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Four days ago the smoking-in-movies issue returned for the 37th time. It started with Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, bitch-slapping Avatar for Sigourney Weaver‘s character being a chronic smoker. Then New York‘s David Edelstein suggested that movies with cigarette smoking should get an automatic R rating. Then David Poland said “what?” And then Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale jumped in.

Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless

I’ve said this so many times it’s coming out of my ears. People should be free to do anything they want of a self-destructive nature — cigarettes, booze, compulsive eating, coke, heroin — as long as theykeep it to themselves. And actors should be free to do anything they want that will make a performance connect. But smoking has lost its coolness, and actors who lean on it repeatedly or compulsively are boring, and I’m starting to say “fuck ’em” when they pull one out and strike a match.

Here’s how I put it two and a half years ago:

“The only people I know in real life who smoke are (a) young and courting a kind of contrarian identity, (b) older with vaguely self-destructive attitudes, and in some cases beset by addiction problems, (c) serious party people with unmistakable self-destructive compulsions and tendencies, and (d) life’s chronic losers — riffraff, low-lifes, bums, scuzzballs. Cigarette smoking used to be extremely cool but no longer, and that goes for actors in movies too.

“All the above associations seem to kick in every time sometime lights up in a film, and it’s gotten so that I don’t want to watch characters in movies smoke at all. Unless it’s a period film or unless they look extremely cool doing it (a la Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past or Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless), but very few actors have that ability.

“I smoked for years and years but I don’t any more, and I don’t like the way cigarettes smell unless I’m in Europe. (It’s different over there). Smoking isn’t outright suicide but it’s the next thing to it, and every time someone lights up in a movie it half-pisses me off and makes me think negatively about the film in general, especially if this or that actor smokes all through the movie and looks and acts like a lowlife.

“Criminals in movies are always smoking because of (b), (c) and (d), but I think it’s way too easy for an actor to use smoking as a piece of business. It’s tedious and repellent. It makes me want to see the actor get shot or at least beaten up.

“I think the sun has really set on the sexiness of smoking in movies, and I’m starting to think that actors who light up all the time in front of the camera are second-raters.”

NY Times DVD/Bluray columnist Dave Kehr recently lamented the winnowing process by which thousands of obscure films have been shelved and forgotten because studios “felt that more obscure films wouldn’t be profitable enough to justify striking new prints and preparing new digital transfers.

“As a result huge swaths of our film heritage have vanished. After 10 years of DVD the studios seem to have concluded that all the films that will make money in home video have already been released; that number is a very small percentage of their output. Turner Classic Movies online says that of the 162,984 films listed in its database (based on the authoritative AFI Catalog), only 5,980 (3.67 percent) are available on home video.”

If you’d asked me to spitball the percentage of films on DVD compared to the total amount made, I would have said maybe 10% to 15%. But less than 4%?

We all suspect that the majority of titles that haven’t made it to DVD are marginal junk, but it’s a near-certainty that at least 5% of the unseen are worth seeing/renting/owning. Many are listed on the left side of Hollywood Elsewhere, in the lower-left mustard-colored section. The list of DVD Unreleased has been compiled and maintained over the last year or so by Moises Chiullan.

The films include Saint Joan (Otto Preminger, 1957), Macabre (William Castle, 1958), The Fiend Who Walked the West (G. Douglas, 1958), Five Gates to Hell (Clavell, 1959), Key Witness (Phil Karlson, 1960), Summer and Smoke (Peter Glenville, 1961), The Chapman Report (George Cukor,1962), Bachelor Flat (Tashlin, 1962 –on Hulu], The L Shaped Room (Forbes, 1963), The Chalk Garden (Ronald Neame, 1964), A Thousand Clowns (Coe, 1965), You’re a Big Boy Now (Coppola, 1966), The Whisperers (Forbes, 1967), Dark of the Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968), Skidoo (Preminger, 1968), Last Summer (Frank Perry, 1969), The Comic (Carl Reiner, 1969); The Revolutionary (Williams, 1970), The Landlord (Hal Ashby, 1970), Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Perry, 1970), Tropic of Cancer (Strick, 1970), I Never Sang for My Father (Cates, 1970), Pretty Maids All In A Row (Roger Vadim, 1971), Sometimes a Great Notion (Paul Newman, 1971), Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (Turman, 1971), ‘Doc’ (Perry, 1971), The Music Lovers (Russell, 1971), Savage Messiah (Russell, ’72 or ’73), Drive, He Said (Jack Nicholson, 1971), The Steagle (Sylbert, 1971), The Last Movie (Hopper, 1971), Made For Each Other (Bean, 1971), The Day the Clown Cried (Jerry Lewis, 1972), Hickey & Boggs (Culp, 1972), The Carey Treatment (Edwards, 1972), Play It As It Lays (Perry, 1972), Pete ‘n’ Tillie (Ritt, 1972), Slither (Zieff, 1973), Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (Pakula, 1973), Man on a Swing (Perry, 1974) and so on.

HE reader and correspondent Terry Woods reports “a friend just got back from an invitational screening of Avatar plus a James Cameron q & a. The director stated that his first cut of the film was 4 hours and 18 minutes. A fair amount of Sigourney Weaver‘s scenes were deleted and other secondary characters were pared down. A sizable number of special-effects scenes were also excised including a battle between Jake’s Avatar and some howling Pandoran animal. In fact the beast itself was excised completely from the final theatrical cut.

Presumably much of this material will resurface as an extended Avatar Director’s Cut DVD/Blu-ray, which would also include the Jake-Neytiri sex scene.

Winners at the 36th annual Eloi Choice Awards included Twilight (Favorite Movie, Favorite On-Screen Team, Favorite Franchise), Taylor Lautner (Favorite Breakout Movie Actor), Sandra Bullock (Favorite Movie Actress), The Proposal (Favorite Comedy Movie), Inglourious Basterds (Favorite Independent Movie), Hugh Jackman (Favorite Wolverine), Jim Carrey (Favorite Comedic Star), Miley Cyrus (Favorite Breakout Movie Actress….in what film?), and Johnny Depp (Favorite Movie Actor).

An Education, three Weinstein films, District 9 and In The Loop — all allegedly ineligible for WGA awards.

After the preceding appeared I heard from a guy who tends to know stuff, to wit: “You are probably already aware of this but just in case you weren’t, Disney-Pixar’s Up is unfortunately ineligible for DGA and WGA awards because the filmmakers are not signatory members of either guild.” I know nothing for sure. Looking into this as we speak.

A person going for the second hug is always a sure sign that they’re tipsy. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this embarassment is any kind of mark against Precious. Because for me Mariah Carey‘s performance is the best thing in it. If she was nominated instead of badass Mo’Nique, I’d be all for it.

Think about it — small-theatre marquees with hand-placed letters are nearly dead. They’ve been gone for years in American small towns, and it won’t be long before they’re gone from the big cities also. You can feel the lore of cinematic romance when you stand under a funky old marquee. I don’t know what others feel when they stand under an electronic moving-word sign outside the Lincoln Square plex on 68th Street, but I feel nothing. It’s a damn shame.

Variety‘s Clifford Coonan is reporting an exceptional reception for Avatar in China, which he says is causing “massive ripples.” Filmgoers saw it record numbers despite “the worst weather in half a century in parts of the country,” he says. He reports that James Cameron‘s film has “struck a chord with local auds because of the way it deals with people being forced to move from their homes — a big issue in China where land grabs by unscrupulous real estate developers, aided by corrupt officials, are a national scandal.”

Like Marshall Fine and other aficionados sadly burdened with a sense of taste, OK Magazine‘s Phil Villarreal hates Leap Year also. That’s okay because you have to hate some things in order to love others. Francois Truffaut once said that “taste is a result of a thousand distastes.”

“There is one moment of hope near the end of the movie,” he writes, “after the idiot lead character, Anna (Amy Adams) faces a severe disappointment in a small Irish town, then high-tails it to a jagged cliff. It’s here that hope finally arises that Anna will come to her senses and live up to the title by taking a header off the cliff in an effort to atone for her sins of being the stupidest idiot alive and leading the audience through 90 minutes of her drudgery-inducing hunt for someone, anyone — maybe even anything — to marry her.

“You won’t hear it from me whether or not Anna jumps off the cliff or turns around to be swept up by Matthew Goode in an embrace of doom. But I will say this: Just once, Hollywood, could you give us a happy ending?”

Precious has gathered eight nominations for the 41st annual NAACP Image Awards. This for a film that Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy called “a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick.”

Precious was nominated for outstanding motion picture and outstanding independent film. Lee Daniels was nominated for Best Director, and Gabby Sidibe, Mariah Carey, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton and Lenny Kravitz were all individually nominated for acting. Fox will air the Image Awards live on 2.26.