I was discussing The Social Network this morning with a very bright, plugged-in, boomer-aged lady. Good job, motivated, sharp, no simpleton. And until I pointed it out, she didn’t get what Jesse Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg was doing at the very end of the film — i.e., refreshing Erica Albright’s Facebook page in hopes of discovering that she’d accepted his friend request. TSN‘s finale is merely one component, of course, but it follows that if my smart friend didn’t quite get it (i.e., she’s new to Facebook) there are probably dozens if not hundreds of Academy and guild members who also didn’t understand at first. These guys may even resent TSN on some level, ironically, for having made them feel a little bit out of it. People are funny that way.

It’s always tragic when a person of any age decides to pull the plug, for whatever reason. Lord knows poor Mark Madoff, who took his life yesterday, coped with terrible goblins swirling over, under and around for the last two years. I could only begin to imagine what it must have felt like to be seen as a pariah by everyone on the planet earth, if only because of the sins of the father and the adage about “the acorn never falls from the tree.” My sympathies to all concerned. I understand about coming to a point when you’re “tired of yourself and all of your creations,” but — here it comes — if you’re going to fold your hand shouldn’t it be because of your own cards (i.e., character, history, prospects)?

Whatever the actual financial realities, you have to hand it to Janice Min ‘s Hollywood Reporter for at least projecting a feistier, more enterprising image than poor, beleagured Variety. If you have any sporting blood, I mean. Variety has lost so many good people in recent months (critic Todd McCarthy, reporters Michael Fleming. Dana Harris and Pamela McLintock) that further downward spiraling seems inevitable. Who would have projected two years ago that THR would soon emerge as a healthier, more forward-moving enterprise than Variety? Avis has finally overtaken Hertz.

Oscar Poker took a hiatus last weekend due to the all-but-nonexistent wifi at the Palace Es Saadi, but we’re back on today. The plan is to wait until the recipients of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards are announced, or until 1 pm Pacific/4 pm Eastern. The edited program will most likely be up later tonight. Breaking: Sasha Stone has finally seen The Fighter.

French Street, Fairfield, Connecticut — Sunday, 12.12, 9:25 am.

I’m typing this from the home of an old friend in Fairfield, Connecticut. Sunday morning rainstorm outside — cold, soaked, mushy, etc. Warm and toasty inside (as you might expect), two 3G bars, strong black coffee.

I tasted this experience from time to time in the ’90s. Online column-ing and Hollywood Elsewhere saved my life.

I’ve now seen almost every worthwhile 2010 film except Country Strong. (That was a joke.) So here’s my pure and un-politicized distillation of the finest 2010 films, without regard to any notions of any of them winning anything. Just quality and enjoyment and the stuff that plucks my deep-down chord…however you want to put it.

My favorite film of the year, hands down, is David Fincher‘s The Social Network, in part because it’s so perfectly made and clearly focused, and so primal in its portrayal and understanding of human nature, and partly because it isn’t the least bit interested in trying to emotionally touch the viewer. It’s far too good for that.

Except I was touched by Jesse Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a brave little shit with a genius intellect — duplicitous, disloyal, covert, under-handed. Not so hot with the humanity friendo stuff. Genius is as genius does. And yet you can feel the emotion churning under Eisenberg’s steel-rivet glare in each and every scene. The sadness and solitude that fills him at the finale is a dramatic construct (i.e., the real Zuckerberg has had the same girlfriend since Harvard), but it’s one of the best endings ever, not just on the level of Citizen Kane‘s sled-in-the-furnace finale but Some Like It Hot‘s.

I can’t riff on the others (mainly because I have a train to catch) but Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan is #2 and David O. Russell‘s The Fighter is third. And then comes Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg (#4), Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (#5), Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In (#6), John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole (#7), Chris Nolan‘s Inception (#8), Lee Unkrich‘s Toy Story 3 (#9), and Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech (#10).

Followed by Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine (#11), Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours (#12), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful (#13), Jean-Francois Richet‘s Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 (#14), Olivier Assayas‘ Carlos (#15), Lisa Cholodenko‘s The Kids Are All Right (#16) Mike Leigh‘s Another Year (#17), Doug Liman‘s Fair Game (#18), Aaron Schneider ‘s Get Low (#19), Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere (#20), Roger Michell‘s Morning Glory (#21); and Anton Corbijn‘s The American (#22).

True Grit gets an A for execution and a D-minus for content and theme, and that’s as far as I’m willing to go

I’ll finish this (including the best docs) when I get on the 11:06 pm train to Connecticut. I have to shut down and run.

No excuse for failing to acknowledge the triumph of Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer at the European Film Awards last weekend — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Ewan McGregor), Best Screenplay and two other awards that news accounts haven’t described. It was announced during the nadir of my wifi agony at the Marrakech Film Festival, so that’s a bit of an excuse…no? I guess not.

Roman Poalanski, Ewan McGregor during last year’s filming of The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer was and is a deliciously well-made thing — easily one of my top 2010 favorites. Here, in honor of it and to make up for last weekend’s dereliction, is a re-posting of my original 2.17.10 review:

Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer (Summit, 2.19) is a brilliant and masterful adult thriller. I just saw it this evening, and less than ten minutes after it began I knew I was once again in the hands of perhaps the most exacting filmmaker alive today, and as sharp as he’s ever been. This film is so gloriously not run-of-the-mill-Hollywood I can barely stand it.

Anyone who says “very well made but not enough action, not emotional enough and not a big enough payoff” is asking for commonality from the wrong guy. Polanski has never been one to massage and titillate the Eloi. He makes films for people who get what he’s up to. The Ghost Writer knows exactly what it’s doing and how to play cerebral thriller chess. It really is a masterpiece of its type.

It’s now a settled issue in my head that Variety‘s Derek Elley is a highly unreliable reviewer. I’m basing my judgment on the fact that Elley wrote that Polanski “brings not a jot of his own directorial personality or quirks” to The Ghostwriter. That is a complete flabbergast. The film throbs with Polanski’s personality and mentality. The same calmly intelligent approach to story — the sharp dialogue, subtle hints and clues, exacting narrative tissue, patient accumulation of facts and intuitions — that characterized Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown are here in abundance.

I’m in an Upper West Side cafe that’s closing down but I’ll write more about this tomorrow. I haven’t had such a complaint-free time with a thriller of this type in ages. The crowd I caught it with was totally enraptured — I could feel the concentration in the room — although I suspect that the Eloi will sidestep it for the most part. (Isn’t that what they generally do? Avoid intelligent adult fare?)

So often the protagonist in this type of thriller will be slow on the uptake or speak clumsily or be tongue-tied in some way when the occasion calls for the opposite, but Ewan McGregor‘s lead character — a bright and astute Brit hired to ghostwrite a political memoir for an ex-Prime Minister in the Tony Blair mold (Pierce Brosnan) — is wonderfully alert and articulate all the way through, even when he’s scared or uncertain or conflicted.

And the story never loses or confuses you. It moves along step by intelligent step. I can’t for the life of me figure why Marshall Fine called the middle sections “frustrating.” The film is never that. As long as you’re not looking for a Michael Bay or Martin Campbell-esque experience, The Ghost Writer delivers a kind of heaven that smart moviegoers will flutter over.

The only bad element during the screening was a 60ish asshole with swept-back gray hair who kept going “uhm-hmm” out loud whenever a significant detail or direction was revealed. He was sitting on the other side of my aisle — seven or eight feet away — and he really wanted everyone in his vicinity to know that he was getting all the twists and turns. I hate guys like this. Every so often I would look over and burn death-ray beams into the left side of his head.

Last night I attended a promo party at Soho House for two outrageously expensive but undeniably cool coffee-table books — Bill Gold: PosterWorks (with commentary by Christopher Frayling, the guy who invented the term “spaghetti western”) and The Rat Pack, commentary by Shawn Levy. I flipped through both and snapped away. Any and all photos not featuring Frank Sinatra are from the Gold book.

I don’t buy this analogy at all. If I was Aronofsky I’d be pissed. Crude and simplistic, apples and oranges. Still…

Showgirls | Black Swan Trailer MASH UP from Jeffrey McHale on Vimeo.

People repeating the “Annette Bening is finished” card need to chill down and recalculate the odds. I include myself in this equation. Because she’s not totally done. She won’t win, but she’ll bounce back when the Broadcast Film Critic and Golden Globe noms are announced, and when the SAG Award nominees are revealed.

I was saying to a friend a couple of hours ago that I personally can’t imagine The King’s Speech winning a Best Picture trophy from the New York Film Critics Circle or the L.A. Film Critics Association. I mean, I’d fall right out of my chair if that happens…but it can’t…right? Anyway, when and if the King’s Speech myth of inevitability has fallen away, a healthy percentage of MCN Gurus are going to say to each other, “Oh, my…what to do? Where to go? What safe winner can we flock around now?”

And then, I’m guessing, they’re going to start moving over to The Fighter. Especially if it gets lucky and wins with either the L.A. Film Critics Association (voting Sunday) or the New York Film Critics Circle (voting Monday). Not that I think this will happen — I fully expect The Social Network to win with both groups. But you never know…

“It has been common wisdom as this awards race moves into full gallop that Best Picture Oscar may come down to The Social Network and The King’s Speech,” Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote yesterday morning. “But after this week, I believe we may be adding a new heavyweight contender if mounting buzz is any indication. Academy members who are starting to see Paramount/Relativity’s The Fighter, particularly after Monday night’s premiere, are starting to talk in ways that make Oscar consultants for rival films nervous.

“‘It’s a great movie, it really is,’ one major writer/director told me last night. An exec close to the film’s campaign says the studios are starting to hear this a lot and points out one director branch member who came up after the film and told her, ‘I think I’ve just seen the Best Picture of the year.’ This exec says, ‘I know I should be drinking coffee but I am starting to drink my own Kool Aid. I think this thing is really starting to take off.'”

David O. Russell‘s The Fighter (Paramount, 12.17) has strong but not AAA (i.e., Social Network-level) Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic scores. And yet it’s igniting serious emotional excitement — perhaps more so than any other Best Picture contender so far. The passion of the big guns who are with it — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir, among others — is deep and true.

I’m feeling something here, something that might result in a Best Picture win with the New York Film Critics Circle or the Los Angeles Film Critics Association…who knows? I’ll never back off from my worship of The Social Network, but anyone can see that The Fighter is a way out of the Social Network vs. The King’s Speech impasse. I’m not saying this will happen, but it certainly could. My insect antennae is sensing earth tremors, a certain rumble, whatever you want to call it.

“The entire audience for The Fighter will know that ‘Irish’ Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), lovable palooka of Lowell, Mass., is going to get that title shot and reunite his brawling, hopeless family,” O’Hehir writes. “The magic of The Fighter is all in the telling, in the fact that Russell has taken a tale of mythic American redemption and one of those Hollywood screenplays with four credited writers and somehow made a movie so rousing, so real and so full of complicated emotions that it all feels brand-new.”

This echoes what I said on 11.12, to wit: “I really couldn’t understand how a movie about a boxer could possibly add something to the table that I hadn’t seen before in 20 or 30 other boxing movies, but The Fighter‘s focus on family feuds and crack addiction and delusion and the necessity of facing brutal truths and looking people you love in the eye and telling them they’re history unless they clean up their act…this is what real families do, and why this movie feels like it’s doing it plain and straight every step of the way.”

Back to O’Hehir: “Several other movies this year have tried to tackle working-class American reality (at least in its Caucasian, New England form), including Ben Affleck‘s self-indulgent thriller The Town and the tedious Hilary Swank vehicle Conviction. Russell’s jazzy, ruthless, affectionate and funny film outshines them all, and is a terrific date movie to boot: It’s a boxing flick with bone-jarring action scenes for the guys, and a family-and-relationship comedy for the gals!

“I’m just glad to get Russell back, because he makes movies with tremendous soul, as much of a cliche as that may be. Marvelously shot and edited, The Fighter has high style but is never showy, blends history and fiction in fascinating fashion, and includes several of the year’s best performances. Oscar voters may well end up weighing The Fighter against Black Swan, made by Russell’s friend and producer Darren Aronofsky — a similar fable, told in vastly different fashion — but no matter who wins, nobody loses. Taken together, these movies demonstrate that there’s still passion in American cinema.”

Writing in a deliberately cliched fashion, Scott says The Fighter “is quick on its feet and packs a mighty punch. With solid bodywork, clever feints and tremendous heart, it scores at least a TKO, by which I mean both that it falls just short of overpowering greatness — I can’t quite exclaim ‘It’s a knockout!’ — and that the most impressive thing about it is technique.

“This is yet another tale of an underdog battling long odds and stubborn adversity in search of a shot at the big time. It is also a love story, a family melodrama and the chronicle of a close and complicated fraternal relationship. The love of a good woman (the unaffectedly lovable Amy Adams), the rivalry and camaraderie between brothers, the battered face, bruised knuckles and wounded pride — The Fighter has it all.

“But the inevitable comparisons arise only in retrospect, when it settles down into the company of Rocky and Raging Bull and other very good (and Best Picture-nominated) boxing pictures. Mr. Russell, a restlessly — sometimes recklessly — inventive filmmaker, does not try to subvert the genre, but rather, as Clint Eastwood did in Million Dollar Baby, to refresh it, to find new insights and angles of vision within the parameters of the tried and true.

“Mr. Wahlberg, for his part, leans back against the ropes and watches, underplaying so gracefully and with so little vanity that you almost forget that the movie is supposed to be about Micky. Everyone else seems to do a lot more fighting than the ostensible title character. But the brilliance of Mr. Wahlberg’s quiet performance is that it so effectively mirrors the deep logic of the story, which is finally about the paradox of a man in a violent profession who is fundamentally passive and who must learn how to find some distance from the people who love and need him the most without abandoning them or betraying himself.

Another sample quote from my 11.12 review: “The simple fact is that The Fighter is alive, really alive. It’s a rugged little blue-collar thing that (I know this sounds like a cliche) pulses with grit and real feeling and emotional immediacy. It’s loose and crafty with a hurried, shot-on-the-fly quality. Which makes it feel appropriately ‘small’ and local-feeling. To watch it is to be in it.

And another: “Hollywood has made good films about Massachusetts blue-collar people, but for me they felt ‘acted’ (like The Town and, no offense, The Departed). But Russell and Wahlberg, shooting almost entirely in Lowell on a fast 33-day schedule, have made some kind of real-deal thing here.

“Ten minutes into [the] screening and I was saying, ‘Wait…this is good…this is good…this feels right.’ The acting is great from every player, especially from Bale (he’s got the big showy part) but also Wahlberg, Amy Adams and fierce Melissa Leo as the headstrong mother of Walhlberg, Bale and five or six of the gruntiest-looking family of blue-collar sisters you’ve ever seen in your life, let alone a film. And George Ward and several others are also on it. They all say what they mean and mean what they say, dammit. Nobody’s playin’ fuckin’ games here.”