The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt has huffed and puffed and unequivocally panned Rob Marshall‘s Nine (Weinstein Co., 12.18). And Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, playing it cooler and more circumspect. has given it a friendly and approving pat on the back.

Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day Lewis in Rob Marshall’s Nine.

And yet between the lines you can sense an absence of serious gushing pleasure in McCarthy’s reactions. The ultimate effect is that his review doesn’t really counter-balance Honeycutt’s, which is much more impassioned. What Nine needs now is a champion — an advocate to ride in on a white horse with wings (like the TriStar horse) and write something about Nine that’s not just knowing and supportive but operatic. An orgasm review that gets high off its own juices…anyone?

“The Nine disappointments are many,” grumbles Honeycutt, “from a starry cast the film ill uses to flat musical numbers that never fully integrate into the dramatic story. The only easy prediction is that Nine is not going to revive the slumbering musical film genre. Box-office looks problematic too, but moviegoers are going to be enticed by that cast, and the Weinstein brothers certainly know how to promote a movie. So modest returns are the most optimistic possibility.

“Federico Fellini‘s 1963 masterpiece takes you inside a man’s head. Since he happens to be a movie director, those daydreams and recollections are visually striking but, more to the point, you sense, through the nightmares of an artist blocked from his own creativity, everything that is going on inside this man. In Nine, written by Michael Tolkin and the late Anthony Minghella, you get a tired filmmaker with too many women in his life and not enough movie ideas.

“Daniel Day-Lewis plays Guido and, to his credit, it’s not Marcello Mastroianni‘s Guido but a new character, more burnt-out than blocked and increasingly sickened by his womanizing. He’s an incredibly sexy man and performs all the right moves. The problem is he keeps doing those moves over and over so you experience not so much artistic angst but a guy trying to sober up from a two-week binge. Sporting a scruffy beard and running a hand through long hair only goes so far.

Penelope Cruz, Daniel Day Lewis.

“With Nine you never get inside the protagonist’s head. You just can’t decide whether his problem is too many women or too many musical numbers breaking out for no reason.”

McCarthy finds not just reason but rhyme. “Cutting between black-and-white and color in the musical numbers and, like Fellini’s film, constantly on the move as Guido is buffeted about with scarcely a moment to breathe, much less write a script, Nine takes the the matter of directile dysfunction seriously without being pretentious about it,” he writes.

Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella‘s script “notably finds a way to honor 8 1/2 while enabling one to put it to the side of one’s mind, and in illuminating Guido’s folly while still taking seriously his relationships with women.

“Instead of making Guido entirely self-absorbed and self-serious, Day-Lewis at once places the viewer firmly in the palm of his hand and then in his pocket by emphasizing the character’s humorous awareness of his position in life. He puts on a grand show at a press conference, although one journalist, noting that Guido’s last two films flopped, pierces the armor of jokiness by asking, ‘Have you run out of things to say?'”

Which instantly recalls a Randy Newman lyric from a few years ago: “I got nothin’ left to say / “I’m gonna say it anyway.”

Moving Image Source’s Matt Zoller Seitz has delivered Part 2 of his Clint Eastwood study, called “Kingdom of the Blind, Part 2.” Narrated this time as well as subtitled.

“Eastwood’s wisecracking angel of death persona is so familiar — and so beloved by audiences — that when he seriously critiques it, as he did in Unforgiven, it doesn’t always register,” says Seitz. “People see Eastwood in a cowboy hat and think ‘entertainment.’ This writer saw the film three times in theaters. Two of those times the audience cheered Munny’s vengeance — the most horrific rampage in a studio movie since Taxi Driver — as if it were Terminator 2.

“Is Eastwood an exploitation filmmaker with aspirations to importance, or an artist who uses violent action to entice viewers into experiencing his films’ more complex aspects? Is he making art, or just entertainment with personality?

“Such distinctions may be a dead end; Eastwood would surely never draw them. And in any event, the actor-director isn’t just aware of his inconsistencies and mysteries, he foregrounds them in his films. The most intriguing aspect of Eastwood’s career is Eastwood himself.”

Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Ian Dury biopic featuring an allegedly career-defining, award-bait lead performance by Andy Serkis, is being commercially released in England on January 8th and it’s not playing at Sundance 2010? This isn’t calculating.

In the view of New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, “the tension between the bleak and the blithe” in Up In The Air “is sustained by director-writer Jason Reitman to the end. Airports are the seedbed for all that is most alien, angering, and atomized in our twenty-first-century days, and there are times, in this film, when George Clooney‘s eyes appear to glaze and say, Come die with me.”

In the Old Hollywood days a major studio that had spent big-time on an epic-level film (Gone With The Wind, Duel in the Sun, Ben-Hur, Around The World in 80 Days, Cleopatra, etc.) would almost automatically be assured of a few below-the-line Oscar nominations. The producers and studio chiefs also knew that the town would at least try to find it in its heart to bestow a Best Picture nomination unless, you know, the big film they’d made was embarassingly bad. And sometimes they’d wangle a Best Picture nomination even if it sucked (i.e., Dr. Doolittle).

In so doing the community would basically say to the producers and the studios behind these behemoths, “You guys have stuck your necks out and hired hundreds of people, and now we’re going to try and give you as much semi-legitimate Oscar hoopla as we can, which will presumably help you out at the box-office.”

I don’t know if old-time community standards are still in effect but in a fair and just world shouldn’t Avatar get Best Picture nominated for the simple fact that it’s a big-gamble movie that has cost $300 million? In a compassionate world shouldn’t the community rally round and do as much as it can to help out poor 20th Century Fox and Tom Rothman and James Cameron and all the other guys whose members are on the chopping block…no? Presuming it doesn’t blow chunks, of course, and I strongly doubt that it will. If you had green-lighted Avatar wouldn’t you feel gratified and comforted if the town voted to support you and yours with a Best Picture nomination? Isn’t a community supposed to take care of its own?

Chris Morris‘s Four Lions, a comedy about suicide bombers, is set to screen in Sundance 2010. Morris and In The Loop creator Armando Iannucci used to be allied or partnered in some comedic fashion. So figure that Four Lions is 2010’s In The Loop, or…you know, something in an Islamic-doofus vein.

In preparation Morris reportedly spoke to” terrorism experts, imams, police, secret services and hundreds of Muslims.” A statement from Warp Films says that the film “understands how terrorism relates to testosterone. It understands jihadis as human beings. And it understands human beings as innately ridiculous.”

Nicholas Kristof‘s “Johnson, Gorbachev, Obama” column (12.2) is brilliant — please read while listening to the King/Moore interview.

“What are you doing setting a deadline…it’s like crazy. If they’re the enemy you fight them until they lose.”

By the usual spitball standards, here are some of the new Sundance 2010 standouts — premieres, spotlight, midnight, etc. — that were announced a couple of hours ago. The coolest-sounding are Floria Sigismondi‘s The Runaways, the Joan Jett/birth-of-’70s-girl-rock biopic with Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, and Untitled Duplass Brothers Project, which co-director and co-writer Mark Duplass confided last summer will almost certainly not be called Please Don’t Fuck My Mom.

Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett in Floria Sigismond’s The Runaways

Premieres

Untitled Duplass Brothers Project, directed and written by Mark and Jay Duplass, about a recently divorced guy meeting a new lady…and then her son. John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, Catherine Keener.

Floria Sigismondi‘s The Runaways (Apparition). Stewart, Fanning, Scout Taylor-Compton, Michael Shannon, Alia Shawkat and Tatum O’Neal.

John Wells‘ The Company Men, a corporate downsizing drama starring Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper and Rosemarie DeWitt.

Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini‘s The Extra Man, a comedy-drama about a down-and-out playwright and escort to wealthy Upper East Side widows who takes a young aspiring writer under his wing. Katie Holmes, John C. Reilly, Paul Dano, Kevin Kline and Alicia Goranson.

Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low (Sony Classics, previously at Toronto), an offbeat story of a mysterious ’30s hermit who schemes to stage his own funeral while still alive.

Philllip Seymour Hoffman‘s Jack Goes Boating (Overture), about a limo driver whose blind date trggers an offbeat love story that involves two working-class New York City couples. Costarring Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Tom McCarthy.

Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me. Costarring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Simon Baker and Elias Koteas.

Nicole Holfocener‘s Please Give (Sony Classics), about a New York City husband and wife who come into conflict with the granddaughters of the old woman who lives next door. Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Keener and Sarah Steele.

Joel Schumacher‘s Twelve, about “sex, drugs and murder among the young Upper East Side elite.” Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, 50 Cent and Zoe Kravitz.

World Premieres (Some of Which Have Premiered Before)

Gaspar Noe‘s Enter the Void, Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love, Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child, Jacques Audsiard‘s A Prophet, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari‘s Women Without Men.

Spotlight Documentaries

Reed Cowan‘s 8: The Mormon Proposition, which looks into the role played by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in promoting and passing California’s “Proposition Hate” against gay marriage.

Adrian Grenier‘s Teenage Paparazzo, about how “a photo taken of the actor by a 13-year-old boy prompts an examination of the effects of celebrity on culture.”

Dan Klores‘ Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks.

Doesn’t Johnny Depp‘s reported decision to play Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in Emir Kusturica‘s Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman With Six Fingers sound like a 1950s thing? The kind of casting exemplified by Victor Mature as Chief Crazy Horse, Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata and a Taiwanese named Sakini, John Wayne as Genghis Khan and Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese kabuki star, I mean? I thought filmmakers had moved past that kind of thing. Unless, of course, Kusturica’s film is a jape of some kind.

Jonny Depp; Pancho Villa

The National Board of Review has kicked off the official Up In The Air bandwagon by giving Jason Reitman‘s film four major awards — Best Picture, Best Actor (actually a tie vote between UITA‘s George Clooney and Invictus‘s Morgan Freeman), Best Supporting Actress (Anna Kendrick) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Reitman, Sheldon Turner).

I told someone at last night’s Lovely Bones party that I had a feeling that the NBR would give Precious its Best Picture award. Not a strong feeling, but a gnawing one. Not that it matters either way. Remember when the announcement of NBR awards used to create a brief electric surge? Back in the ’90s and before that, I mean? Congrats to the Up In The Air team — well deserved — and the other winners, but what matters in early December are the film critic awards.

Clint Eastwood was named best director for Invictus and given the NBR Freedom of Expression award. Eastwood’s director award means Invictus almost won the Best Picture trophy and that the two Eastwood bestowings were basically a consolation — a gimme.

Carey Mulligan was named Best Actress for her performance in An Education, and Woody Harrelson — Woody Harrelson? — was named Best Supporting Actor for his work in The Messenger.

Other NBR awards went to The Prophet for Best Foreign Film, The Cove for Best Documentary, Up for Best Animated Feature, It’s Complicated for Best Ensemble Cast, The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner for Breakthrough Performance by an Actor, and Precious‘s Gabby Sidibe for Breakthrough Performance by an Actress.

A Serious Man‘s Joel and Ethan Coen won for Best Original Screenplay. Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson was handed a Special Filmmaking Achievement Award. The other two NBR Freedom of Expression honorees are Burma Vj: Reporting From A Closed Country and The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellseberg And The Pentagon Papers.

I was talking to a Manhattan journalist just after Tuesday night’s all-media screening of Up In The Air at the Lincoln Square. He said he had found Reitman’s film unsatisfying because it doesn’t specifically explain what career-related or life-changing path George Clooney’s character will be taking at the end. He then said, “So do you think Up In The Air will be nominated” — nominated, mind — “for Best Picture Oscar?” I looked at him cockeyed and went, “What?”