The one-year anniversary of Barack Obama‘s election is fast approaching, and I’m almost ready to throw him under the bus and start working for Rep. Marcy Kaptur. I’m so frustrated with his unwillingness or inability to stand up and show some steel cojones that I’m starting to feel actual anger towards the man.

For me the tipping polnt came when he wimped out on pushing hard for public option health insurance. I can honestly confess now to hating Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner almost as much as Dick Cheney or any other loathed Bush adminstration figure. Obama wants to adopt a middle-ground approach to waging war in Afghanistan? That’s almost the exact same tune that Lyndon Johnson was singing in the mid to late ’60s about Vietnam.

“Those Obama fans who are disappointed keep looking for explanations,” N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich said this morning. “Is he too impressed by the elite he met in Cambridge, too eager to split the difference between left and right, too willing to compromise? As he pursues legislation, why does he keep deferring to others — whether to his party’s Congressional leaders or the Congressional Budget Office or to this month’s acting president, Olympia Snowe? Why doesn’t he ever draw a line in the sand?

“‘We know Obama has good values,’ Jeff Madrick said to me last week, ‘but we don’t know if he has convictions.'”

WHV’s long-awaited, 8K-scanned North by Northwest Bluray arrives at my doorstep sometime tomorrow. It streets on November 3rd. I’m told that some kind of special theatrical screening will happen in Los Angeles within the next week or so. If anyone knows the particulars…

Six weeks ago I complained about Criterion’s choice of a jacket cover for the forthcoming Downhill Racer DVD (due 11.17). I said I preferred the original 1969 movie poster — a bedroom metaphor for the glamour of Olympic-level skiing — to designer Eric Skillman‘s concept of a droid skiier (Robocop negotiating a slope on the ice planet of Hoth) that came from a Downhill frame capture.

On 10.1 Skillman blogged about the various options he came up with for Criterion and why the robot-droid art was chosen, etc.

“The concept for Downhill Racer came pretty easily,” he wrote. “The film, about an arrogant but talented athlete, has some really dynamic skiing visuals, and a freeze-frame sequence during the opening credits that just begs to be made into a cover.

“There was also this pretty great-looking original poster…but frankly, the film is anything but a love story, and we all felt it was pretty misleading. Better, I thought, to focus on the great skiing cinematography — shot on skis in large part — that’s such a big part of the film.”

Skillman is a first-rate designer and far too perceptive, I’m presuming, to conclude that the original poster was selling “a love story.” It’s selling the sex, money and glamour element that Robert Redford‘s David Chappellet clearly desires — the thing that drives him to be an Olympic-level athlete. He wants to win medals and be famous, yes, but he’s basically a half-educated small-town bumpkin who craves a feeling of social upgrade and opportunity that would come, he feels, from schtupping a classy European hottie like Camilla Sparv. I think it’s clear that Skillman’s use of the term “we all felt” is a diplomatic way of saying that it was mainly his Criterion employers who saw a “love story” impression.

The ’69 poster is obviously aimed above and beyond a mainstream popcorn sensibility. I wrote last August that “this kind of poster would be totally unimaginable by today’s ad-art standards,” and the final Criterion decision on Downhill Racer does seem to bear this out. Movie art posters and DVD jackets generally demand an upfront visual directness that any eight year-old can would not only respond to but feel utterly unchallenged by.

My son Jett, a Syracuse senior, saw Paranormal Activity tonight and sent along the following as soon as he got home: “I’m not a horror fan, and certainly not by present-day standards with torture porn, decapitation and brutal rape repping the norm. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, does so much less and scares you so much more.

“I saw it tonight with my buddy Ryan at the Carousel Mall in Syracuse, NY. The mall was packed with kids and a huge line was wrapped around the corner. It was obvious what movie everyone came to see. I was impressed because this film was strictly promoted off viral campaigning and word-of-mouth. You’d think people were lining up to see New Moon.

“It’s basically about a couple based in San Diego. The narrative is built around the girl, Katie, who has a long history of ghost encounters since she was a kid. The boyfriend decides to document the ensuing nights on tape. We’re led to believe because the boyfriend is such a douchebag by taunting Katie’s demon that the demon encounters get worse and worse.

“The film is a constant build-up that starts with creaking doors and pounding footsteps and ends with bite marks and broken mirrors. The structure is repetitive by rotating the day and night scenes. In daylight the couple just reflects on what happened the previous night and how they can get rid of the demon, but when night falls everyone in the audience curls up, expecting the encounters to only get worse.

“Each night the demon does something different and more brutal. Towards the end even the macho guys sitting behind us were moaning ike nancy boys. The fear is so intense, it’s suffocating. You’re left guessing what will happen in the end, and in the end, you’ll still be wrong. You’re left speechless and reluctant to go to sleep. Even as I write this, I’m not so sure I’ll get even three hours.

“As Ryan and I left the theatre, the mall was even more of a madhouse. Hundreds of teens and college kids were lining up for the next showing. They were asking us, ‘Was it scary?’ Yes, it was — the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.

Once costars Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova fell in love sometime in the summer of 2007, during a tour to promote the film. And now, roughly 15 or 16 months later, they’re toast. But they’re feigning a kind of serene acceptance of this melancholy fact (or so it seems to me) for the sake of promoting Strict Joy, which everyone is calling their “breakup album.”

Marketa Irglova, Glenn Hansard

And now N.Y. Times guy David Carr, in a very nicely but carefully written profile, has passed along their recent history (the success of Once and the Swell Season on top of the whole gettin’-over-it-and-movin’-on thing) and taken a measure of the album as a portrait of this.

Carr makes it clear which side he’s on when he describes Hansard as “a gifted, emotive frontman who sings as if he must, with a heart on his sleeve that is constantly throbbing” while calling Irglova “the embodiment of a harmonist, a supporting voice on the edge of the limelight whose feelings seem buried deep behind a smile of musical contentment.”

Are we following the drift? Guys almost never break things off unless they’ve fallen for someone else, and there’s no hint of that having happened with Hansard. To me, Irglova is almost certainly the one who snapped the branch. She’s the solo dancer, the decider, the disappointed party…or so I suspect.

I realize I’m just spewing hot air, of course, but with Irglova-Hansard declining to talk and Carr refusing to dig for the truth, what’s an interested party to do? Carr’s diplomatically deciding to let the ex-lovers slide is understandable from a certain perspective, but burying the blow-by-blow doesn’t feel right. What happened? Nobody detonates a two-year love affair and then smiles and says “everything’s cool” and “the show must go on” two or three months later like it’s so much spilt milk. Love is never that orderly or tame. There’s a serious love story here, and I for one would like to know what it is…or at least was.

My London adventure also diverted me from Pete Hammond‘s 10.14 “Notes on a Season” piece about Amelia, which asked whether Fox Searchlight has something to hide given the lack of screenings. The answer is that it doesn’t. Amelia isn’t just set in the 1930s but plays, apparently, like a film made with semi-schmaltzy 20th Century chops, which should be an allowable thing. And yet there’s a guarded feeling about it.

Hillary Swank in Mira Mair’s Amelia.

“There were two screenings on the Fox lot Oct. 7 that were projected digitally because film prints were not even ready yet,” ” Hammond reported. “It seems post-production came down to the wire on this one, with director Mira Nair putting the final touches on Gabriel Yared‘s (superb) music score in Paris just a week earlier.

“In reality the film has been a work in progress for some time. And in July a top studio exec very involved in the production told me somewhat ominously that they didn’t think the movie was ‘Academy,’ a statement that immediately put my expectations in check.

“That’s changed. Some added flashback sequences with the young Amelia give the story an emotional layer that apparently make a big difference for many who saw the earlier cuts. A studio source who finally saw the finished film for the first time told me his worst fears were not realized, saying, ‘I didn’t like it, I LOVED it.’ That newfound enthusiasm was shared by other staffers I ran into on the lot who had also just seen it.

“The fact is Amelia is a beautifully crafted and very traditional epic drama that’s aimed at an older, more discerning audience. That’s the kind of crowd that’s slow to show up at the multiplex, but if they do, they will be treated to the kind of fine adult biographical story movie studios generally just don’t seem to be making anymore.

“In some ways Amelia is reminiscent of Out Of Africa, which has the same combination of sweep, adventure and romance this film incorporates. Indeed, if this were 40, or even 20 years ago, Mira Nair‘s meticulously mounted effort would be deemed a front-runner for awards and a certain thing at the box office. But now we live in a post-Slumdog world, and the blueprint for a Best Picture is more likely to favor indie dramas like Precious than the old-style craft of an Amelia.

“So now, while its parent company is more concerned with the more obviously commercial Avatar and the Alvin and the Chipmunks Squeakquel, Searchlight must find a way to effectively sell the kind of faithful biopic that big Fox did so well in the, uh, 20th century.

“Searchlight is a studio used to nurturing quirky unexpected awards contenders like their Oscar babies, Slumdog Millionaire, Juno, The Wrestler and Little Miss Sunshine. With Amelia they suddenly find themselves with an old-fashioned, sweeping Hollywood biography that stars a two-time Academy Award-winning best actress, Hilary Swank (the first of those Oscars ironically came from another Searchlight underdog, “Boys Don’t Cry”).

“The strategy seems to be to let the picture open in about 700 screens and find its audience in the major markets before widening out. If it can hang in there, an Oscar campaign can follow where there would seem to be great potential in nominations at the very least for Stuart Dryburgh‘s stunning aerial cinematography, Yared’s gorgeous score and Swank’s right-on interpretation of Earhart. She definitely has the look and accent down pat (the real newsreel footage Nair incorporates prove that), but she’s even better in the quieter moments behind the controls of the plane — particularly in a suspenseful sequence toward the end where she and her navigator (expertly played by Christopher Eccleston) try to fly their way out of trouble.

“If ever there was a picture that should have great appeal to the older constituency that frequents these screenings, particularly the matinees, this will be the one.

“Whether Amelia even has a chance to fly into the expanded 10 Best Picture list based on box office, critical and Academy reaction is a question Oscar watchers will likely be answering before the end of the month.”

In a 10.16 N.Y. Times editorial observer piece called “Mad Men and the Thrill of Other People’s Misery in Sour Times,” Adam Cohen observes that AMC’s Mad Men is offering beleaguered Americans heaping helpings of other people’s misery…to a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings and mounting home foreclosures, Mad Men offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy — and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.”

Producer Daniel Melnick died last Tuesday, which was right in the middle of my Fantastic London sojourn. And then I kind of kicked it around in my head after returning to New York two days ago (i.e., Thursday). And then I remembered two or three phone conversations I had with Melnick in 1994, when he was 62.

They were all about the then-unfolding Heidi Fleiss Hollywood hooker scandal, which involved suspicions that certain actors and producers and studio execs had enjoyed Heidi’s girls with money siphoned or skimmed off production budgets. None of this was ever proven, but it sure was fun to nose and dig around. (I was reporting/filing at the time for Entertainment Weekly and doing stories for L.A. Times Sunday Calendar.) Melnick was known to be something of a ladies’ man (and perhaps one of those who’d sampled a Heidi girl from time to time…who knew?), and he agreed to talk to me, I presumed, with the idea of steering me away from this aspect.

Which isn’t to imply that Melnick had done anything “wrong” or icky. He just didn’t want to be mentioned in any Heidi stories being written, that’s all. No collateral stink to mess with his well-deserved reputation as a classy and sophisticated bon vivant.

In any case at one point I must have sounded too nosey during one of our conversations because Melnick suddenly arched his back and told me in stern stentorian tones that he wouldn’t tolerate any implications in the press that he had hound-dogged on the Heidi side of the fence. I immediately responded that it was against my religious beliefs to identify or admonish anyone for catting around per se, and that I was only interested in finding out if studio or production-budget funds had ever been (unofficially) used to pay for prostitutes. Melnick eventually calmed down but it was touch-and-go for a while.

Melnick always spoke like a smoothie — he had a warm, deepish, silky-toned voice — and in so doing seemed to fortify his rep as a man of the world who knew a little about everyone and everything.

Here’s a recollection from screenwriter/journalist John Eskow, who worked with Melnick on Air America.

Melnick produced the original 1971 Straw Dogs, and so his passing naturally affected Rod Lurie, the director-writer of the remake that recently wrapped in Shreveport, Louisiana. The news hit just as Lurie and crew were…okay, no spoilers but it was the last day of filming. During the original Dogs shoot Melnick was thought of “the Peckinpah wrangler,” Lurie informs.

Today is a half-moving day, hence my half-absence for the last several hours. The effort that goes into finding the right-sized, not-too-wide bookcase, and then finding the right delivery guy at the right place to meet me at the buying location in Queens (and everyone has their particular demands and schedules and fees)…something like this just vacuums up your day. But it has to be done.

Like so many trailers, this recently released one for Mira Nair‘s Amelia (Fox Searchlight, 10.23) seems to deliver a compressed version of the whole film (except for the last 10 or 15 minutes). Sitting here, having watched various versions for the last two or three months, I feel that I have seen it. There’s a screening early next week for people like me (i.e., late-to-the-table types).

“Most conspiracy theorists don’t understand this, but if there really were a C.I.A. plot [involving the assassination of President Kennedy], no documents would exist.” — Author Gerald Posner (“Case Closed”) speaking to N.Y. Times reporter Scott Shane in a 10.16 story about whether the Central Intelligence Agency might be “covering up some dark secret” about JFK’s murder? “Probably not,” Shane writes. “But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior.”

My London trip allowed me to see Tony Scott‘s The Taking of Pelham 123 twice — on the way over and the way back. And don’t laugh but I think it deserves to be one of the ten Best Picture nominees. The idea in nominating ten is to promote and celebrate a movie or two that guys like Scott Foundas and Dennis Lim don’t approve of, right? That Average Joes paid to see and actually enjoyed?

This is precisely the kind of shrewd, sharp-angled, deftly layered urban thriller that high-end Hollywood filmmakers like Scott are better at making than anyone else in the world. And I’m convinced after watching The Taking of Pelham 123 that it’s a damn near perfect film for what it is. The sucker never lags or falls into clicheville, it has a crafty plot with well-massaged characterization, it’s always psychologically complex or at least diverting, it delivers first-rate performances and just rocks out up and down.

And so somewhere over the Atlantic I began asking myself why a film as well-made and fully engaging as this one can’t be nominated for Best Picture? Because it’s a summer movie and summer movies don’t win awards? Of course they don’t, and of course this one can’t. The suggestion is to pop Pelham into the ranks of Best Picture contenders in order to round out the pack and toss a bone to the lowbrows and guilty-pleasure fixaters like myself.

What are the most likely ten Best Picture nominees at this stage? Up In The Air, Invictus, The Hurt Locker, An Education, Nine and A Serious Man. These are the six locks, in my view. Then you have Bright Star (maybe), Up (maybe but what’s the reason to lift it out of the Best Animated Feature category?), Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (probably but it’s so grim and dark, and isn’t it more of a performance film than a rock-solid cinematic achievement?), and possibly A Single Man.

I don’t think these last four are locks at all, and you can argue, I suppose, that A Serious Man might not be a given either. But any way you slice it there’s not a popcorn-muncher among these, and shouldn’t there be? At least one, I mean?

Early last June I wrote that The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is “an unquestionably better film — more rousing and flavorful, zippier and craftier — than the 1974 Joseph Sargent original. It’s a very satisfying summer-crime fuckall flick. A retread, yes, but with an attitude all its own…pow!

“Scott’s Pelham is first-rate crackerjack escapism because (a) it knows itself and is true to that, (b) it’s content to operate in its own realm (i.e., isn’t trying to top the chase sequences, effects and explosions in the last big urban actioner…it’s not playing that game) and (c) it’s just a solid all-around popcorn movie, full of focus and discipline.

“Scott exhibits the same precision and intelligent pizazz he used for Man on Fire and Crimson Tide. Is Pelham some kind of drop-to-your-knees golden fleece movie? No — just another urban slam-banger but smart, clever and muscle-car sweet.

“The New York subway-kidnap hostage thriller has more intricate plotting than the ’74 film, richer characterizations of the top MTA guy (Denzel Washington in the old Walter Matthau role) and top-dog hostage-taking badass (John Travolta in the Robert Shaw role) and a slew of supporting performances across the board that are much more vivid and interesting than those from the class of ’74, and at the same time less broad and farcical.

“Plus the Travolta and Washington characters are more psychologically layered; more work has put into their rationales and backstories. In hindsight Matthau’s performance seems humdrum and almost glib in comparison to Washington’s. And Travolta…my God, he’s a friggin’ madman in this thing! Fierce, irate, flying off the handle, lunging — his finest bad guy since the ‘ain’t it cool?’ guy in Broken Arrow.

“And James Gandolfini‘s New York Mayor isn’t the buffoon figure from the ’74 film — he’s playing a rationale, practical, somewhat full-of-shit politician, and he does so with an unforced attitude..

“The 2009 Pelham was made by a guy who understands and respects the original, and who sincerely wanted to make a better film — and he did! Integrating it very nicely and believably into a 2009 realm. And very grippingly and thrillingly. There’s no boredom to be had, and it never overcranks it. ”