Isn’t using the image of a tree kind of a literal-minded thing to do? (And with a metaphorical ladder leaning against it?) And how come Brad Pitt‘s name is above Sean Penn‘s? Penn is the central protagonist while Pitt plays a supporting character (i.e., the adolescent Penn’s dysfunctional bad dad) in the flashback sequences. And don’t you need something to balance that little house with the yellow-glow windows on the lower right? Like, for instance, the silhouette of a Tryceratops or Tyrannosuarus Rex on the lower left?

This Hollywood Reporter‘s just-posted Best Actress round-table includes Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Hilary Swank (Conviction), and Amy Adams (The Fighter)…fine. Swank is a non-contender and I’m not convinced that Carter, excellent as she is, is a Best Supporting Actress favorite but okay, whatever.

Kids Are All Right costar Julianne Moore wasn’t invited because she was at the London and Rome film festivals. Another Year‘s Lesley Manville wasn’t in town, I presume. Blue Valentine‘s Michelle Williams and Winter’s Bone contender Jennifer Lawrence were in England shooting. And nobody was focusing on Love and Other Drugs star Anne Hathaway or Morning Glory star Rachel McAdams when this thing was taped on or about 10.25.

Another corporate CG entertainment intended to narcotize the nodding masses with a fake default “liberate yourselves!” message. Hot babes (Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone) behind bars. The fight against the machines. Any movie with Scott Glenn portraying a wise, all-seeing Obi Wan Kenobi guru type in a white robe (who is literally called, believe it or not, “Wiseman”) is an automatic level 10 on the HE bullshit meter.

“To see just how our system was rigged by the financial, political, and university elites, run, don’t walk, to a showing of Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job,” said Bill Moyers in a 10.29 Boston University speech honoring Howard Zinn. “Take a handkerchief because you’ll weep for the republic.”

Moyers was describing the poisoning of the American political system by way of “a 30-year trend” — i.e., one that began with Ronald Reagan — “toward plutocracy, where the rich get richer at the expense of the average citizen.”

The spreading corruption funded by this plutocracy is easily the one fundamental water-table evil of our times — the central pipeline of political pollution from which myriad wrongs and nutter lies and smoke-screens are being fed. One would think that recognizing this could become a basic bond uniting progressives and tea-partyers alike. If Barack Obama had the stones to say what Moyers said a few days ago in this speech, people would rally behind him like never before.

But no — Obama talks instead of John Boehner and Michelle Bachmann and the corporate-funded right as honorable Americans with whom he’d like to find “common ground.” What delusion! Nobody knows how to capitulate to evil better than Barack Obama.

The stink of rhetorical horseshit that filled the East Room during Obama’s post-election-wipeout press conference yesterday afternoon represents the fundamental lie that will erode and destroy his Presidency if he doesn’t wake up. The super-rich have pretty much taken over everything — not just the government but much if not most of the political donation streams going to the major parties, as well as most of the major media news organizations. (I was listening to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer ramble on about the meaning of the midterms yesterday, and the man is nothing but a corporate lackey and a jack-in-the-box entertainer who spews “white noise” pollution.)

President Obama will never admit it and Blitzer and his ilk will never tell you that what’s happening right now is far more pernicious than the corruptions that took root during the age of the turn-of-the-century robber barons.

“To remember a thing, you must first name it,” Moyers said. “We’re talking about slush funds. Donors are laundering their cash through front groups with high-falutin’ names like American Crossroads. That’s one of the two slush funds controlled by Karl Rove in his ambition to revive the era of the robber barons.

“Promise me you won’t laugh when I tell you that although Rove and the powerful Washington lobbyist who is his accomplice described the first organization as ‘grassroots’, 97% of its initial contributions came from four billionaires. Yes: The grass grows mighty high when the roots are fertilized with gold.

“Rove, other conservative groups and the Chamber of Commerce have in fact created a ‘shadow party’ determined to be the real power in Washington just like Rome’s Opus Dei in Dan Brown‘s The DaVinci Code. In this shadow party the plutocrats reign.

“We have reached what the new chairman of Common Cause and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls “the perfect storm that threatens American democracy: an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money, flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

” We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.”

“That word again. But Reich is right. That fraction of one percent of Americans who now earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans — a group that includes the top executives of giant corporations and those Wall Street hedge funds and private equity managers who constitute Citigroup’s ‘plutonomy’ — are buying our democracy and they’re doing it in secret.

“That’s because early this year the five reactionary members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are ‘persons’ with the right to speak during elections by funding ads like those now flooding the airwaves. It was the work of legal fabulists.

“Corporations are not people; they are legal fictions, creatures of the state, born not of the womb, not of flesh and blood. They’re not permitted to vote. They don’t bear arms (except for the nuclear bombs they can now drop on a congressional race without anyone knowing where it came from.) Yet thanks to five activist conservative judges they have the privilege of ‘personhood’ to ‘speak’ — and not in their own voice, mind you, but as ventriloquists, through hired puppets.

“Does anyone really think that’s what the authors of the First Amendment had in mind? Horrified by such a profound perversion, the editor of the spunky Texas Observer, Bob Moser, got it right with his headline: ‘So long, Democracy, it’s been good to know you.'”

[Will somebody explain why the video plays fine on the Boston University origin page, but won’t play when you copy the embed code and reconfigure the dimensions and paste it onto your own page?]

This, for me, is the better of the two assemblies; here’s B-roll #1.

I used to hate watching TV with my father when I was a kid (and particularly as a teenager) because he always kept the sound at whisper levels. We only had one TV — a little thing on a wooden stand in the upstairs den — and I remember saying to him every so often, “Does the sound really have to be this low? I can barely hear it!”

Your father can’t help it, my mother used to say. He has very sensitive ears. Great, I used to reply. He has sensitive ears and so I have to cup mine in order to hear what people are saying on TV shows.

I finally got to listen to TV with my own sound levels when I went out into the world, but first I had to endure a kind of hell for 17 or 18 years. Tortured by whispering Smiths. Leaning forward, “What?,” “I didn’t hear that,” “Can’t we turn it up just a little bit, please?” I would seethe at times. I’m a little pissed just thinking about it now.

Jett and I are sharing the Brooklyn apartment these days, and guess what? He always listens to the tube with the sound way down. “How can you listen to it this quietly?,” I’ll say every so often. “You can barely hear what people are saying.”

Two days ago I attended a luncheon for Sony Classics’ Made in Dagenham, the English-produced drama about a historic female Ford workers’ strike for equal pay in the late ’60s. It happened at Rouge Tomate on East 60th, and was sponsored (or “hosted”) by Revive and Laura Mercier. Dagenham star Sally Hawkins, costar Miranda Richardson, director Nigel Cole and producer Elizabeth Karlsen attended.

(l, to r.) Made in Dagenham producer Elizabeth Karlsen, Sally Hawkins, Miranda Richardson, director Nigel Cole — Monday, 11.1, 12:55 pm.

(l., to r.) Karlsen, Hawkins, Richardson.

As I’ve written before, Made in Dagenham is a well-made, straightforward inspirational drama (female solidarity, facing down chauvinism, labor politics) as far as it goes. If people want to give it a Best Picture nomination in the name of tokenism (i.e., one for women in the same way that a Blue Valentine nomination would be one for the hand-to-mouth indies), fine. I happen to feel that Rosamund Pike, in a smallish supporting role, gives the best performance. That’s not to dismiss Hawkins or Richardson, but Pike has one of those scenes that just sinks right in.

Two more reports about Peter Weir‘s The Way Back. One concerning yesterday’s press screening at L.A.’s Raleigh Studios, and the other about the strategy to not open in New York this year and therefore to not screen it for the New York Film Critics Circle.

The decision to book the shoebox-sized Fairbanks room for yesterday’s first official L.A. press screening was due to a request by a certain unnamed journalist that the screening was primarily held for. Because he/she lives closer to Raleigh Studios than other screening rooms (or so I understand), this journalist actually said “I want to see this large-scope, David Lean-like outdoor epic inside a dinky little theatre with crummy sound…that, believe it or not, is my request.”

Newmarket’s decision to not open The Way Back in Manhattan before 12.31 (and therefore not show it to the NYFCC membership) is due to a risk vs. cost equation. While the chance of winning a NYFCC award (Best Picture, Best Director) is certainly possible (i.e., it’s said by everyone to be a very strong film), the high costs involved in a New York City opening in December have persuaded Newmarket that perhaps sufficient payback won’t manifest. Who knows? But the film will be viewable and voted upon by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, I’m told.

Is it that hard to create a movie poster that makes it seen as if the lead actors actually posed together in the same realm? Whoever did this King’s Speech one-sheet for the Weinstein Co. didn’t try hard enough. Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter “agree” to some extent, but the incongruent pasting of Geoffrey Rush reminds me of the quality of international action-flick posters that I’ve seen at the American Film Market.

And why didn’t these three pose together in costume during filming? It used to be a relatively common practice.

Incidentally: Movieline’s Stu Van Airsdale dislikes this poster even more than myself.

I’m two days late and two dollars short, but the MPAA’s decision to give Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech an R rating is nothing short of surreal. It’s all about a single scene in which Colin Firth‘s King George VI, during one of his speech-therapy sessions with Geoffery Rush‘s Lionel Logue, experiences an emotional breakthrough of sorts as he lets go with a string of vulgarities in a Tourette’s Syndrome way.

This is another example of that old, much-ridiculed MPAA tendency to give films with blue language the same R rating that they routinely hand out to blood-caked torture porn. Late Monday night Hooper told L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein that the decision means that “violence and torture are okay, but bad language isn’t. I can’t think of a single film I’ve ever seen where the swear words had haunted me forever, the way a scene of violence or torture has, yet the ratings board only worries about the bad language.”

This is the second ratings slapdown suffered by the Weinstein Co., which has justifiably railed against the MPAA’s having given Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine an NC-17 over a couple of no-big-deal sex scenes. The prime offender is reportedly a hotel-room sex scene between the married Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, although it isn’t the least bit titillating — it mainly conveys the resentment that has built up between them.

There’s really no logical reason to show respect for the MPAA. Their values are almost Tea Party loony. But there’s also no reason for the Academy to wave away Blue Valentine because of the NC-17. It deserves to be one of the ten Best Picture nominees, I feel, as a gesture of respect for its emotional honesty, high-quality acting and John Cassavetes stamp. You have to have at least one “little” movie in there to round out the pack.