Yesterday N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman explained in a roundabout way why a strong leftist-activist needs to run against President Obama in the 2012 Democratic primaries. Obama needs to “find it within himself to use his power, to actually take a stand,” Krugman writes, “[but] the signs aren’t good.”

“Orange symbology is so burned into general public consciousness that it almost diminishes the natural attractiveness of orange in nature — the fruit, the occasional flower, the oriole, sunsets. Notice that nature is tasteful enough to use orange very sparingly. Nature knows what Frank Sinatra and Olly Moss didn’t recognize — that orange used with any kind of force or emphasis feels a bit oppressive.

“It’s a safety color when you’re hunting or working construction or standing on a busy traffic road in the evening, but it’s also a kind of control color — a symbol used to enforce rules and segregate prisoners and make people stay within boundaries. Orange doesn’t say “life can occasionally be beautiful or transporting.” It says ‘do this,’ ‘watch out,’ ‘don’t go there,’ ‘slow down,’ etc.” — from “Orange, Part 2,” posted on 8.5.10.

Today Art of the Title celebrated the opening credits sequence in Martin Scorsese‘s Mean Streets (’73). They don’t offer embed codes, of course, so I went to YouTube and decided that the pool-room brawl scene makes for a better tribute. De Niro’s energy was astonishing back then. Anyone who knows him only from the ’90s onward doesn’t know the half of it.

I’ll soon have a chance to sit down with Paprika Steen, the Danish actress best known for Susanne Bier‘s Open Hearts and Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Celebration. She’s said to be staggering as an alcoholic actress in Martin Pieter Zandvliet‘s Applause (WWMP, 12.3). I wouldn’t know myself. I’m not seeing the film until Thursday.

“Ms. Steen doesn’t just surpass herself in Applause — she gives one of the best screen performances of the year,” wrote Karen Durbin in the N.Y. Times on 10.29.

“[She] plays Thea, a famous theater actress fresh from a lengthy stint in alcohol rehab who is eager to regain at least partial custody of her two young sons. Applause intercuts the tense drama of her troubled present with pungent flashbacks to Thea triumphant as the drunken Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We see that she was not only great but, once offstage, viciously abusive to her young dresser.

“Playing an alcoholic has been known to bring out the scenery chomper in the best of actors. Ms. Steen never puts a foot wrong, even though she’s playing two alcoholics, wild Martha with the meat-cleaver mouth and the more alienated, calculating Thea.

“There are no melodramatics in the latter portrayal, just a silent, simmering rage at everyone but her children, a tormented sense of being forever on the outside looking in, and a self-destructiveness so willful that when her ex-husband lets her take the boys on an outing near a lake, it’s impossible not to think she’s going to drown them.

“To say that Ms. Steen commands this film is no exaggeration. She’s in every scene, with Thea’s drink-ravaged face often shot in unforgiving close-up. There is even a single eerie, fleeting moment when we can’t tell if she’s Martha or Thea: Ms. Steen is that good.

“Thea’s story is harrowing. Yet for all the pain she depicts, Ms. Steen is delving so deep and with such unerring precision into the human psyche, not even for a moment do we want to look away.”

A young guy I know broke up with his girlfriend last night. He was looking for an actual boyfriend-girlfriend thing, and she turned out to be a bit too aloof and casual-minded. I offered a little solace by quoting the following line, which is from a well-respected late ’70s film: “Jesus…you know, I knew you were crazy when we started going out. You always think you’re gonna be the one that makes ’em act different, but…”

I was under this vague impression that if somebody “friends” you on Facebook they’re stating a willingness to converse a tiny bit. In a sort of tappity-tap-tap way, I mean. You send them a note and they write back, etc. But apparently not. I sent a friend request to an ex-girlfriend a while back and she accepted — cool. But that was it. I’ve followed up a couple of times, and Ingmar Bergman‘s The Silence has nothing on her. Same deal with a marketing exec for a major distributor. She accepted, I wrote back…zip. Facebook is nothing. It’s contact without contact. It’s about nominal acknowledgement, if that.

Is it fair to ask if Harrison Ford is over in the wake of Morning Glory‘s box-office shortfall? Fair or not, they’re doing it. The LA Times‘ Stephen Zeitchik hammered the poor guy this morning for his “marginality” and “obscurity.” Which more or less echoed what Atlantic Wire‘s Eric Hayden wrote last Friday.

Ford is too mopey, too weathered, too glum and over the hill, they’re basically saying.

I for one felt that Ford’s snarly, misanthropic, pissed-off news anchor in Morning Glory was not only his best role but his best performance in years, but what do I know? A movie buff I know saw Morning Glory last night and feels that Ford is “perfect.” But Joe and Jane Popcorn didn’t share this enthusiasm, apparently, to go by last weekend’s $9.6 million haul.

Ford’s role in Jon Favreau‘s Cowboys & Aliens is a real quickie so that’s not much to hang onto. Judging by the comic, I deduced last April that “the only guy whom Ford could possibly play is a 60ish U.S. Cavalry Colonel who refers to Native Americans as ‘filthy savages’ and is soon after wasted by the aliens. A cameo, in short — two or three minutes and hasta la vista.”

If someone has a PDF of Natalie Portman and Laura Moses‘ BYO, allegedly a kind of “female-themed Superbad [about] a pair of twentysomething women who, after finding themselves unlucky in love, decide to throw a party to which each female attendee brings an eligible bachelor,” please forward. Not for review or anything — I just wanna read it.

L.A. Times guy Stephen Zeitchik reported on 11.12 that “the project [described in the headline as a raunchy comedy] has been passed on by several Hollywood studios [but] could still get made via either a studio or, more likely, via independent financing.

“Portman would star as one of the female leads and produce the movie. Studio executives [who’ve read the script] said they’ve been told Anne Hathaway has expressed interest in the second lead role.”

Early yesterday afternoon Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #8 with guest Scott Feinberg, owner/editor of www.scottfeinberg.com, and Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino. Here’s a straight link sans iTunes.

And we just, like, covered everything. Topics included (a) the undeniably powerful but extremely tedious and tiring Harry Potter franchise, (b) the sudden arrival of The Fighter and how exciting it feels to have a new live-wire, blue-collar contender in the race that just wipes the floor with The Town in terms of Massachusetts authenticity,(c) the unfortunate or unfair political standard that “artists with issues” are frequently judged by, (d) the Annette Bening and Michael Douglas questions, and (e) how sex — “the shiny thing” — tends to insert itself into Best Actress campaigns, and (f) the sexuality in I Am Love (particularly my feeling that the guy Tilda Swinton has the hot affair with isn’t tall or broad-shouldered enough for her, and is too bushy-bearded) and Blue Valentine.

Just give it a listen. It lasts for a good hour-plus, but what is length?

From Friday night’s (11.12) season finale of Real Time with Bill Maher, via MichaelMoore.com.

Jean-Luc Godard was interviewed by Christian Jungen for NZZ last Sunday (11.7). The original interview is here. The edited translation is by Frederik Lang.

Jungen: Monsieur Godard, next Saturday [on 11.13], the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will award you an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. What does this mean to you?

Jean-Luc Godard: Nothing. If the Academy likes to do it, let them do it. But I think it’s strange. I asked myself: Which of my films have they seen? Do they actually know my films? The award is called The Governor’s Award. Does this mean that Schwarzenegger gives me the award?

Jungen: I beg your pardon? The most important film award means nothing to you?

Godard: No, it really doesn’t. Maybe it is a late acknowledgement that I — like Lafayette in the American War of Independence, in the uprising against the English — supported the beginning of a revolution.

Jungen: Which revolution?

Godard: In the 1950s, when I was a critic with Cahiers du Cinema, we loved independent films. We discovered that directors like Hitchcock, Welles and Hawks fought for artistic independence within the big studio machinery. After the war, we praised this — back then, a sacrilege for French film criticism. They sniffed at directors like Hitchcock and said ‘he’s just making commercial films.’ But for that alone, the Academy could have given the award to someone else.

Jungen: Now you are being modest. You and your colleagues developed the auteur theory that today structures the canon as works of directors.

Godard: The phrase ‘la politique des auteurs’ was made up by journalists. When Fran√ßois Truffaut wrote his first articles, he only said: The auteur of a film is not the screenplay writer — it is not the one who gets the story on paper who is important, but the one who stages it.

Jungen: In 1980, you revoked the auteur theory with a mea culpa. Why?

Godard: I suffered severely from the consequences, that they talked more about the author and not his works. That’s why I didn’t go to Cannes for the world premiere of my latest work, Film Socialisme. [Because] they would have only talked about me. But it was already like this during the Nouvelle Vague. We were no more than ten critics who spoke of films and not directors. By the way, this was a mistake: with Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, we only talked about cinema and not about ourselves. We didn’t know one another.

Jungen: Later on, you fell out with Truffaut. What was the reason?

Godard: Over time I realized that he made exactly the kind of films that we attacked: screenplay films! Truffaut’s works were not shaped by the camera but by the pen. The camera imitated what his pen had written.

Jungen: Back to the Oscar: Why don’t you attend the award ceremony?

Godard: I don’t have a visa for the US and I don’t want to apply for one. And I don’t want to fly for that long.

Jungen: Once again, there is a debate in Jewish newspapers about whether or not you are an anti-Semite. Does this hurt you?

Godard: That’s nonsense! What does ‘anti-Semite’ mean? All peoples of the Mediterranean were Semites. So anti-Semite means anti-Mediterranean. The expression was only applied to Jews after the Holocaust and WWII. It is inexact and means nothing.