The biggest thing working against Gustavo Santaolalla‘s Brokeback Mountain score winning the Oscar on 3.5 is nobody being able to quite pronounce his last name. I’m pretty good with Spanish and every time I try it I half-swallow my tongue.

Halle Berry is obviously capable of making atrocious choices in movies, but she’s also a good sport.

It’s a shame that I missed seeing Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (1955, and as far as I can recall the first anamorphic feature cartoon ever made) at the El Capitan, but a new two-disc DVD is coming out 2.28. The first DVD was released in the prehistoric analog era of 1999, so this new one will probably have a better transfer.

It’s confusing and tedious to try and post one of the “Elsewhere Live” broadcasts where it should be which is why it’s been gracious of Jason Heiser to help me out on this, but he’s out of touch lately so here’s Thursday night’s discussion with John Scheinfeld, director of Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him)? plus a riff about the LBJ doc.

David Kamp and Lawrence Levi‘s The Film Snob’s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Filmological Knowledge (Broadway) finally hits the stands on 2.21. I was handed a copy last October and I ran a whole column on it then and there because experience has taught me not to wait when your blood is up — do it now. Read all about it on the Snobsite, which also talks about the Rock Snob book (co-authored by Kamp and Steven Daly). It’s in my earlier piece, but this is the essence of the Film Snobs book, towit: “The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness — the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Samuel (White Dog>) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky. The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more bene- volent film buff, the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger movies.”

I could smell Freedomland (Columbia, opening today) coming a mile away. The advance word was atrocious, which was no surprise given that Revolution Studios chief Joe Roth directed it. I didn’t go to the screening (I watched the Criterion DVD of Shoot the Piano Player instead), but N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis did, and she calls it “an early candidate for worst film of the year…an inept, lethally dull drama [featuring] one of the few authentically awful performances of [Julianne Moore‘s] career.” The reviews are 20% positive on Rotten Tomatoes across-the- board and only 13% Cream of the Crop. And if I were Roth I would send a basket of fruit and a bottle of Dom Perignon to the Hollywood Reporter‘s Sheri Linden, who’s calling Freedomland “a moving portrait of hurting souls, brought to life in compelling performances.”

Yesterday I suggested a remake of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, not realizing that one had already been made by the great Jay Chandrasekhar and released last summer by Warner Bros. Here’s a review and an excerpt: “Chandresekhar is one of the saints of the cinema, and The Dukes of Hazzard is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a muscle car from birth to death, while all the time living it the dignity of being itself — a dumb machine, noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. The General Lee is not one of those cartoon cars that can talk and sing and is a human with four wheels. The General Lee is a muscle car, and it is as simple as that.” Apologies to Roger Ebert, but this is good.

Here’s the first right-wing film critic attack upon V for Vendetta, appearing on Jason Apuzzo‘s Liberty Film Festival site. (It’s odd that the author doesn’t use his own name, going instead by the moniker “the Road Warrior”…what’s that about?) One thing I agree with: V is set in a vaguely futuristic England, but “is very much about America here and now.” Yes! The diversion is RW’s view that the film is “a paranoid, left-wing fever dream of what America is here and now…a psychological study of left-wing projection and paranoia. Needless to say, [it] is everything it accuses the government within the film of being: fear-mongering, deceitful, hateful, and propagandistic. This irony, unfortunately, seems to be lost on director James McTeigue and writers Andy and Larry Wachowski (who adapted Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel).” RW is an intelligent fellow, but my God, it’s amazing sometimes how bright people can look at a strong, go-for-broke film like V for Vendetta and come away with such wildly different reactions. Here, again, is my 1.12 review, which is reiterated in the column article below called “Vendetta Dissent.”

Bond franchise producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, widely regarded throughout the film industry as a pair of amiable chumps, tried to get several name actresses to play Daniel Craig‘s leading lady in the currently filming Casino Royale, but the agents and managers for these actresses counselled against it for one reason or another. (One of them being that they think the Bond franchise is on a downswirl these days.) But now Wilson-Broccoli finally have someone to play Vesper Lynd, and it’s Eva Green, last in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven and before that in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Green is an enticing, exotic, sparkly-eyed actress and a good fit, but throw her together with Craig, the recently-signed Mads Mikkkelsen (who’s playing Le Chiffre, the Bond villain) and Jeffrey Wright as 007 second-banana CIA agent Felix Leiter (a character who was first played by Jack Lord 45 years ago in Dr. No) and the prospect of Royale being regarded by audiences as a second-tier, no-star package all the way seems unavoidable. The only thing that has a chance of making a difference with forward-thinking types is the quality of it (if it manifests). The buzz will have to be that Casino Royale is the exception to the 007 rule — that it’s an origin story with an above-average script by Crash guy Paul Haggis, and that it’s not just a formula thing with the usual quips and explosions and a PG-13 notion of adult sexuality by way of a 1964 Playboy magazine sensibility. (Wilson has imposed restrictions on Bond screenwriters for years in order to keep the Bond franchise family-friendly.) If this doesn’t happen and the criteria of Wilson-Broccoli prevails, Casino Royale will be a flatliner and yet another nail in the coffin of a franchise that has been culturally and spiritually dead for a long time. It doesn’t mean a damn thing if it’s been financially profitabile…not a thing.

Novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, 69, says the core theme of Brokeback Mountain is that “life is not for sissies,” which of course means that he thinks Heath Ledger‘s Ennis del Mar character is one. He’s right, of course. The immense sadness that BBM leaves you with at the finale is all about this middle-aged cowboy’s realization that he’s blown it by failing to make something out of his deep-river feelings for Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist. A Pulitzer Prize winner and BBM co-screenwriter (along with Diana Ossana), McMurtry is an Oscar nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay. He let go with his del Mar diss during a taping of “CBS News Sunday Morning” that will air this coming Sunday (2.19). “You need strength…love is not easy,” he said. “It’s not easy if you find (it), it’s not easy if you don’t find it. It’s not easy if you find it but it doesn’t work out. [Our film] merely says the strong survive, but not everybody is strong.”

Animals aren’t just poking through as the stars of new films, but are giving killer performances…so to speak. This is almost the view of Pete Hammond, who saw Frank Marshall’s Eight Below (Disney, 2.17) at the all-media last Monday. He also showed Eight Below to his UCLA “Sneak Preview” class last week and says “it went through the roof…one woman said it was the best film she’d ever seen at the series.” He also says that the Huskies and Malamutes in the film are phenomenally touching, and that they almost seem to show acting chops. I couldn’t be bothered to see Eight Below because (a) it looked sappy, (b) I’m starting to wonder if Walker is making the right career calls, and (c) because I’m a narrative animal-movie snob. Except, of course, when it comes to movies like Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthazar (a sad donkey movie)or Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu’s Amores Perros (sad dogs). Bresson’s would be an excellent film to remake, of course. It can’t be improved upon, but most people out there won’t rent or buy the Criterion DVD so at least a remake would be seen, although a Balthazar remake would probably turn out better if the Disney people had nothing to do with it. I’m serious about this — animal movies are vaguely in vogue now, and a Balthazar remake would be an upscale way to go with at least a potential of being a critical favorite and an award-winner, if only because cultured film lovers regard the Bresson film as a landmark art film.

An interactive Oscar ballot that the New York Times would love you to fill out.