As of 8:30 am Pacific the New York Film Critics Circle had given its Best Documentary prize to The Central Park Five, a fine, sturdy, New York-centric doc that nonetheless bothered me for reasons I’ve explained. (No need to dredge it all up again.) And the Best First Film award went to David France‘s How To Survive a Plague. I’m off to a 9 am appointment and won’t be free until 11 am.

It would appear that JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek: Into Darkness (Paramount, 5.17.13) is enveloped in some kind of apocalyptic wasteland along with a time travel flourish of some kind. It would therefore appear that things are going to be grim, grim, grim all over due to “an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization,” leading Captain Kirk to “lead a manhunt into a war-zone world to capture a one-man weapon of mass destruction,” etc.

Paramount’s The Guilt Trip (12.19), a road comedy about a 60ish widowed Jewish mom (Barbra Streisand) and her downbeat inventor son (Seth Rogen), was snuck Sunday afternoon at the AMC Century City. No reviews until later but it wasn’t half bad — adult laughs, low-key tone, character-driven, no vulgarity, not classic but likable and entertaining and occasionally heartfelt. Pic was exec produced by Rogen and Streisand, directed by Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) and written by Dan Fogelman.

Rogen and Streisand showed up after the screening and did a live q & a that was close-circuited to other theatres. The crowd was packed with impassioned, eager-beaver fans of Streisand’s albums and particularly of Yentl.

Rogen plays an inventor, Andy Brewster, who’s trying to sell a natural-elements cleaner to the big chains without much success. When he discovers that the beloved ex-boyfriend of his widowed mom, Joyce (Barbra Streisand), is living and working in San Francisco, he invites her to join him on a cross-country trip as he tries to sell his cleaner (which has a really hard-to-remember name that kinda sounds like Science Cleaner but is actually Scioclean or something like that) so they can wind up in San Fran and reunited with the old boyfriend. And yet the way Joyce nags and nudges pisses Andy off and puts him in a bad mood half the time.

Silver Linings Playbook helmer David O. Russell is the possible weak sister among the projected Best Director Oscar nominees? I really, really don’t think so despite Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan having concluded that Ben Affleck, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hooper are “already absolute locks…aren’t they?” No, they aren’t. Not all three, I mean. Buchanan is reading two-week-old leaves.

Affleck, yes, but Hooper? Surely Buchanan has heard of the Les Miz blowback by now. And Spielberg? Why, because Lincoln is his best film since Schindler’s List and he needs to be rewarded for not succumbing to his usual instincts? Or because he and Jaunusz Kaminski went completely whole-hog on that milky white light flooding through the non-existent windows in the U.S. House of Representatives chamber? Or because he’s worth $3 billion and Academy members will receive a kind of goodwill dividend if they nominate him?

In last night’s Zero Dark Thirty riff I didn’t mention the eerily riveting score by Alexandre Desplat. It conveys appropriate doses of menace and anxiety, but in a way that perfectly suits or matches the film’s low-key, docu-drama-ish authority. Ironically the music in this clip is one of the few portions that seem a bit rote. Desplat also did the score for Argo.

“Basically I prepare for a role in the same way every time,” Chris Walken tells The Guardian‘s Sean O’Hagan in a 12.1 interview. “I take the script, I stand in my kitchen and I quietly mumble it to myself. Over and over. I keep doing that until I hear something in there. I was trained as a dancer and that stuck with me, so I’m essentially looking for a rhythm. For me, acting is all to do with rhythm. When I figure stuff out, it has to do with finding the rhythm. Always.”

“Walken grew up in Astoria, Queens, the kind of second-generation, melting-pot neighbourhood that has long since vanished in New York,” O’Hagan writes. “He once told an interviewer he ‘grew up listening to people speaking broken English…and I probably speak English almost as a second language.’ This may be the real key to his strange, almost stilted, delivery, alongside the fact that he made an early decision as an actor to wilfully disregard punctuation when reading his lines, a quirk that he guessed rightly would set him apart.”

O’Hagan misspells “willfully” in that last sentence, using only one “l” instead of the two preferred by Merrian-Webster.

Correntin Charron‘s Un petit plat pour l’homme is hereby dedicated to a friend, editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith, for reasons he’ll immediately recognize. I guess I should co-dedicate the link to MSN’s James Rocchi, who’s also a bit of a foodie. The English title is One Small Dish for Man.

For $14.98, you can now pre-order a forthcoming Bluray of Michael Mann‘s The Insider. It ships on 2.19.13, or two and a half months hence. I’ll take it, thank you, beggars can’t be choosers. But there’s something demeaning about this great 1999 film being sold to the public via Walmart. I’m asking around as we speak, but if there’s a God it will contain some decent extras. If any film cries out for a deluxe Criterion release, it’s this one. The 2000 Touchstone DVD was strictly bare bones.

The headline implies that I’ve noticed saliva spray coming from the great Al Pacino in the midst of one of his anti-corporate tortious interference rants. Not true. It’s just that I’ve never forgotten the flying missiles when I caught his lead performance of American Buffalo at a downtown Manhattan theatre 30-odd years ago. Nor have I forgotten a critic writing about same during a performance of Richard III, and quoting a line from that play in the bargain: “Why dost thou spit at me?”

“Even after a relentless, decade-long pursuit that leads to the daring midnight raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, even as she unzips the body bag to verify that the bloody corpse inside is indeed that of the slain al-Qaida leader, Jessica Chastain‘s Maya, a CIA officer, is defined primarily by her femininity in this male-dominated world.

“It’s probably a phenomenon Kathryn Bigelow unfortunately is acquainted with herself, being the rare woman in Hollywood making muscular action movies — including 2009’s The Hurt Locker, winner of six Academy Awards including best picture and director, the latter being a first for a woman. And so even as Zero Dark Thirty takes an aesthetically stripped-down look at a hugely dramatic event, it shines with the integrity and decency of its central figure: a fierce young woman who’s both dedicated and brainy, demanding and brazen.” — AP critic Christi Lemire.

In other words, Zero Dark Thirty is as personal for Bigelow and as much a piece of self-portraiture as Vertigo was for Alfred Hitchcock.

Six hours and 15 minutes ago I drove over to the Directors Guild building for a 6 pm screening of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, which I loved. Hard as nails, a tension opera, the real details, lean and mean, cinema verite, the confidence to “get there” in its own way, and when it does it pays off like a slot machine. I believed every line, every scene, every frame.

No one is a bigger admirer of The Hurt Locker than myself (I was one of the first fans out of the gate,) but Zero Dark Thirty delivers on a more precise, exacting and muscular level — it’s dry and fierce and austere and Day of the Jackal-ish (minus the sex) and much more exacting and verite than even I expected. And yet it builds and delivers like a great melodrama, or a great melodrama according to Biggy-Boal’s new rules.

And then I saw Django Unchained…a total spur-of the-moment thing. There was a big crowd inside the DGA lobby waiting to get into a 9 pm screening, and a filmmaker friend suggested that I join them so I did (what the hell) and nobody stopped me at the door…wham!

I don’t want to break the rules by riffing or reviewing, but it’s a complete Tarantino wankathon, a ’70s spaghetti western “southern”, about as un-period as it could possibly be, pop tunes on the soundtrack (including Richie Havens‘ “Freedom”), 2 hours and 45 minutes long (and a really talky second hour that has to be experienced to be believed), sadistic and blunt, semi-“thoughtful”, comedic and smirking and about as cinematically sincere as an SNL skit, pockmarked with occasional fast-zoom shots, incredibly impressed with itself, howlingly funny at times, silly, stupid, undisciplined, simultaneously Mandingo-esque and an anti-Mandingo, tedious, a hoot, astonishing at times and too effing long. But at least it’s not three hours, which it allegedly was a while back.

A lot of people are going to love Django Unchained. But forget any awards action. Okay, maybe Leonardo DiCaprio or Christoph Waltz for supporting, but I doubt it.

I don’t have time to do a full-on review of Zero Dark Thirty but it’s a great film for delivering a real drama (i.e., one disguised a a procedural) on its own terms and without going “Hollywood” except for one line that includes the word “motherfucker”, and I swear to God the guy who said it’s basically a long episode of 24 has a major blockage going on.

To me Zero Dark Thirty felt like dessert — like fresh strawberries and poundcake under a mound of Reddiwip.

Jessica Chastain gives one of the great hard-boiled performances of all time, and yet you can read her thoughts and feelings every inch of the way, clear as a bell. I still think the Best Actress Oscar belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, but I worshipped Chastain’s steely minimalism to such a degree that I’m really glad I rsvp’ed to see it a second time late tomorrow afternoon. Now I can go there again.

Don’t even talk about ZDT not being a Best Picture contender, and I don’t want to hear Tom O’Neil giggling about it in the elevator going down to the garage. Best Director for Bigelow, Best Original Screenplay for Boal. And Chastain is a Best Actress nominee, of course. And I really loved Jason Clarke as a CIA torture guy.

It’s 12:44 am now and I have to crash before long, but here I am sitting here beaming with pride that I’m not one of those Academy flabby-bellies who’ve been kvetching about how Zero Dark Thirty is too cold or unemotional. This kind of “cold” and “unemotional” turns on my spigots like almost nothing else. Thank you, God, for giving me the genes and the luck and life experience that didn’t make me into one of them. Thank you for letting me see through to the nub and heart of things, and the ability to recognize the cinematic equivalents of the freshest, best prepared foods and the chemistry of Hostess Cupcakes.

It may not warm the cockles of your heart, but for me Zero Dark Thirty is Bigelow’s masterpiece. And big cheers in particular for Boal’s screenplay, which nails right through and hones it all down, scene after scene after scene.

Incidentally: A friend said he saw Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity on 11.12 and that it’s really good. Roughly 90 minutes long, tightly fused, unfolds in real time (or something fairly close to that), a good story about a way out of a horrific situation, has fantastic 3D and a knockout opening — something like 20 minutes without a cut.

A guy who’s always talking to Academy members says they’re mentioning Amour a lot. On its own, no prompting. I’m mentioning this in the wake of Michael Haneke‘s film having won four European film awards today — Best European film, best director, actor and actress. And I’ve seen it three times now (once in Cannes, once at a screening, once on a screener). So I’m reading the signs and feeling the juju and I don’t know what else.

Just an attaboy to the Participant Media designer or subcontractor who threw this invite together. Nice. I’m doing a post-screening q & a with Ava Duvernay, I’m told. The Help director Tate Taylor is co-sponsoring or co-inviting or whatever. MON star Emayatzy Corinealdi will also attend.