This poster was tweeted by Judd Apatow last night and it seems to have debuted on 12.7, but I swear I saw this a good month ago if not longer. But I can’t find any evidence of that. And why doesn’t the toothbrush lady look more like Leslie Mann?

This Is 40 costar, comic legend and slight rapscallion Albert Brooks spoke with me at last night’s premiere after-party. I suggested a phoner and Brooks promised to call today at 2 pm. He called at 1:58 pm. I asked him to ring back on my digital land line, and while things were a little halting or lunging and unsteady at first, we would up doing a nice healthy 55-minute chat about death. I don’t know why I just said that when we dovetailed into death issues three or four times at most.

Albert Brooks

Topics included a possible Curb Your Enthusiasm-type cable show, Brooks’ too-short This is 40 scene with John Lithgow (which reminds me of his party-inquisition scene with William Hurt in Broadcast News), the fact that Brooks identifies more with his menacing Drive guy than his father-of-Paul Rudd character in Judd Apatow‘s film, the mentality of movie-award giving, Lost in America, John Lennon‘s “lost weekend” period, writing issues, the dying of pets, old-age issues, Big Ideas vs. movies about nothing and so on.

I had been thrashing around all morning trying to think of some Brooks questions that would lead to intrigue and excitement while simultaneously talking about life, love and money with a lady friend, sussing out the Golden Globe nominations and writing that agonized, down-on-my-knees Lincoln plea to anyone and everyone. I managed to type out about five or six Brooks questions before he called but once we got going it was easy.

Again, the mp3

The apparent strength of Lincoln as the likeliest lazy-default Best Picture winner (based on the apparent weakening of Les Miz plus the 4 SAG nominations and 7 Golden Globe nominations) is, of course, hugely depressing for me personally. It feels awful. I can feel my spirit pouring out onto the floor like sand. But how is the likelihood of Lincoln not a shrug for the vast majority out there? I’m asking this.

Forget respectful, admiring and approving. I approve of Steven Spielberg‘s film as far as it goes but who out there is genuinely feeling the flutter and the levitation from this somber, dutiful, milky-white-lighted legislative procedural slog? Because if a movie isn’t lifting you off the ground or lighting you up or turning you around in some emphatic, lapel-grabbing way, what are you doing? Why the hell would you want to put it at the top of the 2012 Best Picture list? Who are you? What are you eating?

I’m speaking honestly here. I’m not just doing my usual Spielberg-default critique. I really do know a few things…a lot more than a few about what constitutes a truly exceptional, stand-tall movie, and I’m really, really speaking from a place of truth and concern.

Just separate Daniel Day Lewis‘s performance from the film itself. That’s all I’m asking…okay, begging that people try and do for five minutes. Separate that performance from the film and try and extricate yourself from the effect of having ingested the lore of Abraham Lincoln from the time you were seven or eight years old. If you do these two things, Lincoln will still be on your list (because it’s somewhere between pretty good and quite good) but it won’t be on the top of it — trust me.

You might want to also recall how Lincoln begins with a flagrantly phony scene, probably the phoniest in any of the top-ranked 2012 films. I’m speaking of that crassly calculated, totally bullshit opener in which President Lincoln shares some quiet words with four Union soldiers (two white, two black) under the cloak of night, and how this leads to one of the black guys, played by David Oyelowo, to polite tell his Commander-in-Chief that he’s irked and disappointed that men of color aren’t allowed to become officers. And then he recites a portion of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and he walks away from Lincoln as he continues to recite, withdrawing like a member of a chorus in an early 1950s stage production of Brigadoon. For this scene alone Lincoln deserves to lose. I mean that.

The ground-lifters are Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, Holy Motors, Anna Karenina and the last 40 minutes of Les Miserables. No lie, no spin, no hot air…fact.

I don’t know why I woke up late. The Asian jetlag thing had been losing strength. But I did for some reason, and I woke up at 10 am to the Golden Globe nominations and also to Nikki Finke’s annual (and entirely valid) HFPA diss rant. Do I take 45 minutes to re-code everything to HE format or just go to Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily and copy and paste?

The latter. I’ve got a lot going on today. Albert Brooks said he’d call at 2 pm and I need to write up some questions. Plus everything else.

My first GG response was “why did they blow off This Is 40‘s Leslie Mann for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical”? She’s really quite good — call her exceptional — in Judd Apatow‘s film. And I was settling into her polish and timing and restraint and emotional undercurrent during last night’s re-viewing at teh Chinese. I didn’t expect to feel this surge, but I did. And I know that what Mann does is far more effective in a comedic vein than what (no offense) Emily Blunt achieves in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen or Meryl Streep in Hope Springs. It’s unkind, unfair, unjust.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has pointed out that no GG Best Director nomination for Tom Hooper “probably spells trouble for Les Miserables…in the past 30 years only 2 films won Best Picture without their helmers have been nominated by the HFPA: Crash and Driving Miss Daisy.”

1. BEST MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA
a. ARGO Warner Bros. Pictures, GK Films, Smokehouse Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures
b. DJANGO UNCHAINED The Weinstein Company, Columbia Pictures; The Weinstein Company/Sony Pictures Releasing
c. LIFE OF PI Fox 2000 Pictures; Twentieth Century Fox
d. LINCOLN DreamWorks Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox; Touchstone Pictures
e. ZERO DARK THIRTY Columbia Pictures and Annapurna Pictures; Sony Pictures Releasing

2. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA
a. JESSICA CHASTAIN ZERO DARK THIRTY
b. MARION COTILLARD RUST AND BONE
c. HELEN MIRREN HITCHCOCK
d. NAOMI WATTS THE IMPOSSIBLE
e. RACHEL WEISZ THE DEEP BLUE SEA

3. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA
a. DANIEL DAY-LEWIS LINCOLN
b. RICHARD GERE ARBITRAGE
c. JOHN HAWKES THE SESSIONS
d. JOAQUIN PHOENIX THE MASTER
e. DENZEL WASHINGTON FLIGHT

4. BEST MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL
a. THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL – Blueprint Pictures/Participant Media; Fox Searchlight Pictures
b. LES MISERABLES – Universal Pictures, A Working Title Films/Cameron Mackintosh Productions; Universal Pictures
c. MOONRISE KINGDOM – Indian Paintbrush; Focus Features
d. SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN – CBS Films; CBS Films
e. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK – The Weinstein Company; The Weinstein Company

5. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL
a. EMILY BLUNT SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN
b. JUDI DENCH THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL
c. JENNIFER LAWRENCE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
d. MAGGIE SMITH QUARTET
e. MERYL STREEP HOPE SPRINGS

6. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL
a. JACK BLACK BERNIE
b. BRADLEY COOPER SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
c. HUGH JACKMAN LES MISERABLES
d. EWAN MCGREGOR SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN
e. BILL MURRAY HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

7. BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
a. BRAVE Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios; Walt Disney Pictures
b. FRANKENWEENIE Walt Disney Pictures; Walt Disney Pictures
c. HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Animation; Sony Pictures Releasing
d. RISE OF THE GUARDIANS DreamWorks Animation LLC; Paramount Pictures
e. WRECK-IT RALPH Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios; Walt Disney Pictures

8. BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
a. AMOUR (AUSTRIA) Les Films Du Losange, X Filme Creative Pool, Wega Film; Sony Pictures Classics
b. A ROYAL AFFAIR (DENMARK) (En kongelig affære) Zentropa Entertainment; Magnolia Pictures
c. THE INTOUCHABLES (FRANCE) (Les Intouchables) The Weinsten Company, Quad Productions, Gaumont, TF1 Films Production, Ten Films, Chaocorp; The Weinstein Company
d. KON-TIKI (NORWAY/UK/DENMARK) Nordisk Film Production, Recorded Picture Company
e. RUST AND BONE (FRANCE) (De rouille et d’os)

9. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE
a. AMY ADAMS THE MASTER
b. SALLY FIELD LINCOLN
c. ANNE HATHAWAY LES MISERABLES
d. HELEN HUNT THE SESSIONS
e. NICOLE KIDMAN THE PAPERBOY

10. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE
a. ALAN ARKIN ARGO
b. LEONARDO DICAPRIO DJANGO UNCHAINED
c. PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN THE MASTER
d. TOMMY LEE JONES LINCOLN
e. CHRISTOPH WALTZ DJANGO UNCHAINED

11. BEST DIRECTOR – MOTION PICTURE
a. BEN AFFLECK ARGO
b. KATHRYN BIGELOW ZERO DARK THIRTY
c. ANG LEE LIFE OF PI
d. STEVEN SPIELBERG LINCOLN
e. QUENTIN TARANTINO DJANGO UNCHAINED

12. BEST SCREENPLAY – MOTION PICTURE
a. MARK BOAL ZERO DARK THIRTY
b. TONY KUSHNER LINCOLN
c. DAVID O. RUSSELL SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
d. QUENTIN TARANTINO DJANGO UNCHAINED
e. CHRIS TERRIO ARGO

13. BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – MOTION PICTURE
a. MYCHAEL DANNA LIFE OF PI
b. ALEXANDRE DESPLAT ARGO
c. DARIO MARIANELLI ANNA KARENINA
d. TOM TYKWER, CLOUD ATLAS JOHNNY KLIMEK, REINHOLD HEIL
e. JOHN WILLIAMS LINCOLN

Somehow the issues and speedbumps that I felt or sensed when I first saw Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40 in late October dissipated when I saw it again on Wednesday night. So this is one of those “it’s pretty good but it works a lot better if you see it twice” movies. Costar Albert Brooks came over and said “hi” at the after-party. I also spoke to costar Chris O’Dowd, who is absolutely legendary in The Sapphires, which the Weinstein Co. is bringing out in March.

(l.) This Is 40 director-writer Judd Apatow, Universal Studios president Ron Meyer at the Roosevelt Hotel after-party — Wednesday, 12.12, 10:20 pm.

(l. to r.) This Is 40 costars Paul Rudd, Albert Brooks, Robert Smigel.

“This steam-driven military weapon of an enterprise is a sobering reminder of just how tinny a musical Les Miserables was in the first place — the listless music and lyrics by Alain Boubil, Claude-Michel Schonberg and Herbert Kretzmer, the derivative characters fashioned from Oliver! scraps. And even if you do come to Tom Hooper‘s neighborhood loving the show, having seen seven stage productions and named your cat Gavroche after the urchin who hitches his fate to those of grown-up revolutionaries, well, you’re in for a gobsmacking: This ‘prestige’ production is at heart a minor road-show carnival, leaving behind little but tinsel as it rumbles through the streets of Awardstown.” — from review by Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum.

“Startled” is one way of expressing my reaction to Django Unchained‘s 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Another is “gobsmacked.” Because make no mistake — this film is a wankathon and a piece of faux-“performance art” that is so air-quoted and layered (or lathered) with ironic references that it doesn’t stand or breathe on its own, not by a damn sight. It’s “the kind of vaguely awful film that only a talented person could have made,” as Pauline Kael (I think) once said in a review.

I wasn’t convulsing and moaning in my seat, but I felt bored after the first hour and undernourished and close to appalled during the second hour (i.e., the dead zone) and then irritated as hell during the last 45 minutes.

“Talented but wildly undisciplined” is Quentin Tarantino‘s cross to bear. For his latest film is two hours and 45 minutes of indulgent spaghetti-western cheese whiz with leather hats and rifles and six-guns and horses. Plus an endlessly talky, verbally flatulent second hour (after a reasonably tight and engaging first 60 minutes) that has to be experienced to be believed. Yappity-yappity-yap-yap-yappity-yap-yap…we can talk all night long and into tomorrow morning and all the top critics will still kiss our ass and give us hand jobs…yaw-haw! Nigger twirlin’ a six-shooter! Nigger! Nigger on a horse! “Did you see a sign on my front yard that said ‘dead nigger storage’?” Oh, wait…

Django Unchained is a cowboy-playtime-in-a-sandbox movie that screams “movie!” every step of the way and isn’t worth a damn after the first hour. And yet critics are still going “whoo-hoo, that Quentin…my, what a clever-ass fellow! And how clever and knowledgable he makes us feel! Clever and knowledgable and highly moral because we approve of his anti-slavery message, and so we agree that white slave owners of the 1860s need to be shot, speared and slaughtered just like the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds.” So everybody comes out happy and looking good.

If you’re not that hip and you don’t mind sleazy supporting characters drooling all over each other and grotesque overkill from time to time & if you believe that long running times and blood-spattered walls are a mark of aesthetic integrity, you’ll probably love Django Unchained.

I just want to say upfront that I think slavery is, was and always will be a vile, terrible thing, and that Hollywood Elsewhere stands foursquare with Quentin Tarantino and the Weinstein Co. in condemning this wretched practice. HE also agrees, incidentally, that Abraham Lincoln and U.S. Congress did a very fine thing when they passed the 13th Amendment.

The real subject of Django Unchained isn’t “let’s get the slave owners of the middle 1800s the way we got the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds.” The real subject is “how lazy and bloated and wanky can the writing and filmmaking stylings of Quentin Tarantino get?”

The guy started out dense and cool and hard in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction — his glorious peak period. Things got a little looser and less urgent with Jackie Brown, but the plotting and the flashbacks were nicely interwoven, and the performances (especially Robert Forster and Samuel L. Jackson‘s) were dead center. And then Tarantino became more of a style hound and a shitload-of-film-references guy with Kill Bill Volume 1 and Kill Bill Volume 2. I kinda loved Deathproof, the jukebox, hot girls and fast-car movie that was part of Grindhouse, but I was mostly bored and pissed off at Inglourious Basterds (especially by the beating the head of a German officer with a baseball bat scene). Django is about masturbation and masochism and show-off moves, and in my book a movie that uses “slavery” in order to get low, cruel and cheap.

Shot like an Almeria ’70s western (those fast-zoom shots are one such signature) and pointedly inauthentic in terms of period detail and speech, Django Unchained is the least “real” and most self-consciously fake Tarantino film ever made. It’s semi-“thoughtful”, sometimes comedic and smirking and incredibly impressed with itself. It’s a personality movie start to finish. Mildly funny a few times, lurid, unsubtle, tedious, simultaneously Mandingo-esque and an anti-Mandingo, a hoot, astonishing at times and too effing long. But at least it’s not three hours, which it allegedly was a while back.

I guess it’s written somewhere that any movie about a moral pestilence has to end with punishment and cleansing of evil behavior, and Django Unchained certainly does that. Although I wouldn’t call the walls of DiCaprio’s mansion “clean” at the end. What they need is a five-man crew with sponges, rags, buckets of hot water and a container of Mr. Clean.

Prescient Todd McCarthy observation #1: “The anecdotal, odyssey-like structure of this long, talky saga could be considered indulgent [as] some might object to the writer-director’s tone, historical liberties, comic japes or other issues”…do ya think so?

Prescient Todd McCarthy observation #2: “A stellar cast and strong action and comedy elements will attract a good-sized audience internationally, though distaste for the subject matter and the irreverent take on a tragic subject might make some prospective viewers hesitate.”

As the movie is more of a QT variety show than anything that rings of commitment or sincerity, the performances, flamboyant as they are, only sink in so deeply. I don’t think Jamie Foxx‘s Django performance is strong or tasty enough, if you wanna know. He looks cool and sometimes cuts a dashing figure, but the film is not really his to own. Christoph Waltz‘s Dr. King Schultz, a German bounty hunter with a loquacious speaking style, has more pizazz to throw around. Southern plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) struck me as a typical Tarantino gasbag. Samuel L. Jackson‘s obsequious Stephen, Candie’s all-knowing, totally-subservient house slave, might be the most intriguing. Kerry Washington‘s Broomhilda…naah.

The scuzzy supporting cast includes Don Johnson, James Remar, Dennis Christopher, James Russo, Don Stroud, Tom Wopat, Bruce Dern, Russ Tamblyn, Robert Carradine, Tom Savini, Michael Parks and Tarantino himself. (Tarantino has gone from looking thin to well fed to seriously fat — he’s literally doubled in size since he played Mr. Brown in Reservoir Dogs 20 years ago. Time to lay off the booze and the steaks and the cherry pies and hit the treadmill.)

Almost all movie deaths, it seems, are brutal, shocking, bloody, sudden, ghastly, traumatic. Nice little nod-off deaths — like Sir Cedric Hardwicke‘s passing in The Ten Commandments or Keir Dullea‘s in 2001: A Space Odyssey — have been few and far between over the last 50 years. Is real-life death ever smooth and easy? Very rarely, it seems. I’m almost tempted to say “only if you do yourself in with pills” but I’m sure exceptions abound.

James Toback once told me that (I’m paraphrasing) “almost none of us are going to die as pleasantly as we’d like to…it’s always under circumstances we can’t foresee, much less plan for, and sooner than we’d like.” And the likelihood that you’re going to die while lying comfortably in bed between recently-washed sheets is almost nil. The odds are that your final throes are going to either be painful or traumatic or grotesque, and possibly a combination of all three.

There’s a fairly great Albert Brooks/Judd Apatow q & a in the Apatow-edited Vanity Fair comedy issue. It’s summarized in the online version but a Brooks quote about “being ahead of the herd”, readable only in the magazine version, is the best of it. Apatow tells Brooks that he’s always been respected “as a bit of a futurist,” and Brooks says he realized early on “I should at least take [that] as a compliment because that’s all it’s good for.

“My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist wa s someone who rode away ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don’t have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you’ll be the richest.”

Also: “Brooks says the comedian who made the biggest impression on him when he was starting out was Jack Benny. ‘Because of his minimalism. And the way he got laughs. He was at the center of a storm, he let his players do the work, and just by being there made it funny. That was mind-boggling to me,’ Brooks says.

“He tells Apatow that early on in his career he performed on The Tonight Show one night when Benny was on. ‘There was always that last two minutes where Johnny was asking people, ‘Thank you for coming — what do you have coming up?’ And during the last commercial Jack Benny leaned over to Johnny Carson and said, ‘When we get back, ask me where I’m going to be, will you?’ So they came back. Johnny said, ‘I want to thank Albert. Jack, where are you going to be performing?’ And Jack Benny said, ‘Never mind about me — this is the funniest kid I’ve ever seen!'”

“‘And it was this profound thing,’ Brooks continues. ‘Like, Oh, that’s how you lead your life. Be generous and you can be the best person who ever lived.'”