The weather, I mean. An excellent museum and movie-watching day.

There’s a certain distinction in being the absolute last Hollywood-feeding site to post the new Watchmen trailer. The truth is that I was too lazy to get around to it until now.

I’ve seen Matteo Garrone‘s Gamorrah twice now and could easily roll with a third viewing. That’s a signification admission for a film as pointedly verite and rigorously un-“dramatic” (in the Godfather sense of that term) as this one. But I’ve fallen for the immersive, un-performed, you-are-there atmosphere that Garrone has fastidiously chosen and created, and my respect for it (and the film, obviously) has grown with each new refresh.

I spoke with Garrone last Monday on the phone. He was in a car somewhere in Los Angeles. The big American Cinematheque screening and after-party at Ago happened the following night. Sorry I wasn’t there.

The film is about the Camorra, or the Italian mafia, which is based in and around Naples. I got within shouting distance of this rancid city during an Italian trip I took with Jett in late May ’07. Talk about a scuzzy environment. The piles of rotting garbage, a result of a ridiculous longtime strike as well as organized crime’s influence upon the situation, were everywhere. I couldn’t get out of the region fast enough.

Gamorrah is based on a best-selling book by Roberto Saviano and Virginia Jewiss.

So far it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It opens sometime next month.

“Tony Curtis‘ Hollywood heyday is long gone,” I wrote eight and half years ago for my Reel.com column, “but there’s no mistaking the fact he’s always embodied a certain pugnacious cool [that’s] as palpable today as it was when Curtis was starting to come into his own as an actor, in the late 1950s.

“Forget all the cruddy movies he’s made over the last 20 years. And forget his smooth-talking seducer-stud roles, which he began playing in the early ’60s in big-studio disposables like Sex and the Single Girl, Boeing Boeing, The Great Race, and Not with My Wife, You Don’t!

“I’m talking Sidney Falco cool. A pensive, anxious, urban quality. You can see shades of it in Curtis’ saxophone-playing Joe in Some Like It Hot. In his performances in Lepke, The Outsider, The Defiant Ones, The Great Impostor. But especially noticeable in the erstwhile Mr. Falco — a profoundly scummy New York press agent he played in the blistering 1957 drama Sweet Smell of Success.

“Bluntness, ambition, class resentment, latent anger — these are fires that have always burned within Curtis, the man. I had coffee with the 74-year-old actor last Sunday [in March 200] and it seems to me they’re still there. (Nowhere near as toxic, of course. Age modifies everything.) Their manifestation in Sidney 43 years ago, when these stored-in-the-gut feelings were riper and more intense, made for a perfect match — the sort of synchronicity that happens once in a blue Hollywood moon.”

I’m bringing this up to remind everyone that Curtis is not — or wasn’t, at least — a guy given to softball platitudes and sanding off the edges. And yet he’s been accused by Michael Korda of doing more or less that in his recently published autobiography, American Prince.

In a Daily Beast article called “Some Like It Dull,” Korda says that American Prince constains “lots of names, lots of pals from the old Ratpack days, lots women, lots of marriages, lots of children, a frank account of Curtis’s cocaine addiction (at one point he tried to sail through H. M. Customs on landing at Heathrow with a .38 revolver and a bag of marijuana in his luggage).

“But the spirit, the anger, the determination to tell his side of the story that marked, say, Kirk Douglas’s memoir, are all lacking. The book ought to be fun, the stories of high jinks on and off the set are there, but instead of being high-spirited and outrageous they are somehow dull and boring. There is more than enough shtupping, but Curtis (or perhaps his ghost-writer) isn’t able to make it seem sexy and exciting and fun, indeed it seems thrown in as if somebody had said, ‘It needs more shtupping, if it’s going to sell.’

“But that’s not what it needed, really. It needed a certain good humored grace, and an earthy appreciation for a good life well lived (and to hell with what other people say or think), and the sense that in old age the author at last knows who he or she really is. When you think about it, just the qualities that Joan Collins showed in her memoir, and which led Tony Curtis to call her ‘a cunt’ on the set of The Persuaders. (He didn’t like Shelley Winters, either, but it has to be said that her memoirs were a lot gutsier and funnier than his.)”

“That’s really the problem with the book. The one thing a movie star memoir has to be is fun — it doesn’t have to be true (few of them are that), or fair to ex-wives or husbands or old lovers (few of them are that either), but it does need to be fun, to lift us out of the humdrum problems of our own life for a few hours, and, alas, American Prince is no fun at all.”

Funny, but Korda’s review makes me want to pick up a copy. Because Curtis didn’t equivocate or dull-out or play namby-pamby games with me eight years ago. Maybe he chose the wrong ghost-writer; maybe he should have chosen me instead. (Not that I would have had the time.)

The only negative feeling I have about Curtis is that quote he gave to Fox News’ Bill McCuddy dissing Brokeback Mountain, during which he said “he hadn’t yet seen Brokeback Mountain and had no intention of doing so. He claims that other Academy members feel similarly.

“‘This picture is not as important as we make it. It’s nothing unique. The only thing unique about it is they put it on the screen. And they make ’em [gay] cowboys.’ Curtis reminded folks that his contemporaries wouldn’t have cared for the highly acclaimed Best Picture nominee. ‘Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it,’ Curtis said.”

With that quote, Curtis became (in my head, at least) the figurehead spokesperson for the Academy’s homophobic geezer faction, whose votes against Brokeback led to Crash winning the Best Picture Oscar.

Here’s the final stretch from that March 2000 interview piece, which I called “Cat in a Bag.”

“Today, there’s a wariness in Curtis. Something itchy, cautious, pent-up. I’ve noticed this in actors before. It means there’s all kinds of energy (rude, vulnerable, or otherwise) looking to get out, but they need the unreality of playing someone else to find the right pitch for it.

“I wouldn’t call Curtis pretentious or posturing. He’s likable, affable. He’s still looking to be flattered (as all actors are), but he doesn’t hesitate to make fun of himself, or admit to past failings or weaknesses.

“We met last Sunday at the Beverly Glen shopping center, just south of Mulholland Drive. I waved to him above the heads of several customers sitting outside a popular, packed delicatessen. Curtis waved me over and led me to the inside of a less-crowded Starbucks — fewer people, fewer stares.

“When he ordered coffee for both of us, the woman at the counter insisted on charging nothing. A small tribute to the legend. ‘Really?’ he said to her. ‘Well, thank you so much!’

“We talked about everything — politics, drug-dependency (Curtis had difficulties in this area during the ’80s), Burt Lancaster, old Hollywood, his Web site (tonycurtis.com, a venue for selling his paintings), women, new technologies, etc.

“He says there’s a large billboard of his youthful image near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and the 101 Freeway — painted by a local artist, he says. A nice little ego boost…or maybe a hint that things are coming around and old man Curtis might be in play again.

“At one point, I handed Curtis a list of his 120 films and asked him to check those he’s genuinely proud of. He checked a total of 18. He didn’t check The Vikings. He didn’t check The Outsider. He checked Houdini. Every film he made after Spartacus in 1960 up until 1968’s The Boston Strangler, he didn’t check. He checked his role as a pair of mafiosos — Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter in 1975’s Lepke and Sam Giancana in the 1986 TV movie Mafia Princess.

“Among his ‘notable TV guest appearances,’ Curtis checked only one — the voice role of ‘Stony Curtis; in a 1965 episode of The Flintstones.

“Curtis looks good for his age. He’s had the usual touch-ups. His teeth are perfectly white. His features are naturally weathered, but more like a man 15 to 20 years younger. His eyes have a bright, inquisitive gleam. (I’ve seen a lot less of this quality in people 30 and 40 years younger.) He has a slight pot belly. His legs are well-toned. He has a cheerful smile. ‘Thank God at my age, I’m not sick,’ he says.

“But all the applications and polishings and youthful attitudes in the world can’t make time run more slowly.

“‘Can I tell you a story, Jeffrey?’ he said, about halfway through our talk. ‘In 1948, when I was 23 or 24, when I first came out here I lived in a house on Fountain Avenue. I rented a room there. And they had a swimming pool. I had an appointment and I got on a trolley car…they were running right down the middle of the freeway back then.

“‘Then I got back, I jumped into the pool, I took a shower, got dressed and got into the car, and drove up here to meet you. That’s how quick these 50-fucking-two years have gone…quick as that.'”

N.Y. Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins has listed four reasons why Hillary Clinton would be a great pick for Secretary of State:

1. She would not let the vice president run our foreign policy. Joe Biden is no Dick Cheney, but we just do not want to go there again. We have scars.

2. Barack Obama could live out his fantasy of following the Abraham Lincoln model and filling his cabinet with a team of rivals without having to make Sarah Palin secretary of commerce.

3. Clinton already has a supply of pantsuits sufficient to get her through six months of peace negotiations in the Middle East without coming home for a change of clothes.

4. She might do a terrific job.

Yesterday’s Quantum of Solace business made it the biggest Bond ever, according to Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason. Marc Forster‘s brutally efficient action-machine flick was estimated to have taken in roughly $27 million yesterday, give or take, with a potential three-day haul of $71.5 million. Casino Royale, Daniel Craig‘s debut film for the franchise, took in $14.7 million on its opening day (11.17.06).

After discussing the Rich Raddon Proposition 8 brouhaha for hours and hours, the Film Independent Board of Directors has finally issued the following statement in an e-mail sent at 7:44 pm Pacific: “As a champion of diversity, Film Independent is dedicated to supporting the civil rights of all individuals. At the same time, our organization does not police the personal, religious, or political choices of any employee, member, or filmmaker.”

“LAFF’s Rich Raddon tendered his resignation last night [over the Proposition 8 issue],” MCN’s David Poland wrote a few hours ago, “and FIND did not accept it. So this morning the LAFF board met about how to move forward.

“In many ways, I am encouraged by this becoming a decision to be made by a group and not by one person, whether the person under fire or the top of FIND, Dawn Hudson. It is an opportunity to debate these issues in some detail and, surely, with great passion.

“This is, no doubt, a tricky slope. Can a person who works in a community with a strong history of supporting gay (and other minority) rights survive while differing from the group politically? Isn’t that at the core of freedom of ideas?

“On the other hand, isn’t one reasonable price to pay for the expression of one’s freedom to get a response from the other side? Did Mr. Raddon show cowardice in trying to exit FIND rather than fighting for what he believes?

“One group will debate that this morning, and an answer may or may not be forthcoming. But in choosing not to accept Raddon’s resignation, Dawn and those she consulted took a leadership role. Rich Raddon will not be simply swept under the rug.”

I tried to get a comment from FIND twice today, and nothing has come back yet.

“Why, my colleagues constantly wonder, are all the year-end awards contenders not being screened?,” writes Boston Herald film guy and columnist Stephen Schaefer. “Why has no one seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Australia, Cadillac Records, Gran Torino or Seven Pounds?”‘

Answer: Button will be screened next week in New York and Los Angeles. Clint Eastwood has only recently completed his final work on Gran Torino. Australia won’t be seen until l1.18 or thereabouts due to Baz Luhrmann doing last-minute post-production tweaks. And Cadillac Records (Sony, 12.5) …I don’t know what the deal is with this one.

Schaefer, however, feels that “the most obvious answer is the rise of the viral online community. That means once a movie is screened, instant judgment awaits. It’s not posting early reviews online [but] the buzz that concerns them.

“And when you have a risky $150 million prestige picture like Button or a risky epic like Australia with a star like Nicole Kidman who hasn’t had a domestic hit in far too long or Clint Eastwood‘s latest bid to continue his amazing record with the Oscar voters or Will Smith‘s reunion with the director who guided him to his Oscar nomination with Pursuit of Happyness, well, you have a lot of fear.

“Right now the studios can build buzz for all these movies, they can say they’re in the race for Best Picture and not be contradicted. But once they’re seen, reality immediately take over; the studios no longer have control. Weeks before a movie opens, its Oscar (but not necessarily its Golden Globe) chances could be over.”