I’ve said before that 20th Century Fox probably made a bad call in delaying the opening of The Family Stone from mid-November to 12.16. Maybe they’ll luck out with Diane Keaton or Sarah Jessica Parker getting Golden Globe-nominated for a Best Female Performance in Comedy or Musical…or maybe the Los Angeles or New York critics will give Diane a nod. All I know for sure is (a) The Family Stone is the best home-for-the-holidays family dramedy I’ve seen in a long time, on the level of You Can’t Take It With You and/or The Man Who Came to Dinner, (b) neither the trailer nor the upraised-wedding-finger poster conveys what it really is (especially the poster, which is all about anger and irreverence…emotions that are not exactly front-and-center in the ffilm), (c) I’m sensing the same sand-leaking-out-of-the- hourglass feeling I had before In Her Shoes opened, and (d) the latest tracking I’ve heard about says “definite interest” in The Family Stone is at 15%, which is not good for a film opening three weeks from now (it should be at 30% right about now). The word last September was that Fox had three home-run movies that couldn’t miss because they were so well made and emotionally satisfying, and here we are two months later and only Walk the Line has made good on its promise. In Her Shoes stumbled and it looks like The Family Stone may follow suit, and who else is there to blame except Bob Harper and the Fox marketing team?

Hold up on Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2 going to the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, which I reported a few days ago as part of a long Word item about 22 films “tipped” for the festival. Clerks 2 (the “Passion of the Clerks” title is out) just wrapped last Friday, and the soonest they’d be ready to hit a festival would be the Cannes Film Festival in May. Smith, however, will be attending Sundance with a documentary he and Scott Mosier produced for Malcolm Ingram called Small Town/Gay Bar, which is in the documentary competition.

As much as I enjoyed Syriana and as much as I understand and (mostly) agree with director-writer Stephen Gaghan’s decision to keep the audience guessing about exactly what’s going on because the various characters (played by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Christopher Plummer, et. al.) don’t really get the whole picture either….even though I get and support all that, I couldn’t help but chuckle at David Edelstein’s Slate review.

L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke has startled the film world with a gut-punch quote from producer and longtime Steven Spielberg loyalist Kathy Kennedy that Munich (Universal, 12.25), which Spielberg directed and Kennedy produced, “could be his best.” The quote comes from a friend of Kennedy’s, who adds that Kennedy “wasn’t talking that way about War of the Worlds.” First, War of the Worlds was a pretty good film (except for the last ten minutes with the dipshit happy ending) so anyone who uses that film as an example of a big Spielberg miscalculation or letdown is a suspicious source to start with. Second, anything that Kennedy says about Munich (regardless of any perspective provided by Finke’s source) is obviously not to be trusted. Third, as I noted a couple of weeks ago, the Munich trailer strongly indicates that above and beyond the procedural aspects (Mossad agents out to kill the Palestinians who perpetrated the 1972 Munich Olympic Games masscare), it’s mainly going to be a guilt-trip movie with Eric Bana’s Mossad operative lamenting about his team having killed some innocents and the possibility of his daughter loving him less if she ever finds out, etc. The insect-antennae reading around town is that Munich will probably be pretty good, but that’s all. If it turns out to be much better or even masterful, fine…but I doubt it.

The comic tone of Lasse Halstrom’s Casanova (Disney, 12.25) isn’t exactly “farcical,” which, for some of us, means humor that’s cloddishly broad and frequently unfunny. Casanova‘s alchemy is more subtle; it’s selling laughs through the filter of a certain subdued old-world lunacy. It almost feels as if Hallstrom and his cast were on mescaline when they shot it. Does Casanova feel as whimsically stoned as Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers? Maybe not, but it’s a very close relation. I saw it earlier this week and concluded right afterwards it’s the most satisfying Lasse Hallstrom film since….I was going to say My Life as a Dog but let’s hedge a bit and say What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?. Ledger plays the legendary Venice cocksman with just the right portions of sincerity and insincerity…a very delicate brew. Costars Sienna Miller, Lena Olin and Jeremy Irons more than hold their own, but Oliver Platt gives the biggest standout performance as the pot-bellied Papprizzio. (A friend who just saw it in Sydney told me this morning he felt “more emotionally invested in Platt’s buffoon than Ledger’s Casanova.”) While I’m on the subject, the MPAA’s ratings board has again passed down an idiotic decision in giving this mildy frothy comedy an R rating because of a simulated oral-sex scene. My kids told me three or four years ago that oral sex is a total so-whatter among eighth graders (at the school they were attending in Tiburon, at least) so you’d have to think that kids who are 12 and 13 and 14 thesed days would barely raise an eyebrow at simulated off-screen oral sex in a film. Sorry, parents, but we’re no longer living in a Wonder Years world. A PG-13 would have been more than sufficient.

That rumor about Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 12.25) having been shot in 70mm is only a little bit true. They used 70mm film only twice during the shoot, for FX shots. 70mm used to be a gold-standard way of shooting a prestige film (the clarity of image on older 70mm films like Lawrence of Arabia is ummistakable), but no longer because 35mm has become so light-sensitive and technologically tuned-up.

Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros.) opens today with a 75% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating. I haven’t yet written my piece about it, but despite what you may be hearing about the narrative being a little oblique for some viewers, this a riveting and deliciously cynical geopolitical drama for the ages. The best people have been speaking about it in reverent tones over the last two or three weeks, and its reputation is only going to grow as the years advance…and for good reason. I did a pretty good phone interview with Gaghan last Saturday, which you can hear by clicking on the “archives” file right under the site’s Elsewhere Live ad. And read this review by senior critic Kenneth Turan. I totally agree with everything he says here, and he says it very well.

The town is shutting down for Thanksgiving already. Five days of friends-and-family kickback time (and a chance to catch up with all the movies and DVDs I’ve been putting off seeing) is about to begin. A friend sent me a “have a Happy Thanksgiving” note this morning and I replied, “I’ve been a Turkey-McNuggets-on-Thanks- giving guy for years, and the notion of holiday respite is a joke given the relentless demands of this column…but thanks for thinking of me, [name], and I hope you have a heathwarming time on Thursday as well.” The same sentiments are hereby passed along to the readership.

I love Chris Columbus’s Rent, but it has a 47% Rotten Tomatoes rating so all right, okay…I’m clearly in the minority. But at least William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer likes it and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt is seriously supportive. And the New York Times‘s A.O. Scott is also, to his admitted surprise, a fan. “The lyrics to one of its frenetic, show-stopping songs celebrate the idea of ‘being an ‘us’ — for once — instead of a ‘them’,” Scott Begins, “and the world around Rent may be similarly divisible, into those viewers whose hearts beat faster as soon as the lights go down [on a production of Rent], and those whose heads begin to ache before the first note has even sounded. Approaching the film adaptation, which reunites most of the original Broadway cast to belt out Jonathan Larson’s lung-stretching songs about love, art, real estate and AIDS, I was inclined toward the latter category. Two hours later, I was pleased (and somewhat surprised) to find myself an ‘us’, for once, instead of a ‘them’. Some aesthetic objections still stand…but every time the film seemed ready to tip into awfulness, the sneer on my lips was trumped by the lump in my throat. [Columbus] as taken a source that is fiercely and jealously loved by its core fans and refrained from messing it up. It is not just that he shows dexterity and imagination in transferring the spectacle onto the actual streets of the East Village in Manhattan. The real key to his success is his utter lack of condescension. Rent is nothing if not earnest…it believes in itself utterly [and] is occasionally silly, often melodramatic and never subtle. Openhearted to a fault, it stakes its integrity on the faith that even in millennial New York, some things — friendship, compassion, grief, pleasure, beauty — are more important than money or real estate. But to chide Rent for its childish politics or its simplistic and instantly obsolete vision of the New York demimonde is to think like a ‘them’.”

Memoirs of a Geisha star Ziyi Zhang “looks like a virtual shoo-in for a [Best Actress] nomination, and the early leader for the statuette,” writes Tom O’Neill on the L.A. Times-funded site, “The Envelope.” Really? On the basis of what? It can’t be her acting, so this must be about Academy members believing that giving “Zi” a nomination would inject an element of graciousness and good manners in the relationship between Hollywood and the Chinese film industry. I like to show love as much as O’Neill does, but Zhang’s performance ranges the gamut of emotions from A to B…she’s stiff, constrained, and awkward with the English dialogue. O’Neill also claims that the buzz on Geisha “says a best pic bid looks inevitable.” Like I said in my 11.21 piece, Geisha might get lucky because of the undeniable quality of below-the-line contributions, but all over town people burdened with a sense of taste are rendering the same verdict: pretty images, but no real soul or fire or poetry generated from within.

“The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close,” proclaims L.A. Times film industry columnist Patrick Goldstein. He repeats the standard observation about the business having been “eroded by many of the same forces that have eviscerated the music industry, decimated network TV and, yes, are clobbering the newspaper business.” Then comes the Sobering Statement: “Put simply, an explosion of new technology — the internet, DVDs, video games, downloading, cellphones and iPods — now offers more compelling diversion than 90% of the movies in theaters, the exceptions being Harry Potter-style must-see events or the occasional youth-oriented comedy or thriller.” Comments from industry solders about an ongong “bloodbath” aside, this doesn’t portend an end to the movie business. It merely projects a revenue shift. The industry professionals who’ve been living fairly high on the hog based on real or perceived theatrical-revenue income (stemming from themselves, their films, their clients, etc.) are either going to have to (a) weedle their way into the new markets or (b) live and be happy with slightly less in the way of cash, savings, travel, perks and freebies. Life is hard…life is a scramble.

The slump is not a myth, as this Hollywood Reporter/Reuters story explains: “Because ticket prices have increased slightly, estimated admissions for the fall present a bleak picture. Estimated ticket units were 208.1 million, down nearly 8% from the 223 million reported a year earlier and well shy of the record 268.3 million rung up in 2003. And with overall year-to-date sales running behind the year-ago period by nearly 7% — which translates to a deficit of around $550 million — it will be up to the films of the seven week year-end holiday period to close that gap.” I’ve said myself many times that admission totals are the bottom line, and here it is in black and white.