Several very cool people attended tonight’s Up In The Air party at the Monkey Bar, but George Clooney was the epicenter. I asked him about his next film, Anton Corbijn‘s The American. It was shot in 2.35 color scope, he said, but no one has seen anything. Clooney said he’d spent most of the day helping to arrange a huge Haiti-earthquake fundraising concert that will occur a week from Friday. The Monkey Bar is located within the Hotel Elysee (i.e., “Hotel Easy Lay”) on 54th near Park.

Elisabetta Canalis, George Clooney at tonight’s Monkey Bar party for Up In The Air.

Up In The Air costar Anna Kendrick — Wednesday, 1.13, 9:15 pm.

Canalis, Clooney, Woody Harrelson — Wednesday, 1.13, 9:25 pm.

The guests included Jason Reitman, Anna Kendrick, Ivan Reitman, Michael Douglas, Paramount honcho Brad Grey, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, Charlie Rose, Spike Lee, Michael Clayton/Duplicity director-writer Tony Gilroy, In The Valley of Elah director-writer Paul Haggis, Montecito’s Tom Pollock, screenwriter Stephen Schiff, Woody Harrelson and maybe eight or ten journalists.

I’ve seen the English-language trailer for Roman Polanski’s The Ghost, and I honestly prefer this German-language one. There’s no question that Kim Cattrall is four or five times more sultry and scintillating when she’s been dubbed in German rather than speaking her native tongue. In fact, dub Sex and the City 2 in German and I might watch it.

The visual exaggerations in this vintage African Queen poster are fairly comical. Humphrey Bogart‘s Schwarzenegger-like physique, Katharine Hepburn looking like she’s 28, etc. 50s-era posters were about a very curious mythology based on how the poster artist would improve upon all aspects of the movie (including the physical appearances of the stars). Always imaginative. Has any recent one-sheet tried to ironically resuscitate this aesthetic?

Before yesterday I would have simply described Haiti as one of the worst hell-holes to live in with some of the worst people in the world running the government. I don’t know what to say now except that life on this planet can be disproportionately cruel. I’ve always been thankful I wasn’t born there, but I’m extra double glad of this today.

If there’s a Haitian relief fund of any kind I’ll probably drop some money in. And you know that the same Haitian thieves who’ve been stealing all along will take a chunk of that relief fund and send it to their bank accounts in Bern.

My third or fourth reaction is that the worst may not be over. The authorities have said they don’t have facilities to handle the wounded, much less deal with the 100,000-plus bodies. The latter poses a terrible potential for an outbreak of disease and more death if it’s not taken care of quickly. I’m thinking of Humphrey Bogart‘s second reaction to the death of Robert Morley in The African Queen. After expressing regrets to Katherine Hepburn, he says, “Sorry to mention this, ma’am, but with the climate and all the sooner we get him into the ground, the better.”

Inception “is the biggest challenge I’ve taken on to this point,” says Chris Nolan to the L.A. Times Geoff Boucher. “We’re trying to tell a story on a massive scale, a true blockbuster scale — the biggest I’ve ever been involved with. We tried to make a very large-scale film with The Dark Knight and with this one we wanted to push that even further.

“I grew up watching James Bond films and loving those and watching spy movies with their globetrotting sensibility. We get to do that here, not just geographically but also in time and dimensions of reality as well. We get to make a movie that’s expansive, I suppose you’d say, in four dimensions.”

I’ve been watching stunned and stupefied for weeks as Gunboat Meryl has out-pointed, out-performed and out-maneuvered Carey Mulligan in the Best Actress spin game. If quality and depth of performance were the sole criteria, Mulligan — hello? — would be the locked-down winner like badass Mo’Nique and Christoph Waltz. But people are moved by other considerations.

Mulligan’s Jenny in An Education is fresh, vulnerable, vibrant, womanly, alive. Streep’s Julia Child in Julie & Julia is an impersonation bit — a smart dodo-bird performance that’s almost like a wind-up doll routine, maybe two cuts above Dan Aykroyd‘s Child on SNL but not three.

And yet Meryl seems to have the favoring headwind because she’s familiar and beloved, and because of the idea that Mulligan is too young and not funny or charismatic enough in interviews, and — here’s the real mind-blower — because people who should know better have bought into the notion that poor Meryl is “overdue” because she hasn’t won a Best Actress Oscar since her Sophie’s Choice triumph in 1983, which came four years after her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Kramer vs. Kramer. This line is actually working! I’m on the floor about this.

Streep has been worshipped and pedestaled for decades, and I understand that people feel it’s only right and fair that she should be handed another Oscar because it’s been 26 years, but her Julie & Julia performance is not the one to get all excited about. It’s a charming but minor little impersonation trick in a not very good film. Unlike her performance in last year’s Doubt, which I thought was wonderful — that black bonnet and harpy voice were transporting, and those granny glasses! I would watch that film again just for the acidic, half-humorous edge Streep gave to her lines. I half-chuckled all through that film. She’s so effin’ brilliant.

But please — the fact that Meryl Streep hasn’t won an Oscar for two and a half decades is of no consequence to anything or anybody. It’s meaningless. Has she not been living a mostly wonderful life all this time and getting rich in the bargain? Which reminds me — doesn’t it seem fair that she should be punished for Mamma Mia? She made a fortune off that film and look what it did to people, to our culture, to the tradition of movie musicals. As far as I’m concerned (and I think I’m being very gracious in saying this) I think Streep should be on awards probation for five years because of that film. Until 2013, I mean. Unless she pulls off another Doubt-level performance.

I’m not writing this because I feel it’s desperately important that Carey Mulligan wins the Best Actress Oscar. She’s had a wonderful year and is doing magnificently. All the praise and attention will keep her aloft for years to come. I recognize that her award-season problem has been that she’s too low-key and sincere, and that she’s not pizazzy enough on the red carpet. It nonetheless makes me sick to hear this kind of thing because she gave the female performance of the year, and because there aren’t enough people who seem guided by this simple fact.

But you know the nip-nippies are out in force when you read what Tom O’Neil said yesterday about her acceptance speech at the National Board of Review award ceremony the other night, to wit: “If the NBR gave out an award for…the most shallow acceptance speech, it would certainly go to Mulligan. Mulligan fans better hope she doesn’t win the Globe this weekend and stage this snoozefest at that podium too. If she pulls this on national TV, she’ll lose all hope of winning the Oscar.”

See what I mean? Mulligan hasn’t quite dazzled the press or done the dance in the right way. Where as Streep, an old hand at this, has. It’s really not right or fair. and it actually feels a little icky. Then again, if Mulligan listens and hires a writer to punch up her act, she might do herself some good.

“You’re supposed to get so caught up in the struggle between good and evil while watching The Book of Eli (Warner Bros., 1.15),” writes Marshall Fine. “But the evil is pretty generic in this film, and the good is pretty bland as well. And the supposed mind-blowing revelations left my mind distinctly unblown.

Directed by the Hughes brothers and starring Denzel Washington, the film “has the washed-out look that’s all the rage for dystopian fantasies these days. Apparently, one of the first victims of nuclear war is color.

“There are huge continuity flaws and gaps of logic in the script. At one point early in the film, Eli takes on a gang of killers and dispatches them all with his scimitar, leaving alive only their female decoy, who’s dressed as Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan. An hour or so later, Eli’s newly acquired sidekick, played by Mila Kunis, walks into a trap that appears to involve the same woman and two of the killers Eli so easily filleted in the earlier scene.

“I could be wrong, of course. Most of the male characters in this film are dressed so much alike that they apparently bought their clothes off-the-rack at the same Grunge Bikerworld outlet. Except, of course, for Denzel’s Eli, who has an endless supply of clean T-shirts and sweatshirts.

“But the other leaps this film takes seem almost random, the kind of revelations that are supposed to make you go, ‘Oh, wow’ but really just force you to say, ‘Wait a minute.’

“At one point, it is revealed that Eli has, in fact, been walking west for 30 years — but, again, there’s no back story offered to explain why it’s taken him so long. (It’s roughly 3,000 miles coast to coast, so if you walked 10 miles a day…) It’s one of those mysteries you’re supposed to swallow whole, like the way it takes Amy Adams three days to traverse Ireland in Leap Year.”

Documentary distribution has always been a hard row to hoe, but one look at the website for Gerald Peary and Amy Geller‘s For The Love of Movies — an intelligent, reasonably comprehensive, emotionally subdued history of American film criticism — and your heart just goes out. They’re doing this all on their own, and you can feel the budgetary scrimping in every corner of it. The DVD market is a feast-or-famine proposition. For the smaller titles it’s clearly rough and tumble.

But my reaction was finally one of admiration for Peary and Geller’s diligence, which was essentially my response to the film itself when I reviewed it last spring. And I like the no-frills jacket cover, which makes it look like an industry screener. But I’m not so sure about Bobby B. Keyes‘ original soundtrack, which sounds too laid-back and mellow and old-farty for a saga such as this — i.e., the rise and fall of a 20th Century art form that serious impacted the fortunes of thousands of films over a 75 year-period, give or take.

“For those who know a lot about the American film-critic monastery, For the Love of Movies is a tidy and agreeable canoe ride down memory creek,” I wrote last March. “With a tinge of melancholy, I should add, although this comes more from my own feelings.

“Peary and Geller, to put a point on it, have chosen not to emphasize the dominant reality facing established film critics in the 21st Century — i.e., the extinction of the monk-like film critic cabal as it was known and defined from the late 1930s and ’40s to the beginning of this century, and the drop-by-drop diminishment of the power and prestige of the traditional film critic. Which is due, obviously, to the winding down of the Gutenberg era, blah blah. With some critics and columnists adapting to the new technological climate (ahem) and some not so much.

“Clearly we’re looking at the end of the road here, certainly for the elite culture portrayed in the film.

“The prime kiss-of-death factor is a diminished interest among today’s tweeting, texting, 24/7 digital-feed generation in being passive recipients of the views of learned, brahmin-like, know-it-all film critics dispensing ivory-tower insights. Economic issues aside, the firing of film critics is rooted in today’s common-currency belief that everyone and anyone with a computer or hand-held device knows as much as those snooty-ass critics do. Or certainly that their opinion is just as valid, and that they prefer a more democratic, interactive bloggy-blog conversation as the dominant mode of dissection and discussion.”

That Tom Hanks-Julia Roberts midlife crisis movie that Rachel Abramowitz wrote about on 1.12 for the L.A. Times is called This Is Larry Crowne. The project began as a story by Hanks and Nia Vardalos. Vardalos wrote some drafts on her own, and it was then revised by Hanks. Abramowitz says Hanks will direct.

Crowne is about “a man re-inventing his life at middle age…enduring a midlife crisis and joining a kids’ Vespa gang,” Abramowitz wrote. (I only just got my copy today.) “Roberts plays an instructor at a school that Hanks’ character enrolls in.”

The a.k.a. script title is Harry Brown — Toast of the Town. Hanks and Vardalos most likely ditched this when they heard about Michael Caine‘s Harry Brown film.

“Leno isn’t damaged goods. NBC is. Conan is right to go. But the nastiest move could be Leno’s. Howard Stern used to always talk about Leno’s dark side, calling him Evil Jay. Well, if that persona exists, Leno could go to Fox and do a show at 11 pm or 11:30 pm that would force NBC to stick with Conan. Jay would clobber both Conan and Dave and have the sweetest revenge of all.

“I’m a Letterman fan but I’m just sayin’ — Evil Jay, come out come out wherever you are! But hurry. That Lexus passing your Pierce Arrow on the 405 is Conan driving to the Fox lot.” — received from Forbes.com‘s Bill McCuddy a couple of hours ago.