Nobody knows anything about tomorrow’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association voting, the results of which should be known by 5 pm or so. Nonetheless, I have a couple of hunches. LAFCA’s Best Picture winners are occasionally contrarian in one of two ways — they try and help out the proverbial little guy (i.e., a highly regarded “critics film” that has had trouble at the box-office or received insufficient support from its distributor), or they simply honor the cinematic merits of a film with an almost perverse disregard for the herd mentality, even if the winner has a shortcoming or two.
If this is a contrarian year (and the ingredients are in place in that there’s no one film with a big head of steam), that means they may go political and give it to Todd Field‘s Little Children, which New Line has only marginally supported since it opened, or (my personal hope) Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, a thrillingly composed tour de force that’s facing tough odds at the box-office, or, even more perversely, Jean-Pierre Melville‘s Army of Shadows, a 1969 film about the French resistance that has gotten several raves from big-gun critics.
If none of these three can build a big-enough consensus and LAFCA still wants to go contrarian, the big prize will go to The Departed. Pound for pound and move for move, no film provided as much sheer revved-up delight. The bizarre Catholic-guilt ending aside, it’s almost a complete 100% popcorn high, albeit in a sophistica- ted, high-end way. Plus it’s the Martin Scorsese film everyone’s been waiting for since Goodfellas. The fact that Scorsese probably has the Best Director prize in the bag may mean LAFCA will go elsewhere for Best Picture…who knows?
I heard from two big-wheel critics yesterday, and one of them wrote:the following: “Frankly, it’s wide open. I’ve been chatting with several members, and there’s no clear front runner or front-runner group. I’ve heard about everything from Army of Shadows to Flags of Our Fathers to Letters From Iwo Jima to Dreamgirls” — say what? — “to The Departed to United 93 to you-name-it. (Not to mention Volver, Babel, The Pursuit of Happyness, Apocalypto, et. al.)
“Anyone claiming on any website regarding any voting org (LAFCA or otherwise) that there’s a front-runner is either lying, has an agenda or is misinformed — or a bit of all three. I like it when it’s wide open since this allows the voting group to get more creative and move away from the dull middlebrow toward something more interesting. I love the stuff I’m hearing about Army of Shadows — that would throw the Hollywood types into a tizzy, and it would be eminently well-deserved.”
I suppose the Best Picture prize could also go to Letters From Iwo Jima. As good as it is — it’s a far better film than Flags of Our Fathers — it doesn’t quite have the startling high-throttle quality that I feel a Best Picture winner ought to possess. But then I’m not a voter. I’m just sitting here in a warm Brooklyn apartment.

N.Y. Times writer David Halbfinger writing about Grace Is Gone, “a tiny, taut and” — the filmmakers hope — “affecting entry” in the dramatic competition at next month’s Sundance Film Festival. Directed and written by James C. Strouse (whose first script was Lonesome Jim, which Steve Buscemi directed), it stars John Cusack as a man whose wife is killed in battle in Iraq, leaving him the task of breaking the news to their two young daughters.

“I really think it can be deadly to have an agenda in telling fiction,” Strouse says. “I wanted to connect with people on an emotional level. And I thought the best way to do that was to try and play it as straight and true as I could. There was always the hope that this could somehow be above the argument, and challenge your opinions, whatever they are — to not let anyone off too easily.”
Strouse — what is that, a WASP-y re-spelling of “Strauss”?

Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto is being projected to win the weekend with $14,913,000 as of Sunday evening….a little over $6 grand a print. The tracking indicated less, and while the 14 % negative rating may have hurt some, it didn’t hurt much. The weekend’s big loser is Ed Zwick‘s Blood Diamond, a fifth-place finisher expected to tally $7,936,000, or a little over $4000 a print. For a movie that cost $80 to $100 million to shoot, less than $8 million on the first weekend means the game is basically over except for the Leonardo DiCaprio Best Actor heat.
Happy Feet will end up with something close to $13,284,000, down around 24% from last weekend, for a second-place finish. (Obviously a very good hold.) As expected, Nancy Meyers‘ The Holiday is doing better than Thursday’s tracking indcated. It’ll end up with something like $12,319,000, which is pretty good for this time of year. Casino Royale will be fourth with $8,788,000, Deja Vu will be sixth with $5,582,000, Unaccompanied Minors in seventh place with $5,238,000 (a wipeout), The Nativity Story with $4,686,000 (going nowhere), the ninth-place Deck the Halls with $3,845,000 and Santa Claus 3 rounding out the pack with $3,150,000.

Saturday morning’s “Page Six” is running a lead story this morning about the Weinstein Co.’s last-minute decision not to open George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl in Manhattan, thus taking it out of consideration for local awards and ten-best lists. A day or two ago I got this message from a friend who’s right in the thick of it: “The reality is the movie just isn’t ready to see. We’ve shot 25 pages of new material and Harvey [Weinstein] is trying to rush the movie out and there just isn’t enough time. There’ve been a few screenings but the film is in no shape at all to show. It’ll get there but it’s taking time. All good things need time, and it’s never fair to the film or the filmmaker to rush, rush, rush…and for the sake of what?”

“Page Six” on page 10, 12.9.06 edition of the N.Y. Post.

“Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto. Just saw it. Actually paid. Good news: no Jews, lots of Mayans. No circumcisions but lots of other incisions. When Gibson directed and yelled ‘cut,’ a lot of guys in the cast took him literally.” — Marc Wallace, a loyal Manhattan reader,.

Phyllis Somerville arguably gives the best performance in Todd Field‘s Little Children. Her character — May McGorvey, a scrappy, willful, care-worn mother of a convicted sex offender named Ronny (Jackie Earl Haley) — is one of the few adults in the film (the title refers to a state of arrested adolescence among most of the characters) and seems the most earnest and grounded. What I really mean, I suppose, is that I saw her character as the only one I could really trust.

This is precisely what I said to Field during our chat at the Toronto Film Festival only an hour or two after I first saw the film. As good as Haley, Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Connelly are in their roles, Somerville seems the most solid and whole.
Meaning that she “deserves award attention,” as Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers wrote several weeks ago. Children is one of the best-reviewed films of the year, I’m thinking, and somebody ought to end up with some kind of tangible honor at the end of the day. (I’m saying this with a feeling that Winslet’s Best Actress heat may be waning a tiny bit.)
Does Somerville have any kind of shot? She has a lot of strong competitors, but maybe. It would help, obviously, if one or two of the critics groups singled her out. The hard fact (and this needs saying) is she’s not getting that much support from New Line Cinema, which has been nickle-and-diming Little Children‘s awards campaign all along and, according to one insider, doesn’t even provide a photo of Somerville in the standard press packet.
I sat down with Somerville at Manhattan’s Blue Water Grill earlier this week. The recording I made of our chat is a mess (repeatedly admitting to flubbed interview recordings has been an irritating staple of this column in recent weeks). I can at least say that she’s sharp and friendly and very dyed-in-the-wool Manhattan-ish, which comes from having lived in the same St. Mark’s Place apartment for the last 37 years. And that she has the vibe of someone who’s lived a fairly full and vivid life.

Somerville is short and wiry (as is Haley — they actually look like mother and son). She has a Middle-American accent — she was born and raised in the open-plains region — and speaks in a matter-of-fact way. Her gray hair is long and dramatically swept back. She owns a great-looking black leather jacket and wears Ray-Ban shades during her strolls around lower Manhattan. Or she was, at least, on the day we met.
She got the role, in part, because of a recommendation by longtime actor friend William Wise, who knew Field from having played Tom Wilkinson‘s chubby best friend in Field’s feature directing debut, In The Bedroom.
She owns a computer and goes online, etc., but she still uses dial-up and has yet to furnish the IMDB people with a bio, and it goes without saying there’s no Phyllis Somerville website of any kind. She says she has a web-savvy friend who helps her with this stuff so maybe she’ll be upping her cyber-profile down the road.
I don’t know what else to say except to repeat that she’s damn good in Little Chil- dren, and hope that others who haven’t yet come to a crystal-clear realization of this fact will at least give it a think-through.

Your very first kneejerk reaction when you see this poster is (a) “Aaah, a horror film!…very intriguing,” (b) “Face markings? Something aberrant about this…has Carrey lost it?”, (c) “Uhm…yeah…. hmmm….well,” or (d) fill in the blank.

Nothing looks sensational this weekend. Yesterday’s numbers on Apocalypto (Touchstone, 12.8) were at 82, 24 and 12…although it still has a 14 % definitely-not-interested. It might eke out $10 million or so. Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) is at 76, 28 and 14. It’s played moderately well with some but the reviews are not there . A strong show of support by women probably means that Nancy Meyers‘ The Holiday (Columbia) will at least be competitive and may do better than indicated by Thursday’s figures (i.e., 74, 29, 8). Unaccompanied Minors was at 59, 19 and 1…no business to speak of.
The first tracking figures on Dreamgirls (12.15), which almost certainly indicates the effects of mostly urban advertising, is now at 43 % general awareness and a 29 % definite interest…but it also has a definitely-not-interested rating of 13%, which is high. This is most likely your white cracker rurals telling phone surveyors they don’t want to see a black musical with a gay sensibility, blah, blah. The numbers will go up next week either way.
The biggest numbers of the month are going to be earned by The Pursuit of Happyness (Columbia, 12.15).

“On Monday, millions will be waiting breathlessly for the results from the New York Film Critic Circle Awards,” writes N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”). “Okay, that’s patently not true, but dozens, at least, will be breathing heavily as they wait to find out what gives. The Bagger has done nothing by way of investigation, save talking to a friend who talked to some other friends who know some people. So, with a sampling error that approaches 100 percent, he can say with certain uncertainty that The Departed might sneak in.
“This year, some love the tidy achievement of The Queen, while others are stuck on Pan’s Labyrinth. Alfonso Cuaron has his posse as well, so maybe Children of Men will get its first visibility of the season. Don’t look for Letters from Iwo Jima to remain on a New York roll. The smartypants who sit in this circle have a bit of a Clint issue, and refused to get their arms around either Mystic River or Million Dollar Baby.”

Having delighted over Bill Nighy‘s performance in David Hare‘s The Vertical Hour two nights ago at the Music Box, it suddenly hit me this morning that I haven’t attempted to bring any Oscar- season favor whatsoever upon a fascinating Nighy performance that easily qualifies as Best Supporting Actor-level. No, not his older-husband-of-Cate Blanchett role in Notes From a Scandal (in which he’s perfectly fine) — I mean his gloppy squid-faced Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dean Man’s Chest.

In this otherwise-despised film Nighy not only filled the shoes of the greatest movie villain to come along in years, but gave the year’s most under-valued performance because nobody regarded Jones as anything more than a CG crea- tion. Half it was that, yes…but the other half came straight from Nighy. I wrote last summer that under the makeup, Nighy “delivers his lines with perfectly honed humor and wit. He should be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, really.” 50 or 100 years from now audiences will be getting and savoring what Nighy did here. I think it merits a fresh salute right now.
By the way, please read John Lahr‘s review of The Vertical Hour and especially Nighy’s performance in this 12.4 New Yorker piece.

A tiny bit more than one out of three moviegoers — 34% — would avoid any movie Tom Cruise is starring in, according to a just-published Gallup poll. I knew the guy had high negatives but not that high. The actor with the next highest negative rating — 18% — is Angelina Jolie. What could that be about? People don’t like her because she’s too pretty, too rich, adopts orphans, makes noises “like an animal being killed” during lovemaking…. what? The third highest neg rating — 15% — was earned by Mel Gibson.

In Blood Diamond (Warner Bros., opening today), Leonardo DiCaprio “plays Danny Archer, a Rhodesian-born diamond smuggler who, having been orphaned during his native country’s violent struggles in the 1970s, has spent most of his 30-some years crisscrossing the continent as a soldier of fortune and a merchant of misery. Tousled and tanned, with a long, slicing gait and a killer smile, Danny looks as if he were born for trouble of the sweetest kind.

“But Mr. DiCaprio, perhaps because he knows that much of the audience has already crawled into his pocket, plays the smuggler as the scum he is. Even as the film coaxes Danny toward redemption, the actor fights to hold his ground and the truth of a character who has inspired the most fully sustained performance of his adult life.” — from Manohla Dargis‘ N.Y. Times review.