Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Clint Eastwood‘s American Sniper will have earned an astonishing $90.2 million by late tonight, and that it’ll most likely pull down $105 million by tomorrow night, or by the conclusion of the four-day Martin Luther King weekend. “The movie has become a cultural phenomenon,” said WB distribution topper Dan Fellman. “It tore apart the record book and not by a little. By an enormous amount.” On the other hand a Twitter guy named veryfewguys said, “Of course it’s crushing the box office…it’s The Hurt Locker dumbed down for the Call of Duty/Halo nation.”

This morning the know-it-all bloggy bloggies kicked around the notion of American Sniper suddenly being the new big gorilla in the Best Picture race, especially after it crosses $200 million. “So I just had a crazy thought,” one said. “Considering that Argo won Best Picture without Ben Affleck winning a Best Director nom…”

“Feels to me like all bets are off,” said Voice #2. “Not predicting Sniper but the combination of the box-office and Clint’s age and the really soggy Best Picture slate in terms of studio fare…it feels like a threat to me. Don’t think SAG matters much. Though we always say that and it always does!”

Voice #3: “Boyhood, Budapest and Birdman will still win a lot.”

Voice #1: “Budapest will take production design, makeup, maybe cinematography…right? Birdman takes original screenplay at the very least. Keaton, Best Actor.”

Voice #4: “Sniper takes both sound categories (I think it will easily), editing, screenplay maybe (blecch). Boyhood takes director for sure, supporting actress…what else though? Whiplash could take screenplay, supporting actor Imitation Game takes…?”

Voice #1: “I’m just saying it looks like Sniper could take the most Oscars in the end …Linklater should take the DGA but if Clint takes it…”

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With Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland‘s Still Alice having opened yesterday, here’s a portion of my 11.28 review. Actually, I’m rewriting portions as I go along. Well, half and half. I began by saying that Still Alice is a morose but affecting Lifetime movie about a brilliant college professor (Julianne Moore) who, at age 50, begins to succumb to the awful progressive malice of Alzheimer’s diseasem, or actually early onset Alzheimer’s. Which an HE reader has since dubbed Alice-heimer’s. Sorry.

Moore plays her melancholy part with delicacy and the depth of feeling that only great actresses seem to fully harness — she’s convincing and then some and deserves the Best Actress Oscar that she’s been all but asssured of winning for…what, four and a half months now?

But for me, Still Alice is a hellish thing to sit through. It’s a dirge about a kind of death sentence or more precisely a spiritual suffocation, mitigated to some extent by the fact that the condemned (i.e., Moore) is attractive and wealthy and married to a nice man (Alec Baldwin) and surrounded by bright, sensitive family members who care a great deal and can do absolutely nothing to help.

Still Alice is a movie that says “okay, your brain is going to start dying now…okay, the symptoms are getting a little worse now…is the horror of this predicament affecting everyone? Getting worse, still worse…my God, this disease really sucks! And Julianne Moore can’t do anything about it. And neither can you, the viewer. Because we, the filmmakers, have decided that the most sensitive and affecting thing to do is for everyone — Moore, the costars, the audience, Jeffrey Wells sitting on his living room couch — to just ride it out to the end…sadly, gently, compassionately.”

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Without giving too much attention to Fear Clinic (Anchor Bay, 1.30) I’d like to mention my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as “Freddiemania,” which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84). There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.

Nine days ago I mentioned that while I respect the learned dweeb mentality of Variety reviewer Guy Lodge, I don’t trust him that much. Not after his praising of Abbas Kiarostami‘s suffocating, mildly infuriating Certified Copy, and certainly not after giving a total pass to Paddington without at least mentioning that the story is ridiculous and wafer-thin. You also have to consider the native loyalty factor in any England-residing critic’s review of a British-made film, and particularly one directed and written by a youngish Brit — in this instance Alex Garland. All to say that Lodge has now reviewed Ex Machina. Read it carefully.

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The cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker depicts the late Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Brown and NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu marching together, arm in arm — united against hate, bigotry and particularly violence, as they all met their doom from…actually, it’s not that simple. Two of them died at the hands of armed assassins — haters who fired coldly, deliberately. The other three died in racially-charged altercations that could and should have been avoided if tempers on both sides had been cooler — not quite as cut-and-dried. I just wonder how Dr. King would feel about being depicted as morally and spiritually allied with and in a sense occupying the same historical station as Brown, who was no sweetheart. A roughly similar image would be a New Yorker cover depicting a group of famed World War II figures marching side by side — George S. Patton, Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, James Doolittle, Ernie Pyle and Eddie Slovik.

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Conservative people of faith are going to see American Sniper this weekend. America gets off the couch, climbs into the SUV, drives down to the multiplex, buys tickets, turns off cell phone, etc. And goes, “Hmmm, yeah…that was okay. The battle scenes at least.” Variety‘s Maane Khatchatourian is reporting that Clint Eastwood’s not-bad-but-far-from-great Iraq War drama might actually earn $68 million by Sunday night and $80 million by Monday night, having grossed a startling $30.5 million yesterday — “the biggest single-day take in January.” Plus Eastwood’s biggest hit ever? Its a conservative man’s look at war, duty and country…and that’s where a lot of Amurrican hinterlanders are at. As I wrote the other day, if a movie respects hinterland culture or theology, flyover-state types will line up regardless of how good it is. If nothing else, American Sniper does that thing. The Fox News crowd (i.e., white-haired steak-eaters and their wives) has, I’m assuming, come out in force.

“A nice candid shot of one of the actors who worked with Bradley Cooper in American Sniper,” as tweeted last night by Mark Harris.

I’ve been assuming all along that Sam Taylor-Johnson‘s Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13) is probably going to be a difficult sit, possibly even a painful one. It would be derelict, of course, to ignore a film expected to be this huge. But part of me wants to duck it in the same way I routinely duck Asian action cinema. What’s the point? On top of which I was disappointed when I saw that Dakota Johnson, who was up to something cool in that scene with Justin Timberlake in David Fincher‘s The Social Network, had dyed her hair a kind of mousey brown. I didn’t much care for Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy but I respect producer Michael DeLuca and screenwriter Kelly Marcel so let’s see.

Earlier today I again failed to write some kind of review of Michael Mann‘s underwhelming Blackhat. My immersion in that urban existential angsty machismo thing has been a profound deal for me, especially as manifested in Thief, Heat, The Insider and Collateral. I was even a fan of nearly all of Public Enemies (particularly that socko ending scene between Marion Cotillard and Stephen Lang) but that film was the first indication that Mann might be losing some of the touch. And I guess I’m confessing that the failure of Blackhat feels so…the word isn’t shattering. I don’t know what to call it. Profoundly fatiguing? Soul-collapsing? I only know it’s been very difficult to put words to page. I also know that the guy who directed the Kate Mantilini scene between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Heat had nothing to do with Blackhat, and it pains me to say that a lot more than it might pain Mann to read it. I guess I could try writing a bit more but I want to be done with this as quickly as possible. When I come back from a quick errand I’m just going to talk through my issues and disappointments and then post an mp3. I know I can do that, at least.

John Hardwick‘s The Eichmann Show (BBC Two, 1.20) is a behind-the-scenes tale of how the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was captured on TV by Milton Fruchtman (Martin Freeman) and blacklisted TV director Leo Hurwitz (Anthony LaPaglia). Filming at the trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Fruchtman and Hurwitz’s presentation was edited daily and broadcast in Germany, America, Israel and 34 other countries. The release says it “became the world’s first ever global TV documentary series” and for the first time “conveyed the horror of the European concentration camps directly from the mouths of its victims.” LaPaglia looks older…heavier, whitewalls.

The Church of Scientology has paid for a full-page ad that preemptively denounces Alex Gibney‘s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief…of course! The Scientologists have always aggressively gone after their critics so who’s surprised? The presumably scathing documentary will premiere on Sunday, 1.25, at the Sundance Film Festival, and then have a modest theatrical run before an HBO debut on March 16. What’s new to say about these dickheads anyhow? Scientology exposes were journalistically intriguing in the mid ’90s. Occasional hiccups and rants from Tom Cruise certainly brought renewed attention to the controversial church over the years. But when I first read about Gibney’s doc I kinda went “meh.” As Michael Cieply notes in a 1.15 N.Y. Times piece about the full-page ad, “The church’s forceful response risks calling attention to what might have seemed like old news.” But who am I to pre-judge? I’ll be there with bells on when Going Clear has its first peek-out at the MARC theatre at 2:30 pm.

After being handed an MVP Award at last night’s Critics Choice Movie Awards (which I attended, sitting at table #49), Jessica Chastain spoke of the general need for more “diversity.” Right now diversity is a p.c. code term that means Selma‘s Ava DuVernay should have been nominated for a Best Director Oscar (it would have been a nice token gesture) and David Oyelowo should have been nominated for Best Actor (okay but who would he have bumped?). Things would feel more congenial if this had happened, for sure, but I still don’t think Selma is good enough to be celebrated as one of the year’s absolute best. That’s a minority opinion, I recognize. It can also get you branded as someone who doesn’t quite get it and who should perhaps (what do you think, guys?) be kept at arm’s length. Trust me — that’s what the cool kidz are saying without actually saying. Get with the pro-Selma mentality or we won’t let you attend parties and meetings in our little clubhouse.

“Today is Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, so it got me thinking about our need to build the strength of diversity in our industry,” Chastain said, “and to stand together against homophobic, sexist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and racist agendas. I’m an optimist, and I can’t help but feel hopeful about the future of film, especially looking at all these beautiful people in this room. Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’ And I would like to encourage everyone in this room to please speak up.”

That’s funny because we all know what that means apart from what King meant originally. It means that “we all need to tell the conservative, sentimental fuddy-duds to back off and reconsider because this is right effing now and we need to nominate and celebrate films like Selma because that Norman Jewison world all you grandpas grew up with is no more.”

Yes, agreed, of course. And I trust I don’t need to prove to anyone that nobody despises the Academy fuddy-duds more than myself. But that still doesn’t mean Selma is anything more than a good, sturdy capturing of a noble, tumultuous struggle. Y’all need to calm down.

I almost fell out of my chair this morning when I read the following sentence by Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir: “You can certainly defend, in the abstract, the idea that movie awards should be entirely about the art and craft of cinema, not about who made the movies.” Really? We’re allowed to say such a thing? But if we do, won’t we get ourselves into trouble?

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That 1.66:1 French Bluray of Pork Chop Hill that I mentioned on 1.5 arrived yesterday. Some might think it eccentric if not wasteful to buy a Bluray of this 1959 Lewis Milestone-Gregory Peck war film when I can just as easily rent a high-def version on Amazon.com, but the Amazon version is cropped at 1.78 and the recently-popped Olive Bluray is cleavered at 1.85, and there’s a world of difference between these and 1.66. Consider the 1.66 vs. 1.85 screen captures below — either you get it or you don’t. The only problem with the import is that I can’t seem to kill the French subtitles when I play the original English-language version.