A woman I was talking to at a party last night became very aroused when I told her I’d be speaking this morning with A Single Man star Colin Firth. “Oh, God…I could be your assistant and just sit there and watch!,” she said. “This would be a very big deal for her!,” her husband chimed in with a smirk. “That classiness, that sense of reserve!,” she went on. “It’s what every woman wants.”

It’s also what everyone else has been savoring since Firth broke through roughly 15 years ago. And now there’s widespread agreement that he delivers the finest variation of this very particular aura or attitude in Tom Ford‘s A Single Man.

One of my better questions began with a paraphrasing of John Ford‘s quote about how directors make the same film over and over. Do actors do the same thing more or less? Firth didn’t disagree. His achievement in A Single Man is that he’s playing the deepest and most intriguing aspect of this patented thing, and that this is mainly why people are calling him the front-runner in the Best Actor race — i.e., because the role of George has found him in exactly at the right place and time, and vice versa.

The lighting in the Carlyle bar was very Vittorio Storaro-like this morning. I imagine it’s this way no matter what time of day. The dark amber tones reminded me of of the apartment-scene lighting in a couple of scenes in Last Tango in Paris. Alas, the Canon Elph didn’t quite capture what was there. And yet a photo I took before Firth walked in (see above) comes pretty close.

All stirring, worthwhile films have memorable characters, and surely the most memorable in Lee Daniels‘ Precious is Mo’Nique‘s mom-from-hell, whose name is Mary. But where is the common current in Mary, whose malicious treatment of her daughter, Precious (Gabby Sidibe), results in ruination and emotional shell-shock that’s stupefying, and which has been caused by levels of systematic torture and abuse that would make Klaus Barbie drop to his knees?

All dramatic art always points to some vein of human behavior and says to its audience, “This but for the grace of God could be your story or your neighbor’s…consider it, open your heart, let it in.” To therefore praise Precious and especially Mo’Nique’s performance involves an acknowledgment that Mary is us on some level — that she’s a metaphor for some aspect of our condition, or is at least a symptom of it.

We’re therefore supposed to nod and say, “Yeah, there’s a certain universality in her behavior…I get it, sure. Going along with her animal-pig boyfriend having sex with her daughter because she figures he’ll love her more if she allows him to do this…mmm-hmm. And because she resents Precious for attracting him in the first place…yup, I hear that, absolutely.”

And female viewers are also supposed to say “yeah, I can also relate to my husband impregnating my daughter twice, which results in a Down Syndrome child (a.k.a. ‘Mongol’) and ultimately Precious becoming HIV positive. It’s not pretty but it happens, right? I mean, don’t a lot of parents sexually abuse their kids and look the other way at father-daughter rape? That’s the kind of human drama I understand, you bet.

“And let’s be honest and admit that we all know a mother or two who constantly berates and emotionally tortures her child, and…you know, does what she can to force him or her to become not just morbidly obese but so humungous that the kid would cause a family of African hippos to flee in the opposite direction? Of course we do. This is who we are. And that’s why Precious is such a moving and powerful film.”

Oh, wait, I’m sorry…you’re telling me you don’t relate to Mo’Nique? That she seems like a grotesque aberration and in several ways inhuman? An easy-chair rage monster who has systematically tortured and slowly murdered her child? You find it bizarre that such a character has been catapulted into the national spotlight and become a topic of Oscar conversation? Oh…I see. Well, don’t you think Mo’Nique was exceptional in making this monster come alive? I mean, wasn’t she fantastic? Of course she was and is.

But to what end, you say? How does making a film about a repulsive and depraved life form add to the art of cinema? What’s the difference, for that matter, between praising a film like Precious in a Best Picture context and an actress who does a phenomenal job of portraying a fiend like Mary and a film about…oh, any of the big-name mass murderers of the last 40 or 50 years? Ted Bundy, Richard Speck, Ed Gein, etc.?

It could be argued that any movie about any monster can be made Oscar-friendly if you simply include a big scene at the end in which the monster explains why he/she did what she did, and why he/she is what she is. All you have to do is have the actor/actress break down and insert lines like “I need love too…what about me?…I may seem like a bad person to you but I hurt badly” and so on.

It took me a while to realize this, but it finally hit me a few days ago why Michael Stuhlbarg‘s brilliant lead performance in A Serious Man doesn’t seem to be getting enough traction as a Best Actor candidate.

Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man.

It’s not a matter of how good he is at portraying Larry Gopnik, a stressed and perplexed Jewish family man in mid ’60s Minnesota whom God clearly has no affection for. Stuhlbarg is perfect — every line and expression is dead-on. But the reality is that most people (including film industry professionals) don’t respond all that strongly to talent and craft. They respond emotionally to the character being portrayed. And the fact seems to be that people don’t seem to like Larry Gopnik for being too whiny and weak-willed.

In day-to-day reality most people trudge along like Gopnik, their heads down, hoping for the best and prepared for the worst. But they don’t want to see people like themselves when they go to films. They want to see fighters, rebels — men and women who stand up. Gopnik isn’t a fighter — he sits there and repeatedly bends over and takes it, asking “why me?” or, more to the point, “why does God hate me so much?” Answer: because God feels like it. He can do anything he wants, and sometimes it amuses him to torture this or that person, or allow tens of thousands (or millions) to be slaughtered during wars.

Larry Gopnik is a walking embodiment of the realization that suffering and misfortune are random and pointless things that happen to good and bad people for no apparent reason. And people hate that life is like this, despite attempts by millions of us to light candles and be joyous and creative and call glasses of water half-full rather than half-empty. And so they are punishing Michael Stuhlbarg accordingly.

I have an 11 am appointment on the Upper East Side with A Single Man star Colin Firth. His performance in Tom Ford‘s widely-admired film has put him at the top of the Best Actor candidate heap, primarily because Firth channels so much feeling (crushing loss and sadness, a love of life’s sensual stream, flickers of delight) with such a fine sense of subtlety and economy. And thinking about this has led, again, to compiling a list of the best extremely-low-key, less-is-more performances.

One of my all-time favorites is John Hurt‘s intense, hard-boiled performance in The Hit. Who else? Robert De Niro in Heat. Clive Owen‘s performance in Croupier. Jean Servais as Tony le Stephanois in Jules Dassin‘s Rififi. (I know — I’ve posted about this recently before.) Lee Marvin‘s Walker in Point Blank isn’t quite on Hurt’s level (the part isn’t written that way), but he slips in and out of a lost-and-melancholy mode. Michael Caine in Get Carter. Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. Peter Stormare in Fargo.

But these are mainy hard-boiled performances in crime films. Who, then, has travelled in the same silent still waters that Firth has? Waters stirred with a certain melancholy, sadness, resignation. lI know — Paul Winfield in Mike’s Murder. Who else? Okay, I’ll put a point on it. Who has given the most affecting performances of somewhat older gay guys in movie history? Not that many, when you get down to it.

Either people have made their Sundance lodging arrangements in a more responsible way than myself (i.e., before 12.1) or they’re just not attending the festival because it’s been a tough financial year. I only know I haven’t gotten any takers on an offer to share a large one-bedroom, two-bathroom place near the Marriott for only $1200 total, or $600 for two. I could just rent it myself, of course, but it’s more than double the size of what I need. Plus I’m cheap. I need to figure this out today. Hell, I’ll take the couch.

Why do I find this summary of the last ten years faintly draining? By glibly focusing on the catchiest and most superficially noteworthy events, it’s mainly a reminder of how devoted the headline-driven news business is to perpetrating its own mythology. The Facebook, YouTube and Twitter revolutions are the only developments that seem to have moved the game along, to go by this rundown. The rest (even Barack Obama‘s election, in hindsight) seems to have been about smoke.

I’d like to see a similar-type review of where the best films have taken us — a review of the great themes, personalities, “movie moments.” The rise of the studio dependents and the gradual abandonment of the smart, upper-middle-class movie by the studios, the fall of print critics (along with print in general) and the rise of online punditry, and collapse of indie financing over the last twelve months.

“I spoke to a person who saw Avatar and he said the action scenes delivered everything you’d expect from Cameron, even in this digital form. Visceral, detailed, a ‘first-person shooter’ experience on the biggest game screen ever hoisted.

“The simple, predictable story was deemed as almost perfunctory, as if adding too much storytelling and exposition would have amounted to a sensory overload. After all, no one discusses 2001: A Space Odyssey in relation to its plot. Star Wars either.

“What we have is: Boy meets alien through marines, boy loses aliens and marines, boy fights marines and gets girl.

“And I was also told that despite all the trappings of special effects, blue people and CGI skies, Sigourney Weaver still manages to register strongly with warmth and a commanding presence.” — an HE friend who gets around and knows people.

Tobey Maguire becomes a rage hound when he comes home from Afghanistan in Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers. Consumed with self-hate over having chosen to save his own life over a comrade’s and convinced that his wife (Natalie Portman) has been doing his younger brother (Jake Gylllenhaal), he turns into something feral. His eyes go white and he uncorks it like Bruce Dern did in Coming Home, only more so.

It’s thrilling and terrifying at the same time, like molten lava pouring out of a volcano and people running for dear life, but you can’t turn away. By the end of the film Maguire’s Spider-Man thing has just given up and scampered out the window. At the end you’re thinking, “wow…didn’t know Maguire had it in him.” It’s the best performance he’s ever given.

Otherwise I had believability problems with two major story points in the film.

This remake of Susanne Bier‘s 2004 original is about a younger “bad” brother (Gyllenhaal) stepping into the familial shoes of his older “good” brother (Maguire) after the latter disappears during an enemy skirmish in Afghanistan. My first problem was with the military officially telling Portman that her husband is dead when in fact he’s M.I.A. because — hello? — there’s no proof of death. The military doesn’t provide unsubstantiated information to families of servicemen, period, so this is bullshit.

All Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff had to do was (a) have the military report him as M.I.A. and then (b) persuade us that Portman and Gyllenhaal believe that Maguire probably won’t return due to his probably being dead. That’s all it would have taken.

The second problem is that I don’t believe Maguire’s character could ever find peace with a deed we’ve seen him commit — something he felt forced to do while a prisoner in Afghanistan in order to survive. Maguire’s is one of those acts that require only one of two responses — suicide or abandoning your family and country and going off to Asia to live like a Joseph Conrad character. At the end of Brothers Maguire confesses this act to his wife, but are we supposed to assume he’ll never tell anyone else?

And why isn’t there a military debriefing scene when he comes back from Afghanistan? He would be shown lying, of course — denying, covering up — but the scene should have been in there regardless.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson reported this morning that the first Avatar screening — i.e., exclusively for the Hollywood Foreign Press — happened last night. And that she was told at the IDA Awards after-party by a person who’d attended (or who had talked to someone who attended, or whose brother-in-law heard from the parking-lot attendant who spoke to an HFPA guy) that Avatar is “a 161-minute movie with fab visual effects and [an] adolescent story.”

Meaning what exactly? I don’t know that it’s fair to call the story of Dances With Wolves “adolescent,” even if you transpose it to a rainforest moon called Pandora and throw in “a furry ballerina fighting off space marines with his freaking organic farm.” And…you know, mix it in with Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, blue cat-goats with tails that stand ten feet tall, Delgo squared, a glossed-up Land Before Time 3, etc. People need to cool their jets and wait for the 12.10 screenings on both coasts.

Cameron says on the Josh Horowitz MTV interview that Avatar has everything he’s always wanted to put into a really cool fantasy movie since he was a kid. A faint chill went up my spine. These words reminded me of Francis Coppola talking about feeling like a young man again during the making of Youth Without Youth and Tetro. I’ve learned to beware when silverbacks talk about re-connecting with their youth.

Cameron also said “and if it doesn’t succeed then we’ll forget all about it,” or words to that effect. In other words, the faint possibility of Avatar not succeeding has entered his mind.

The odd thing is that there’s an all-media of It’s Complicated conflicting with the very first Avatar screening on the evening of Thursday, 12.10. (Nancy Meyers‘ film starts at 6 pm and Cameron‘s begins at 7 pm.) It’s a brutal call, but I’m thinking I’ll have to wait to see Avatar on Friday at 11 am.

Every year I complain about those godawful cookie-cutter scenes in which the hero of a film jumps head-first off an incredibly high building or cliff. The same exact bit has turned up in many if not most of Hollywood’s high-budget action-fantasy-thrillers over the last 20-odd years. As far as I can recall the big-jump syndrome began with Tim Burton‘s Batman. This is a YouTube clip reel, of course.

In any case I just noticed that an “oooh, wow” cliff jump is also in Avatar, and something inside me collapsed when this hit me. My intestines dislodged and did a big splat. Why, I’m wondering, don’t the makers of these event films ever say to themselves, “Jeez, here we are doing another building-jump or cliff-jump scene. This must be the 64th or 65th since Batman…I forget. Some kind in my office has shown me a list. Shouldn’t we try something else? Audiences are going to get sick of this eventually.”

So how did Sacha Gervasi‘s Anvil! The Story of Anvil manage to win two IDA Documentary Awards — i.e., best feature-length doc and best music documentary — last night while not even making the Academy’s feature-doc shortlist? How could there be such a huge disconnect from between the Academy’s documentary committee and the IDA? Especially with Anvil‘s recent nomination for a Best Doc Spirit award?

Is it that the IDA and the Spirit committees are younger, hipper, less stodgy? Except Anvil! is about balding heavy-metal musicians in their 50s afraid of losing their mojo. The film is about struggle, rebirth, redemption. It’s primarily a heart movie. The ending is pure Hollywood. How old and blinkered and plugged up do you have to be to consider Anvil too hip for the room? 85?

Anvil producer Rebecca Yeldham told me this morning that “one of our most amazing screenings was up at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival where the median age was 55. And when it ended we got a rousing standing ovation from an audience of upper middle-class Jews. It’s really a movie for everyone. Hopefully people will open their minds [after last night’s win].”

If exuding a proverbial heart element was a key requirement for a potential Best Picture Oscar nominee, Anvil would be right up there among the potential ten. But I can’t advocate this as I believe in Canadians staying in Canada and Mexicans staying in Mexico. I would nonetheless break ranks and cheer if Anvil was to suddenly gain traction as Best Picture hopeful, unlikely as this may sound.

Yeldham (who wouldn’t mind a Best Picture nomination either) claimed not to know the procedural particulars about why Anvil would score with the IDA and the Spirits but not the Academy. You’d think that the folks serving on the three committees for these groups would be cut from the same cloth, faith, DNA. It doesn’t make basic sense.

I’d understand if Anvil was short-listed and/or nominated by the Academy but didn’t win — stuff happens, get over it. But to not even be short-listed?

This Josh Horowitz/MTV discussion with Avatar director James Cameron and costars Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana went live two days ago. I don’t like questions that include the words “how did you deal with that pressure”? I’ve heard that question 973 times over the last 15 or 20 years. It reminds me that expectation pressure is constant — the biggest headache/nightmare in the world — and that repeatedly mentioning this is tedious and infuriating. The only way to cope with fear is to fly over it with inspiration.