting Performance by an Actor Nobody’s Ever Paid Attention To Before.

Again, the phone chat mp3. Medlock is a very cool and friendly guy. I would buy him in a film as a car dealer, a lunch-bucket guy, a baseball coach, a gangster, a security guy, an intimidating dad of a teenage girl…anything along those lines. He has presence, force, charisma, authority.