Nobody wants to see a shot-for-shot, concept-copying remake of the old 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, but with McG at the helm of Nemo, a new version of the Jules Verne novel, it can be safely assumed that the stuff that worked in the 1954 Disney version will be either ignored or vulgarized beyond recognition. But it’s a good thing, at least, that McG has been consigned to the family-film ghetto. Keep him there.

The finalists in the feature film category of the 23rd Annual American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Outstanding Achievement Awards competition are…not terribly exciting! Five timid choices reflecting, yes, quality work, fine, but also cautious consensus values. In alphabetical order:The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Claudio Miranda); The Dark Knight (Wally Pfister, ASC); The Reader (Chris Menges, BSC and Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC); Revolutionary Road (Deakins); and Slumdog Millionaire (Anthony Dod Mantle , BSC).

The winner — Mantle, I’m guessing — will be named at an ASC soiree at L.A.’s Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel on 2.15.09. My personal favorites are Deakins’ work on Revolutionary Road and Pfister’s on The Dark Knight.

Why doesn’t anyone just say it? On top of the taint of accepting an obviously cynical U.S. Senate appointment from Gov. Rod “stinkbomb” Blagojevich, Roland Burris is a pathetic replacement for President-elect Barack Obama because everything he puts out — particularly in terms of his appearance and speaking style — seems to be about caution and equivocation. He’s a dull, timid pre-Obama type — not of this era.

Burris — face it — looks like some kind of mediocre mouse. He’s only a little over five feet tall, it appears. His voice is underwhelmingly soft and high-pitched. He wears a 1964 Adam Clayton Powell moustache. He exudes the aura of a go-along clubhouse politician in the David Dinkins mode. Yesterday MSNBC commentator Jonathan Alter said Burris has been known for years as “the Casper Milquetoast of Illinois politics.”

The only good thing I can imagine is that he might one day be seen as a black Harry Truman.

The word “prescient” obviously comes to mind in the matter of Patrick Creadon‘s I.O.U.S.A., one of the Oscar Shortlist Docs that’ll screen on Saturday, 1.10, at the Tribeca Cinemas. Made in ’06 and ’07 and first shown at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it warns of America being on the brink of a financial meltdown due to rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. “America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions,” the copy says. So Creadon’s film will become one of the five nominees because his crystal ball was in perfect working order…right?

In a very concise and satisfying way, N.Y. Times guy Dave Kehr has explained the Oscar-bestowing mentality though the decades. Posted a whole week ago, read it last weekend and forgot to bring it up.

If the Blu-ray industry really wants the format to gain a serious foothold, drop the prices of those damn Blu-ray discs. I’m getting angrier and angrier at those $31 dollar prices on movies like Pineapple Express. Hell, I’m getting really angry at those $31 dollar prices on movies like The Third Man. Which, by the way, is a very slight burn in my book. The Criterion Blu-ray looks fine, but not that much better than the standard Criterion DVD version.

Digital Domain’s wondrous digital effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — particularly the “aging and youthing” of Brad Pitt — “are so perfect as to be virtually invisible, free of the usual trappings of CGI — that too-fluid, too-fake, superimposed look that makes the cattle stampede in Australia, for instance, feel so unthreatening.

“Paradoxically,” writes Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sancton , “this may mean that the most impressive visual effects feat of the year may go unrecognized.

“‘The thing about Benjamin Button,’ says Judy Duncan, editor of the visual effects trade mag Cinefex, ‘is that, obviously all the [Academy] voters in the visual effects category know what they’re looking at, but the vote for the final winner goes to the entire Academy — including actors and writers and producers — and I don’t know if most of those people are going to know what they’re looking at. They’re going to assume it was all makeup.

“It’s stunning work — I actually think it should win — but I don’t know if the average moviegoer is going to recognize that.'”

That would be absurd, of course. The standard of good visual effects is not to be able to identify them. And yet to think that some people out there would be oblivious of this aesthetic…God!

Because the prosecutor’s office in Shreveport, Louisiana has dropped all charges in the Josh Brolin-Jeffrey Wright bar incident that happened last July (and which was recounted by Brolin during a W. interview last fall), the cell-phone video footage has finally been released.

It’s now on TMZ. If anyone can send me an embed code, please do.

The shaky camera work is maddening, but what’s been captured is quite intense. Theatrical even. The sight of the teary-eyed Brolin and Wright embracing each other before being cuffed is quite the statement about sticking by your buddy as the wolves circle. And the shots of Brolin kneeling on the sidewalk with his head down — he’s Albert Finney-as-Martin Luther preparing to be lashed. It’s almost like Willem Dafoe‘s last scene in Platoon. Not to mention the bulls holding Wright face-down on the sidewalk and zapping him with a taser gun, and a woman shouting at the cops, “What are you doing!? Why are you doing that!?”

This really would make for a fascinating short film. Seriously. Brolin (a talented man before the camera) needs to do this.

In his 1.5 story about David Fincher‘s q & a the night before last at the Time Warner Center, conducted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kent Jones, Variety‘s Sam Thielman did the standard cherry-picking of money quotes. But to me, the undercurrent was a lot more interesting.

Fincher, I sensed, was feeling somewhat chagrined by — or was certainly mindful of — the unpersuaded reactions to Button in some quarters. (Including those among the audience that night.) He spoke much more freely about the technical aspects of shooting Button than what he believed the film was basically about and/or was saying. Of course, no film director likes to spell out the themes of his/her latest film. Every artist believes that the audience should come to its own conclusions.

Fincher said at one point that Button was making the case that a life lived naturally — babyhood first, old age last — was the best way to go, even with all the pain and suffering and heartbreak. When he said this I thought to myself, “That’s a good observation to make, I like that.” But now that I’ve written it down and thought about it, I’m not sure it’s all that profound.

I think he was finally attracted to Benjamin Button because it wasn’t Se7en, Zodiac, Panic Room, Fight Club or The Game. It’s an artistic process movie — a stretching exercise he felt he needed to make, an intimate subject he wanted to explore and find his way through. And because of his Button experience, the next real David Fincher movie — Ness — will be all the better. That’s what I think, anyway.

I tried to take a non-flash photo of Fincher sitting on the stage with Jones, but a female usher stopped me before I had a chance to push the button.

I once had a dispute with a guy over the proper role of a Hollywood columnist-commentator. He felt that columnists should basically be receiver-responders — that they should only write about what the entertainment community puts before them. Baaaah. That’s obviously part of the game, I said, but he was thinking too passively. A go-getter columnist should also adopt the mentality of a senior vp of creative affairs for the entire entertainment industry. Come up with new ideas, approve or disapprove of scripts, and so on.

Jeff Goldblum, Chris Walken

All to explain that during a recent phone interview with Adam Resurrected star Jeff Goldblum, I hit upon a great idea for a movie he would absolutely shine in. Not that Goldblum doesn’t give a rich and savory performance in Adam — he does. But he needs to star in a vehicle that won’t get in the way of his naturally smooth charm. He’s never quite been in such a film. And he’s in a prime condition right now. And the clock is ticking.

I’m thinking about a kind of remake — call it a revisiting — of My Dinner with Andre costarring Goldblum and Christopher Walken. Two older guys of roughly the same generation (Walken is a little bit older) shooting the shit over dinner for 90 minutes or so in midtown Manhattan. Can anyone think of a more entertaining pure-talk proposition? Both are seasoned charisma machines with live-wire personalities and smart-ass urban attitudes. And both have great voices and signature speaking styles.

The thing that triggered the idea was Goldblum telling me during our chat that he knows, likes and gets along well with Walken.

If I had the power and influence I would sit down with these guys and come up with some kind of fictional-situational backstory that could be discussed and picked through during their long chat, and then get them to sit down for a week’s worth of conversation. Shoot it on high-def video, cut the best passages together, and you’d have a great chit-chat movie. I for one would pay to see this. I have a feeling it would be a very popular DVD title. Everybody knows these two guys and what they’re about. And it wouldn’t cost very much to make.

If not Goldblum and Walken, who would be a bigger attraction?

Wait…how about a short series of films about famous actors sitting down together and just yapping away? A DVD package of five or six, say. Maybe an HBO series.

In a New York/Vulture poll of 57 film critics, Gabriele Muccino and Will Smith‘s Seven Pounds has been named the worst film of 2008. Perhaps now that Seven Pounds has been fully reviled and discredited it’s okay to allow people to check out this mock poster, although please understand that it’s a complete spoiler.

Here’s a list of all the critics polled or quoted, along with their own lists of the year’s worst.

The other worst-of-the-year picks, going from tenth-worst to second-worst, is as follows: (10) Diane English‘s The Women; (9) Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling; (8) Frank Miller‘s The Spirit; (7) M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening; (6) Baz Luhrman’s Australia; (5) The Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer; (4) Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games; (3) Jon Avnet‘s 88 Minutes; and (2) Mike Myers’ The Love Guru.

Here’s New Yorker critic David Denby on the reasoning behind his choosing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the year’s worst: “Director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth have taken a playful early story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and literalized and solemnized it to death. It’s a work of extraordinary craftsmanship devoted to an idea that’s dramatically inert. When Brad Pitt finally grows young enough to look like his actual age, he doesn’t have any memories of the ardency or anxiety of youth but only relief that he’s no longer a crotchety old man. Even as a young blade, he’s an old fart. It just doesn’t work. That people can find serious ideas about death and mortality in it suggests the power of weirdness to inspire fancy sentiment.”