It’s raining and cold — not quite cold enough for snow, but right on the edge — and I have to leave soon for a 3 pm performance of The Seagull. And I can’t find my umbrella. I’ve been waiting to see this for a long time, particularly from anticipation for Kristin Scott Thomas ‘s performance. I last saw The Seagull in the early ’80s with Chris Walken as Trigorin, who’s played in the current production by Peter Sarsgaard.

In his debut column for the ’08-’09 Oscar-season, N.Y. Times guy David Carr – a.k.a., “the Bagger” — says that “seven or eight films have a shot” at the Best Picture Oscar. “The consensus, in no particular order — well, okay, in a little bit of a hierarchy — includes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Milk Doubt and The Reader.”

Uhm, no. Not The Reader. Ixnay on the Eader-ray. (God, that sounds facile! Can you imagine pouring your heart and soul into a film for 18 months and then reading “ixnay on the Eader-ray”?) Sorry but that’s the verdict I’m hearing. Intelligent, well written, handsomely shot, doesn’t deliver emotionally.

“And a surprise may be waiting in the wings,” Carr goes on. “Clint Eastwood, a durable crush object of the Academy, has a habit of swinging out of the trees late in the game, as he did two years ago with Letters From Iwo Jima so keep an eye on Gran Torino.” The early rumble is that it’s more of a Clint performance film than a Best Picture contender, but sure, yeah, I’d love to keep an eye on Gran Torino . No Manhattan screenings are currently set, of course. (That I know of.) Tomorrow night there’s an L.A. press screening with a wine–cheese-and-Clint after-party.

“With almost three months to go, a great deal can happen,” says Carr. “The chemistry of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in Australia may bring to mind oil and water, but the Academy may swoon over the epic intent of the director, Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet).” Forget it. No way.

“The Walt Disney Company is carpet-bombing voters with DVDs to argue that the robotic glories of WALL*E should not be pigeonholed into animation alone.” That’s a no-go also. WALL*E‘s excellence has never been in question, but animated films need to stay on their side of the Rio Grande.

“And there’s always a chance that smaller films like Rachel Getting Married, with a searing performance by Anne Hathaway, or The Wrestler, featuring the muscular return of Mickey Rourke, might sneak in.” Nope. Rachel was written off weeks if not months ago.

And The Wrestler isn’t playing well with the over-50s. It’s a sharp and ballsy film, but when you hear about older people walking out of screenings because of the metal-staple scene and booing the mention of its name the following week, you might as well throw in the towel. Rourke is in good shape for a Best Actor nomination, though.

A Slumdog Millionaire issue has been gnawing away since I fell for it in Toronto nearly three months ago. I was wowed by this film — throttled. The injections of extreme verve and jolt-cola pizazz by director Danny Boyle are impossible to resist or dismiss. But I couldn’t believe in the world of the story, partly due to the fever-like sell going on all through it, and partly due to the undercarriage of the main character, Jamal (who’s mostly played by Dev Patel). And that’s a bit of a nag.

Talk to a Slumdog fan and they’ll probably tell you that the hyperness is part of the enjoyment — you don’t buy it but you love the intensity of the Bollywood-ish ride and particularly where it takes you at the conclusion. Slumdog is a show, but as much as it thrills and excites I feel that a truly formidable Best Picture contender needs to finally be unconcerned with the sell and confident enough to just “be.”

This isn’t to say that the presentation of Slumdog isn’t a kick-ass thing, or that the people who love it are somehow misguided in believing it has more Best Picture juice than any of the other hotties out there. LAFCA and NYFCC critics may or may not give it their Best Picture awards, but the Oscar rumble isn’t wrong. As things seem now, it will probably take the prize.

I’m still down with Slumdog for the most part. If it wins I won’t go into convulsions like I did when Chicago beat The Pianist. I love the life-force of it, the fusion of third-world squalor and the classic chops of Charles Dickens , the go-go swirl, the Boyle-ness of it. What other major director would have thought to make such a film in such a way?

It’s just that I couldn’t shake an awareness that every step of the way I was being subjected to a romantically simplistic blitzkreig — a steroid Dickens fable with a hero I very much liked and felt for but couldn’t finally accept.

How can anyone watch Slumdog and not be down with Jamal’s enormous dignity, strength of spirit and intelligence? And I understand (or think that I do) that Jamal’s life story is primarily a device that allows Boyle to dramatize the evolution of Mumbai chaos-culture over the past 15 or 20 years.

But I just can’t believe that a kid who’s been subjected to such relentless cruelty and brutality his entire life — slapped, beaten, exploited, betrayed, booted, whipped, shat upon and made to suffer like a homeless dog day after day, year after year — would end up with this much patience and resolve and focus. Treat an actual dog like this and he’ll be incapable of showing anything but his canine teeth.

Nor did I believe that the beautiful Freida Pinto‘s Latika wouldn’t be soiled and corrupted by her upbringing also, or that she’d stay emotionally loyal to and in love with Jamal through thick and thin. Things change, people grow up and move on, life is hard, get what you can whenever you can, and nobody will save you but yourself. I know, I know…surrender to it, believe in love.

But the cruelty in this film is relentless. Ugly behavior reigns through the first two acts. Except for the cop (Irfan Khan) who interrogates Jamal throughout the film, nearly every male character in Slumdog Millionaire is a cutthroat Fagin or Artful Dodger. Snarling, feral, pitiless.

And all through Slumdog I was muttering to myself how much I hate the Mumbai overload — the poverty, the crowding, the noise, the garbage landscapes, the public outhouses, the ugly high rises…the whole squalid cornucopia of it. I’ve never been especially interested in visiting urban India, but Slumdog settled things once and for all. If someone slips me a first-class Air India ticket from JFK to Mumbai, I’m trading it in for passage to Vietnam or China or Kampuchea or Katmandu.

I was amused by what HE reader arturobandini2 said yesterday: “Don’t look for Slumdog to take top critics’ honors. But if SAG strikes, I predict it’ll be the Academy’s Best Picture winner. Mainly as a fuck-you gesture to actors from the rest of Hollywood.” Spot-on, love it. SAG members will deserve a hearty eff-you if they go on strike.

Slumdog may also triumph, he feels, “because it has a feel-exuberant finish, which the other contenders don’t have. The Academy fogies cream their Depends over that kind of ending, especially in a recession. I don’t particularly like the movie, but I witnessed the fever spreading in the theater like turbo-bacteria. The momentum seems undeniable.”

My deep-down suspicion after seeing Slumdog in Toronto, one that I kept to myself, was that the Academy bluehairs might back away somewhat because of the total absence of local talent. This doesn’t seem to have kicked in at all, however, and that in itself is very cool. In this spirit a Slumdog win could be seen as kindred to the election of Barack Obama. Black president, brown movie.

Shira Levine‘s Premiere riff about “10 Movies That Made Us Want To Smoke” was, for me, reckless and disgusting. What would the reaction be if someone wrote an article called “10 Junkie Movies That Made Us Want to Shoot Smack”? The piece is also, by my sights, inaccurate. Make that mystifying.

The only mention that hit home for me was her acknowledgement of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Little-man Bogart was one of the three supreme hustlers of movie-smoking sex along with Robert Mitchum (in all those late ’40s and early ’50s noirs he starred in) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause . But she doesn’t mention the most essential element in successfully selling this delightful life-shortening habit to impressionable youths.

You have to smoke in movies like you don’t give a damn, like you don’t need it, like you don’t care one way or the other if you have any on you, like your Zen-ness is rooted in your soul and not in the way you look when you light up, you desperate asshole. Once an actor looks as if he anxiously wants or needs a smoke to stabilize or enhance his currency with an audience, he’s a dead man. Once an actor pulls out a cigarette in order to have something to do during a scene (and you can always spot actors who do this), the man has permanently surrendered his cool. He’s finished, discredited. And Levine doesn’t even mention this,.

I was profoundly unmoved, in any event, by Levine’s choices for strongest tobacco enticement — Coffee and Cigarettes, 200 Cigarettes, Wild at Heart, The Royal Tenenbaums, Kalifornia, Thank You For Smoking, Reality Bites and all the Madmen guys.

Make no mistake — nicotine is rank and putrid and Levine is pushing it like any R.J. Reynolds corporate scumbag. She’s attempting to sell the same cancer glamour journalistically that movies sold to her, and maybe pick up a Hollywood contact high on the side. In my mind she’s no better and less funny than Weasel J. Weisenheimer, the legendary R. Crumb dope pusher.

I’ve smoked on and off in my life. I truly hate it and particularly myself for succumbing from time to time, which has mainly happened when I’ve been in Europe, more particularly during my times at the Cannes Film Festival. There, I’ve admitted it.

The Guardian‘s Simon Hattenstone is calling Benicio Del Toro “Hollywood’s finest mumbler since Marlon Brando. He is never better than when mumbling his lines. Except, possibly, when he has no lines to mumble at all. He loves nothing more than paring a script down to nothing. No one can grunt, wince or wheeze their way through a movie quite like Del Toro.

“Which makes his new film, Che, the perfect vehicle for him. In the movie, to be released in two parts (The Argentine and Guerrilla), Del Toro’s Che Guevara grunts through 253 minutes of action. This is a walking, rarely talking, gun-toting revolutionary wheeze machine. His performance makes Che in turn one of the most boring and most captivating films I have seen.” He doesn’t really mean “boring.” He just settled on that word as he punching the piece out. He trying to say “conventionally undramatic.”

“Politician, writer, traveller, biker, doctor, guerrilla and poster boy: few people have a more fascinating story than Guevara. But director Steven Soderbergh and Del Toro as good as refuse to tell it. There is hardly any narrative — we simply watch him hacking his way through the jungles of Cuba in part one and Bolivia in part two. It is a sublimely contrary piece of film-making. Only in the last minute does Soderbergh even attempt to humanize his protagonist as he reveals that he has left his four children at home.

“Hollywood trade paper Variety said Guerrilla had all the excitement of a military training documentary. And yet such is the physicality of Del Toro’s performance, the way he inhabits Guevara, that you can’t take your eyes off him.”

You’d never know it from their website, but I think/trust/have been told that the National Board of Review crew will decide their annual movie awards slate on Wednesday, 12.3 The LA Film Critics Association (LAFCA) site says they’ll announce their choices on Tuesday, 12.9. (Wait, don’t they usually vote on a Saturday? I was expecting them to vote on Saturday, 12.6.) And then the New York Film Critics Circle will vote on Wednesday, 12.10.

I’m rooting for a Revolutionary Road upset over Slumdog Millionaire from either LAFCA or NYFCC. Not because I’m against Danny Boyle‘s film in any way. I just think Sam Mendes‘ film needs a little advance traction to get rolling with the L.A. pueriles who are saying they don’t care for it because it’s too morose. I’m telling you, that Death of a Salesman play is such a downer — what a loser! And all those Shakespearean tragedies besides…God! Can’t we have a little hope and happiness in our lives, something to feel good about with the economy being the way it is?

I guess I can imagine Milk taking it in Los Angeles to symbolically refute the passage of Proposition 8. Maybe.

That 11.27 projection about Twilight making $55 million over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday and $37.5 million for the three-day weekend came from a solid estimator, but Twilight‘s business fell off after Wednesday and now it’s going to come in second to Four Christmases with a significantly smaller take. Here are the latest numbers:

The three-day on Four Chistmases is $31.5 million, and the five day will be $46.5 milllion. Twilight is looking at a three-day total of 27.4. million, off 61% from last weekend’s three-day total. The five-day projection is for $40.5 million. The new long-range expectation is $150 million, give or take.

The third-place Bolt is looking at $26.4 and $36.1 million. Quantum of Solace is $20.3 and $29 million. Baz Luhrmann‘s fifth-place Australia will take in $14.3 and $19.5 — bad news for such an expensive film. Madagascar 2 is $14.2 and $19.3 Transformers 3 is 12.0 and 19.2. Role Models is 5.3 and 7.9.

The limited-release Milk is projecting $1.5 for three days and $2 million or five. Encouraging per-screen average — 3-day weekend estimate is $39,000 a print in 36 theatres. Slumdog Millionaire, playing in 49 theatres, is looking at $1.4 million and $1.9 million at 27,000 a print.

There’s an obvious note of African-American machismo in Barack Obama ‘s recent comments to Barbara Walters about not wanting to get a “yappy girly” dog. He said he wanted a “big rambunctious dog.” This sounded like a reference to a golden retriever or lab or Irish setter, but his comment reminded me that I’ve never once seen an African-American guy walking a dog on a city street that wasn’t just large, but also fearsome-looking. Pit bulls, bulldogs, dobermans…that line of country. Tell me I’m mistaken.

Cue the Glenn Kenny contingent so they can start calling me a closet racist, but not once — not a single time — in all my decades on the streets of New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco have I seen a black guy walking a pure face-licking love dog (which golden retrievers are a prime example of). Is there a p.c. way of saying that there seems to be something in the male African-American experience that responds to the concept of a muscular guard dog with an innate willingness to snarl at strangers and get aggressive at the drop of a hat? Probably not.

Somebody please tell me they’ve seen or heard differently. I realize I’m not supposed to say this, but I’m just saying. I’m a golden retriever man myself. I’ve had two — one fell off a Hollywood hills balcony and broke his back and had to be euthenized, and the other I had to give away due to travel. Breaks my heart.

The more I think about it, the Documentary Short List omission that’s growing more and more in terms of unjustness (and I’m sorry for not thinking of this right off the top) is the one for Gonzalo Arijon‘s Stranded, which opened theatrically last month.

In my heart the emotional import of this film is second only to James Marsh‘s Man on Wire. It was omitted, I’m guessing, for the usual pedestrian taste-bud reasons. The blue-hairs figured that the Andes plane-crash soccer-team cannibalism story of the early ’70s had already been done a couple of times before and why jump into the whole thing again? And because the image of starved young men eating strips of human flesh in order to survive unnerved them.

The chief differences between Tom Tykwer‘s The International (Sony/Columbia, 2.13) and Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity (Universal, 3.20), the two early ’09 urban thrillers that star Clive Owen, seem to be (a) Gilroy’s is a bit lighter and more caper-ish, (b) Tykwer’s is a bit heavier, darker, apparently toying with a Parallax View vibe, and (c) Owen looks a tiny bit heavier in the Tykwer than in the Gilroy, in which he needed to look hot and buff for his romantic scenes with Julia Roberts.

They both look to be 70s’-styled escapist programmers, which is fine. And they both seem visually and tonally similar — i.e., the same kind of upscale urban backdrops. Okay, the Tykwer seems a bit bluer and grayer. It will also hit theatres five weeks before the Gilroy.

The International features a shoot-out scene in Manhattan’s Guggenheim museum. And of course, a guy falls from one of the upper tiers of the circular walkaround and goes splat on the stone-floor rotunda below.

It’s interesting to compare the British International trailer with the U.S. version. I was a bit more attracted to the British one, but that’s me.

The International is the out-of-competition opener for the Berlin Film Festival, which launches on 2.5.09.

We all know about the disappearance of Sean Penn from Wayne Kramer‘s much-delayed Crossing Over (Weinstein Co., 2.9.09). Penn shot a couple of scenes as immigration cop Chris Farrell in the Weinstein Co. drama, but he’s not in the trailer and his name is missing from the credit block. What gives? Why the hell would Kramer cut Penn, a major name actor, out of this Traffic-like drama about the problems of immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship? Because his acting sucked?

(l. to r.) Crossing Over director Wayne Kramer, Harvey Weinstein, Harrison Ford, producer Frank Marshall, Bryan Lourd

I don’t know for a stone fact why Penn is MIA, but an explanation came to me today from a credible, well-placed source. Penn asked to be removed from the film, the guy says, because he had a serious beef with a Kramer subplot in the film involving an Iranian character murdering his sister in an act of “honor killing.” I’m aware of reports that this scene was cut from the film (or diluted) after the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and other voices claimed it was defamatory, but Penn, I’m told, still had a problem with it. Maybe this was just part of the reason.

In any event, Crossing Over is said to have been a “horrific experience” for Kramer, who didn’t get back to me when I wrote him earlier today. I got this story only a few hours ago and didn’t have time to do the usual calling around and cross-checking. Everyone’s on Thanksgving holiday anyway. This is just one well-placed guy’s perspective.

Kramer, I’m told, had a contractual final cut but that doesn’t cut much ice with Harvey Weinstein if there are creative differences afoot — Harvey can just say sure, okay, you insist on final cut and I’ll send your movie straight to DVD. The bottom line, my source claims, is that Harvey pretty much ignored Kramer’s final-cut contract by letting Crossing Over costars Harrison Ford and Sean Penn fiddle with it in editing.

Crossing Over shot sometime during the spring and early summer of ’07, and when Kramer’s cut was test-screened it tested “just okay, nothing great,” I’m told. Crossing Over is a tough, hard-knocks drama with a somewhat downbeat tone, and such films tend to test modestly or so-so. If it’s a sad or glum movie in any way, people go “ewww…I liked that Adam Sandler movie we saw last week better.”

Sean Penn

In any case, after Kramer’s version screened Harvey said okay, you’ve done your cut, now me and Frank” — Frank Marshall, Crossing Over‘s producer — “are going to cut our own version. Kramer flipped out over this at first, but Frank and Harvey’s version wound up testing a little better than his so he swallowed his pride and more or less agreed to let this version be the final one.

But then Harvey showed the film to Ford, who didn’t like this and that aspect so he took the film and did his own cut, but “it was so bad that Harvey decided to not even test it.” So Kramer was relieved that Harrison’s cut was awful and the pendulum had swung back to the Harvey-Marshall cut. But then Harvey said, ‘Oh, I’d better show it to Sean Penn’ and Penn has issues with it also, principally the way the Iranian honor-killing character was portrayed.

There was some back and forth bickering on Penn’s complaints with no resolution. The episode came to a crescendo, my guy says, when Penn’s agent, CAA’s Byran Lourd, called Harvey and said the best way to deal with this is to cut Sean out of the movie. To which Kramer responded, “What…?”

Harvey called Lourd and said, “I’m not going to cut Sean out, I have a contract, this movie cost $20 million, fuck you, we’re not rolling over for you guys,” etc. Two days later Harvey calls and tells Kramer, “We’re cutting Sean out of the movie.” I’m sorry but I think this is hilarious.

“I think it’s important that people know about what is happening to Wayne,” my source says. “My own view is that Penn should be shamed into giving Kramer the movie he wants and deserves. It is very easy to demonize Harvey in all of this, but Harvey, Frank and Wayne all had a cut of the picture they were satisfied with. Harvey’s weak link is giving stars too much influence. In this case it is Penn, who touts himself as being an artist of integrity, but in this case is completely screwing over a reputable filmmaker simply because he doesn’t agree with his political views. It’s really shameful.

“Another big question is where is Frank Marshall in all of this? How come he isn’t standing up to Sean for Wayne? Do these stars have so much power that producers are going to cave in to their political whims and destroy a fllmmaker’s work just so they can maintain a relationship with that star down the line? It should really give filmmakers pause.”

Crossing Over costars Ford, Ray Liotta, Ashley Judd, Summer Bishil, Lee Horsley, Cliff Curtis, Jaysha Patel, Alice Eve and Alice Braga.