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Myself to HE tech guy: “We really need to dump Typkey and replace it with something better, or install something better alongside it as an option that will allow people to post comments without all this horseshit. For too many readers Typekey is nothing but grief, grief, grief.” HE tech guy response: “Yesterday I suggested OpenID as an alternative. Are you happy with going with that?” Me back: “Uhhm, no. OpenID is free software so there must be problems! I don’t trust anything that’s free. You get what you pay for. It could also provide a back-door portal of some kind for hackers. Isn’t there something secure and solid that we can purchase and easily install? Something that works…no muss or fuss?”

Collider’s Steve Weintraub recently learned from Reese Witherspoon at a press event for DreamWorks Monsters vs. Aliens that Cameron Crowe‘s somewhat curious-sounding next film, a Scott Rudin production in which RW was to costar with Ben Stiller for Columbia Pictures, has been “postponed.” She didn’t say the Crowe movie has been jettisoned, but “postponed” sounds a little more ominous than “delayed.” To me anyway.

Last summer Crowe’s script was described on www.goneelsewhere.com as “a tropical romantic adventure comedy with light sci-fi and heavy supernatural aspects,” so it sounds like someone (i.e., Amy Pascal) has gotten cold feet on the project.

Witherspoon said she’s now “actually in James L. Brooks‘ next movie so we’re going to start that in the Spring.”

“With deep personal sadness I must announce that my dear friend and client Bettie Page passed away at 6:41 pm Pacific this evening [Thursday, 12.11] in a Los Angeles hospital. She died peacefully but had never regained consciousness after suffering a heart attack nine days ago.” — A statement issued last night by Mark Roesler , Page’s business agent.

The right-side, less routine pic of the late, legendary Bettie Page was taken in 2003 — she was 80 at the time. Reasonably foxy for an octogenarian.

The N.Y. Times‘ Manohla Dargis and Wall Street Journal‘s “JoMo” Morgenstern are the latest elite-print-critics-who-still-have-a-job to join the Gran Torino horn tootin’ street parade.

“Twice in the last decade, just as the holiday movie season has begun to sag under the weight of its own bloat, full of noise and nonsense signifying nothing, Clint Eastwood has slipped another film into theaters and shown everyone how it’s done,” Dargis starts off. “This year’s model is Gran Torino, a sleek, muscle car of a movie Made in the U.S.A., in that industrial graveyard called Detroit. I’m not sure how he does it, but I don’t want him to stop.

“Not because every film is great — though, damn, many are — but because even the misfires show an urgent engagement with the tougher, messier, bigger questions of American life.

“Few Americans make movies about this country anymore, other than Mr. Eastwood, a man whose vitality as an artist shows no signs of waning, even in a nominally modest effort like Gran Torino.

“Dirty Harry is back, in a way, in [this film], not as a character but as a ghostly presence. He hovers in the film, in its themes and high-caliber imagery, and of course most obviously in Mr. Eastwood’s face.

“It is a monumental face now, so puckered and pleated that it no longer looks merely weathered, as it has for decades, but seems closer to petrified wood. Words like flinty and steely come to mind, adjectives that Mr. Eastwood, in his performance as Walt Kowalski, expressively embodies with his usual lack of fuss and a number of growls.”

Morgenstern begins his review thusly: “No one makes movies like Gran Torino any more, and more’s the pity. This one, with Clint Eastwood as director and star, is concerned with honor and atonement, with rough justice and the family of man. It raises irascibility to the level of folk art, takes unapologetic time-outs for unfashionable moral debates, revives acting conventions that haven’t been in fashion for half a century and keeps you watching every frame as Mr. Eastwood snarls, glowers, mutters, growls and grins his way through the performance of a lifetime.

Gran Torino “is a meditation, as affecting as it is entertaining, on the limits of violence and the power of unchained empathy. It seems to be exactly the movie [Eastwood] wanted to make at this point in his long career. It is defiantly old-fashioned, and occasionally, albeit endearingly, self-indulgent. Most of all it’s heartfelt, and for me the feeling was mutual.”

In Stephen Daldry‘s recently-opened The Reader, 18 year-old David Kross and 45 year-old Ralph Fiennes play younger and older versions of the same German-born character. Except Kross looks a lot more like a young version of Val Kilmer. His eyes clearly lack the wet, soulful, vaguely sad quality that Fiennes’ peepers have. So why cast him (or Fiennes) if they don’t even faintly resemble each other?

Reader costars David Kross, Ralph Fiennes; Val Kilmer

“You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.” — Clint Eastwood explaining to N.Y. Times writer Bruce Headlam on why he won’t play younger characters. And it doesn’t matter if New York/Vulture quoted this line first. So what?

“This botched remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still seriously dishonors the seriously fine 1951 sci-fi landmark on which it’s based,” says Variety ‘s Todd McCarthy in a review that was posted yesterday morning. “One of the new film’s many sins is its lack of any primal, defining imagery. The script by David Scarpa (The Last Castle) rotely retains key elements from the original without giving them any interesting twists. So many other, potentially more exciting roads could have been taken” — but alas, have not been.

The Day The Earth Stood Still, which opens wide tomorrow, is running at 81, 48 and 25 — decent to pretty good business. Big Hollywood’s Steve Mason foresees $36 million as of Sunday night, but says in the same breath that $100 million domestic is unlikely.

Delgo, which no one knows or cares about, is at 24, 22 and 0. And Nothing Like the Holidays is 52, 30 and 5…modest business.

On 12.19 we’ll see the opening of Gabriele Muccino and Will Smith ‘s Seven Pounds, which is now running at 71, 49 and 8 — kinda low for a Smith movie. Its strongest (and perhaps stronger) competitor is Jim Carrey‘s Yes Man , which is at 79,39 and 8 — except that a comedy is always an easier sell than a drama. Universal’s animated The Tale of Despereaux is running at 56, 29 and 2.

On 12.25 comes Bedtime Stories – 71, 38 and 5. Marley and Me is 76, 35 and 6. Spirit is 43, 34 and 3. Valkyrie is 65, 38 and 6.

The reason Valkyrie is coming out before 12.31, I’m told, is because MGM’s pay TV deal expires with Showtime expires at the end of this year, and they’ve got a less well-paying pay TV deal starting next year. They’re MGM and they don’t have any clout any more, nobody’s giving them any new money but they need to generate money now.

20th Century Fox, a friend tells me, is a pensive, unhappy place to be right now. “Agents all say they’re the studio of last resort, they don’t pay money, and Rupert Murdoch has said they’re all on a lifeboat and there are going to be radical changes there. He’s unhappy, and when he gets this way he fires people.” The friend points out that the contact of Fox president/COO Peter Chernin “has been up for weeks and he still hasn’t renewed it. I think he and [Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman] Tom Rothman might leave.”

“Someone in the mobility business in Denmark and Tel Aviv is already developing a real-world alternative to Detroit’s business model, ” N.Y. Times columnist Thomas L. Freidman wrote yesterday. “I don’t know if this alternative to gasoline-powered cars will work, but I do know that it can be done — and Detroit isn’t doing it. And therefore it will be done, and eventually, I bet, it will be done profitably.

“And when it is, our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the personal computer and the internet.”

This is the single best career decision Jennifer Aniston has made since (a) she signed to be on Friends or (b) she posed for that Rolling Stone nude-shot cover way back when. I still have fairly low expectations for her latest films, Marley and Me (20th Century Fox, 12.25) and He’s Just Not That Into You (New Line/Warner Bros. 2.6). Let’s be honest — I probably wouldn’t pay to see them if I wasn’t on the screening lists.

The fourth good thing Aniston done for her career is costar in The Breakup, which gets a little bit better every time I re-watch it. She’s very fine and precise in this; perhaps her best role ever.

“Nobody needs to put these crummy times into perspective by starring into the CGI-enhanced face of Brad Pitt [in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button]. I’ve got six friends that have either been laid off or are fearing the year-end axe. They don’t need to cry — they do that on the commute home.

“Pitt has zero serious worries in [his] world. He’s earning $20 million a flick, he gets to bang Angelina whenever the nannies watch the kids, he doesn’t have to worry about making the rent on his French mansion, and he won’t have to break it to the twins that this is going to be a small Christmas.

“Nobody needs a good cry at this moment. We need to feel like we’re not doomed. That someday we won’t have to wonder if playing $10 for a movie ticket is a necessary expense.” — HR reader Joe Corey, posted today.