Initial reactions to Joel and Ethan Coen‘s True Grit will be posted here and there on Wednesday, 12.1, around 1 pm. I can’t say exactly when or where, but the Scott Rudin-produced western is starting to be shown. I’m told there was a restricted screening (i.e., no Poland, Tapley or Hammond) that happened last Tuesday. (Gasp!) Attendees were sworn to secrecy, etc.

This is an old refrain, but everyone needs to start treating the Oscar telecast as merely the end of the road — a moderately exciting, amusing, occasionally touching, usually harmless, sometimes irksome, sometimes gratifying ceremony in which certain heavy-predicted favorites have their night in the sun. And that’s all it is — just a televised finale. We all know it’s not the destination that counts as much as the quality of the journey, so act accordingly.

So people need to invest a bit more in the season as a whole, and at the risk of alienating Oscar advertisers, start talking more about week-to-week personal passions and what the critics groups and the bloggers and the ubers and early adopters are saying, and endeavor as much as possible to (and I mean no harm or disrespect) ignore the deadwood and just stop talking about what “they” — i.e., the older, sleepier, stodgier, sometimes fatally clueless set that ALWAYS seems to be bringing up the rear in terms of receptivity to the best that’s out there — think.

They should be listened to, of course, and taken note of and paid a certain respect. But that’s all. The deadwood sector of the Academy too often does one thing and one thing only — they choose default winners that tone the whole thing down in terms of vision and hipness and coolness. They are the people walking slowly up or down the subway stairs who cause you to miss your connection.

Marriages between filmmakers are tinderboxes. They’re never long for this world, especially if the husband is a director-screenwriter-producer and the wife is an actress, and double especially when they make films together. Jointly-created films are like children, and if the film fails to ignite commercially and/or boost the career of the wife, the parents will start to blame themselves. Most talented actresses are intensely ambitious and no day at the beach to begin with, and this will only intensify if you put them in a movie that doesn’t take off or make them seem as mesmerizing or pistol-hot or Meryl Streep-ish as they feel is their due. It becomes even worse, obviously, if the husband has an issue or two of his own, which is not unusual among director-writer-producers. On top of which infidelity is so easy on that level.

For years I’ve been lamenting the “CinemaScope mumps” distortion syndrome — that face-broadening, weight-adding effect that resulted from the use of anamorphic CinemaScope lenses from ’53 through ’59 or ’60. It would be heaven if someone could figure a way to horizontally compress these films so that it would all look right. There’s a fundamental feeling of being cheated out of the correct proportions that were captured but not represented by those effing Bausch & Lomb Scope lenses.

William Holden’s face was never this wide, even after he’d gotten much older after decades of drinking.

I hate the “mumps” syndrome. It makes me grind my teeth. It angers me that no one else seems to care. Millions of moviegoers watched widescreen “mumps” films in the ’50s and didn’t notice or say anything, of course. It’s my cross to bear that I do notice this stuff and am one of the few people who complain.

Everyone was tweeting last night about the Munk debate in Toronto between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens over the contribution of religion to the world’s ills and/or comforts. I myself was driving back from Gulalala to San Francisco, and am now searching around for an online digital replay. Before the debate Hitchens sat down with Toronto Globe & Mail‘s editorial board editor John Geiger for a general discussion about same. Here is segment #1, segment #2 and segment #3.

First a persuasive dismissive review from the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane, and now a follow-up from N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. Tell me how this doesn’t translate into some level of difficulty for The King’s Speech. And, unlike Lane, Dargis doesn’t even tumble for Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush‘s performances — she likes Guy Pearce‘s King Edward VIII instead.

“Like many entertainments of this pop-historical type, The King’s Speech wears history lightly no matter how heavy the crown,” she says, adding that Firth and Rush are “solid” but “too decent [and] too banal, and the film [is] too ingratiating to resonate deeply.”

Pearce, however, is “fantastic…mercurially sliding between levels of imperiousness and desperation, he creates a thorny tangle of complications in only a few abbreviated scenes, and when his new king viciously taunts Bertie, you see the entirety of their cruel childhood flashing between them. By the time he abdicates in 1936, publicly pledging himself to Mrs. Simpson (‘the woman I love’), turning the throne over to King George VI, Edward has a hold on your affections.”

“Great meals fade upon reflection — everything else gains,” a great hustler of the past once said. But has Inception gained? I know it upticked between viewing #1 (which frustrated due to shitty sound at a non-IMAX showing at Manhattan’s Lincoln Square) and viewing #2 (a very high-quality IMAX screening at San Francisco’s Metreon with knockout sound). But since then Inception has kind of settled down and levelled out. It’s one of the most thrilling mind-fuck movies of all time, but I’m just not that into seeing it again on Bluray. Go figure.

Okay, I’m half into watching it a couple of weeks hence. But I’m not feeling all tingly about this. On one level I want to see it again, and on another level I kind of fucking don’t. I’m not sure I want to own it, to be honest. I may just Netflix it.

I got really sick of that slow-mo image of the van going off the bridge and into the water during my second viewing. I don’t know if I can take watching that again. It was even pissing me off the first time. “All right already…Jesus fuck,” I was muttering. “How long is it going to take for the van to hit the water? I could go out and hit the head and buy another popcorn and check my messages and it would still be falling when I get back.”

The thing I most want to see is a 44-minute Extras doc called “Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious,” in which “top scientists make the case that the dream world is not an altered state of consciousness, but a fully functional parallel reality.”

My Inception history has been primarily defined by my relationship with Ken Watanabe‘s dialogue. I could barely hear what he was saying during viewing #1, I could comprehend 70% to 80% of his dialogue during the IMAX screening, and I know for sure I’ll be able to hear every last word when I watch him on the Bluray. Ken — nice to know you finally!

TheWrap‘s Steve Pond has not only written one of the most depressing Oscar-season columns I’ve read over the past several weeks, but one of the most infuriating. The simple acknowledging of idiot-wind opinions held by those legendary “older conservative Academy members” gives them a kind of legitimacy, and that they don’t deserve this. Oh, and only 200 people showing up to see 127 Hours is merely another example of arm-carve anxiety. Everyone knows it’s out there. I brought my 127 Hours screener to my Thanksgiving sleep-over house in Gualala, and nobody even asked about it, much less popped it into the DVD player.

This morning I was admiring the catchy eyesore appeal of Bones Roadhouse in downtown Gualala. The flames in the sign tell you they’re into charbroiled beef — very distinctive, guys. Not mention the “great ocean views.” And the loud brownish rust color of the exterior accented by those Indian red window frames is startling. This is the downside of American free enterprise — i.e., people with atrocious taste being allowed to not only design their own storefronts but pollute the aesthetic atmosphere of the nearby area.

Remnant of typical home in Gualala in the old days (i.e., maybe 100 years ago). Imagine what the founding residents of this community would think and feel if they came back to 2010 Gualala and stood in front of Bones.

A friend asked why I’ve been ranting about the failure of Collider‘s Steve Weintraub to step up to the plate and post whatever favorable opinions he may have about William Monahan‘s London Boulevard, which has opened in London and gotten creamed by most critics. Weintraub has stated he hasn’t posted a review because Monahan showed him the film as a friend and not as a critic. I think that’s a moot point once a film opens theatrically.

“How about when one of your director pallies shows you something early and tells you not to write about it?,” the friend asked. “Seriously, is keeping your word that fucking foreign a concept to you?”

My answer: If I’d been shown Sylvester Stallone‘s Edgar Allen Poe biopic in private, let’s say, and had promised not to write anything, I would surely hold to that deal, of course. But at a certain point, keeping your word on this kind of thing is not only meaningless but cowardly. If the Poe bipic was to suddenly open in England (which is the same as opening in NY or LA) and get critically killed, you can bet your boots that if liked it, I’d stand up and be a man and argue with the naysaying critics right then and there. Unlike the trembling, shivering churchmouse known as Steve Weintraub.

“London Boulevard has opened in England. That means that no matter what city or country your’e living in, THE JIG IS UP. We all live in one big community these days. There are no nations, no borders, no passports, no language barriers…there is only CyberTown. So whenever a movie opens in any major market (London, NY, LA, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo), ALL BETS ARE OFF. You stick to your word about not reviewing a film until it opens in a major market, and then it’s “olly olly in come free.”

And I mean especially if you’re a friend of the filmmaker. When his/her film opens and it gets hit by mixed or bad reviews, it’s your DUTY as a friend to stand up and do the right thing…if you liked it, half-liked it or found it partly valuable, I mean. No matter what the friend or his/her publicist says, you jump into the fray. Because come the week of an opening in a major market, the review cat is TOTALLY OUT OF THE BAG. It is wimpy to an extreme to not say something about a film you ostensibly like when a film opens and is put down by a majority of critics. You have to stand by your friends, come hell or high water.

Post-chemo, ailing Michael Douglas appears to be in the pink. A few weeks ago the supermarket tabs ran photos that made him look a little ghoulish. But in this two-day-old photo, taken at Orlando’s Epcot center, he looks healthy and gleaming. The fact that cancer causes weight loss obviously isn’t a “good” thing, but there’s no denying that Douglas looks better in this family photograph than he has in a long time.

Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone for the pass-along.

If you’re gonna do a Sylvester Stallone imitation, you have to stay away from yelling “Adrienne!” That’s for chumps. Serious Stallone mimics tend to use (a) his signature line from First Blood — i.e., “They drew first blood, not me” and (b) the opening line from Edgar Allen Poe‘s “The Raven,” which alludes to Stallone’s long-simmering intention to direct or star in a Poe biopic.

All you have to do is try and simulate Stallone’s reedy baritone voice, his New York-ish accent, the vaguely sneering tone and his slight speech impediment. He has problems with t’s and especially r’s. And so you say the First Blood line as follows: “They dew fuhst bluhd, nahmee.” And you sat the first line of “The Raven” as, “Wanz uppahn a mitnight duhreerwee.”