I don’t trust any journalist who describes Daniel Craig as “the man with the golden hair” so I’m naturally suspicious of a just-posted review of Skyfall by the Mirror‘s David Edwards. He sounds too giddy. So his declaration that Skyfall “might be the best James Bond film ever” comes with a grain of salt.

“Enthralling, explosive and often very funny, Skyfall doesn’t just exceed expectations but shatters them like a bullet to the head,” Edwards writes. “Unfortunately, the very best thing about the 23rd 007 film has to remain top secret, in case it spoils the experience. Let’s just say that what starts as an action movie becomes a weepie in its final ten minutes.”

“After a cracking opening scene in Istanbul in which Bond is shot and left for dead, we travel to London where MI6 boss M (Judi Dench) is in hot water after a hard-drive containing her field operatives identities goes missing.

“It’s only with the reappearance of 007 that she learns the thief is a former agent, played by Javier Bardem, who plans to use the knowledge to bring down his former boss.

“While Skyfall looks and feels like a Bond film — the exotic locales, the memorable villain and an appearance from that iconic silver Aston Martin — director Sam Mendes hasn’t been afraid to play with the formula.

“The themes of cyber terrorism, including a bomb attack on a rush-hour London Tube train, bring the franchise bang up to date.

“And, believe it or not, there’s even some playful flirting between him and Bardem’s openly-gay villain.

“The gadget-loving Q also returns after a 10-year absence, this time played by Ben Whishaw, and gets the biggest laugh of the film when, after supplying Bond with a revolver, remarks, ‘Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go for that anymore.’

“Craig is as reliable as ever, portraying a spy as icy as his cobalt-blue eyes while Bardem’s character rivals the likes of Blofeld and Jaws as 007’s most transfixing bad guy.

“Prepare to be shaken, stirred… and amazed.”

This photo is three or four days old, and my first inclination was to ignore it because it’s a cheap shot in and of itself, even without the unfairly worded AP caption that they apologized for earlier today. But it’s been making me laugh for the last three days, and I think that’s worth mentioning. My favorite caption: “Just pull it out. It’s just a carrot. Just grab hold and pull it out. It wont hurt, it’s fine.”

It also reminded me of that moment in Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom when one of the middle-aged fascists pulls his pants down in front of several young lads and…I’d rather not describe it further but this is what came to mind.

Caption suggestions?

Two nights ago I attended a party at the Beverly Hilton for the forthcoming Baja Int’l Film Festival (Wednesday, 11.14 thru Saturday, 11.17), and while I was there I spoke with the co-directors, Scott and Sean Cross. They also co-direct the Vail Film Festival (which I attended in April 2004) and the Colorado Film Institute. The brothers were hired by some big-wheel Baja businessmen to put Cabo on the film festival map, and so they lined up name-value board members (including Edward Norton, Carlos Reygadas and filmmaker/journalist Godfrey Cheshire) and put it all together.

Scott and Sean Cross, co-directors of the Baja Int’l Film Festival — Beverly Hilton hote, . (No offense but I don’t know which one is which.)

The festival lineup won’t be announced for another few days, but I’m hoping to see some interesting new films along with current faves (No, Post Tenebras Lux, etc.)

I had two reasons for attending. One, because some kind of special light and verve has been coming out of films made by south-of-the-border filmmakers (Pablo Larrain, Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Guillermo del Toro, Gerardo Naranjo) over the last several years, and I’d like to see a lot more films from this territory. And two, like any opportunistic freeloading journalist I’m always looking to prostitute my services cover any film festivals happening in any sort of exotic attractive location, and Cabo sounded like a good place to visit. They’re offering a festival pass and comped hotel rooms. Being a cheapskate I’m also looking for round-trip air fare, which runs about $350.

Here, again, is my mp3 with the Cross brothers. Best of luck to them and the festival, and I hope they meet and bond with Gerardo Naranjo, director of Miss Bala….with whom they haven’t yet had the pleasure.

Nine days ago I repeated the indisputable fact that Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors is one of 2012’s great films, the L’Age d’Or of our time, a landmark madhouse flick. The Rotten Tomatoes gang more or less feels the same. (Doleful Metacritic hasn’t even bothered to post reviews.) But there are hurdles (slight ones) keeping even some go-getter journalists from wanting to see it.

Holy Motors costar Kylie Minogue, press-shy director Leos Carax prior to last night’s NY Film Festival screening outside Alice Tully Hall.

Holy Motors is really “out there”, for one, and that always intimidates or gives pause to people who’ve never dropped acid or mescaline and who really like their meat loaf, mashed potatoes and green beans. And Indomina, the film’s U.S. distributor, has been following a standard lowball indie strategy (limited bookings, not much heat). As I said on 10.3, they haven’t generated much “thunder and swagger” on the film’s behalf.

On top of which Carax “has often kept the press at arm’s length,” as N.Y. Times profiler Dennis Lim wrote on 10.10. The 51 year-old chain-smoking director didn’t speak to any journalists in Cannes, according to Lim, and apparently it’s apparently been a struggle to get him to agree to fly to Los Angeles.

Even fellow columnists have been reluctant to see Holy Motors. “It’s not a priority right now because it doesn’t have much of an award-season profile,” one guy said this morning.

This is so wrong, so upside down. I’m seeing Holy Motors again tonight, but in one of the tiny little shoebox theatres at Raleigh Studios. That’s the only kind of facility Indomina wants to pay for. Last night it had a big New York Film Festival showing at Alice Tully Hall…yes! And my Cannes screening was inside the Grand Lumiere with a packed house giving it a standing, cheering ovation. But when Indomina takes over Holy Motors becomes take-out food instead of a great meal. A nickle-and-dime thing, a DVD in a basket, a VOD.

Carax has made one of the most radical and wildly visionary films of the 21st Century, and it needs to be shown big and vivid and gleaming. Eyeballs need to be popped with a string of gala celebrations involving hundreds if not thousands and with a fusillade of flashbulbs and a champagne after-party and all the attendant hoopla. And yet there’s nothing. Not any more. I suppose it’s better to get some kind of theatrical release, even one from Indomina, than no release at all. But what a bummer.

Please see Holy Motors. Please. Really.

Hollywood rank-and-filers will usually forgive and work with a formerly unbalanced, possibly substance-abusing artist who’s cleaned up and is looking to fly right. But the case for forgiveness is harder to sell if the unbalanced artist makes tacky-looking Lifetime movies like Liz & Dick. And it’s damn near impossible to sell if the unbalanced artist allows the community to see her openly fret about her own employment and financial security situation. People really hate that. It reminds them too much of their own worry and desperation and their 24/7 efforts to suppress same.

Which is why Lindsay Lohan finally completed her years-long quest for definitive career suicide when she told E! last night that she’s endorsing Mitt Romney. “I just think employment is really important right now,” he told E!‘s John Boone. “So, as of now, Mitt Romney. As of now.” That’s it — that’s the stake in the heart. She’ll never get back in now. Because (a) she sounds like a scared loser and (b) she’s gone over to the Dark Side in search of comfort. Drugs, debauch and jail time are totally forgivable. But not drugs, debauch, jail time and Mitt Romney. That’s cyanide.

And speaking of Elizabeth Taylor, I cant shake an image I’ve had in my head since yesterday of she and Jack Kennedy and Robert “Eliot Ness” Stack having a threesome. Not to mention Taylor doing Ronald Reagan, which happened in her late teens or sometime in the late ’40s. The JFK-Stack thing happened in 1948.

I’m giving the Vice-Presidential debate to Joe Biden, 65 to 35 or 70 to 30 over Paul Ryan. A lot of fast scrapping, a lot of punches thrown, a few enjoyable interruptions. I understand that Biden laughing and guffawing when Ryan went into his b.s. is more attractive than snarling and double-taking, but I wanted less of it. Ryan did the usual sidesteppping on core beliefs (i.e., wanting to cut back on middle-class entitlements to reduce national debt) and performed like a steady hammer. Moderator Martha Raddatz was sharp, disciplined, focused and in control — much better than Jim Lehrer was last week.

Ruben Fleischer‘s The Gangster Squad had to abandon its 9.7.12 debut in order to replace a theatre-shooting scene that echoed the Aurora massacre. It’s now opening on 1.11.13. But this doesn’t change what I observed last May, which is that Fleischer’s fllm seems to be taking a fairly fast and loose approach to facts a la Brian DePalma‘s The Untouchables (’87).

“It’s being sold as a ‘get Mickey Cohen‘ movie in the same way The Untouchables was a ‘get Al Capone’ flick,” I wrote on 5.9.12. “But just as the real-life Eliot Ness was portrayed as having made noise and gotten tough with Al Capone, in real life he pretty much stood by while the feds nailed the Chicago gangster tor tax evasion.

“Likewise the real-life Gangster Squad, led by John O’Mara (Josh Brolin in the film) and Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling, ditto), never killed or jailed or put legendary L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) out of business. They mostly seem to have messed with his operations to some extent, or otherwise harassed and irritated. But that was it.

“Like Capone, Cohen did time for tax evasion. Two stretches, in fact — one from the early to mid ’50s and the second from ’61 through ’72. The real-life Gangster Squad may or may not have played a role in helping to put Cohen in jail for the first tax-evasion rap, but so far I haven’t read, learned or been told that. (I had a chat yesterday with Tere Tereba, author of ‘Mickey Cohen: The Life and Times of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster,’ and she didn’t seem persuaded that the Gangster Squad had that much to do with it.)

This new trailer for Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty (Sony, 12.19) is obviously a huge improvement over the initial teaser, which came out in early August and was greeted with a chorus of yawns and people saying “really?…that’s it?” Good on whoever cut this new one. We now have a film to look forward to. Thank you.

Two musical notes: (a) Today’s ear bug is “Pretty Ballerina,” the 1967 Left Banke single (written by pianist Michael Brown about Renee Fladen) and one of the tunes heard in David Chase‘s Not Fade Away; (b) I’ve argued for years that the doo-wop chorus sung by The Tokens in “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is “ah-weem-ah-wepp, ah-weem-ah-wepp” — i.e., “wepp” with a “p” sound. So obvious.

With Ben Affleck‘s Argo opening tomorrow, I’m re-running chunks from two HE riffs about it, one posted during the Telluride Film Festival and the other a pushback thing I ran in mid-September.

(1) “Affleck’s period drama, set during the 1979 and ’80 Iran hostage crisis and based on fact, is a partly light-hearted, partly riveting drama about the rescuing of six American foreign-service workers who had taken shelter in Tehran’s Canadian embassy after the storming of the U.S. embassy and the taking of hostages. An enterprising CIA guy named Tony Mendez (Affleck) devises a plan to hoodwink Iranian officials into believing that these six are filmmakers looking to use Iranian locations for a fake, cheesy-sounding sci-fi film called Argo.

(2) “Argo starts out as a somber docu-drama, and then shifts into a kind of flip jocular vein (especially with the appearance of John Goodman and Alan Arkin as a couple of Hollywood operators who assist Affleck in creating the backstory for the phony film), and then somber again and then sad and then revved again and then really, really tense. In short, it’s smart and absorbing for first two-thirds to three-quarters, but it’s the suspenseful final act that brings it home.

(3) Affleck’s direction “is clean and concise and doesn’t waste time or footage. The screenplay by Chris Terrio is aces. And the cast hits nothing but true notes — Affleck as Mendez, Bryan Cranston as his CIA boss, Arkin and Goodman as the Hollywooders, Victor Garber as Iran’s Canadian ambassador who protected the six when they were hiding in his residence, and Kyle Chandler as the late Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. And Argo delivers superb period detail all the way through — technology, cars, clothes, haircuts, everything.

(4) “It’s a good, smart, satisfying adult thriller — a story well told and highly suspenseful, for sure. It’s pleasing to see a tough situation resolved through ingenuity and guts, and I’m sure it’ll wind up as a Best Picture contender. I don’t happen to think it’s finally one for the ages, but that’s me. Argo is a well-crafted, highly satisfying caper film with a certain patriotic resonance that basically says ‘job well done, guys…you should be proud.'”

(5) “Argo is further proof that Affleck has clearly, seriously upped his directing game. He really is the new Sydney Pollack, and I say that as someone who knew, enjoyed, occasionally chatted with and deeply respected the director of Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, The Yakuza, Out of Africa, The Firm, The Way We Were, etc.

(6) “But it’s basically a movie designed to enthrall, charm, amuse, thrill, move and excite. It’s a comfort-blanket movie that basically says ‘this was the problem, and this is how it was solved…and the guys who made it happen deserve our applause and respect…no?’ Yes, they do. But above all Argo aims to please. It skillfully creates suspense elements that probably weren’t that evident when the story actually went down. And it throws in two or three divorced-father-hangs-with-young-son scenes, and some CIA razmatazz and a few ’80s Hollywood cheeseball jokes and lathers it all on.

(7) “Yes, that jacked-up suspense finale that ‘works’ but it doesn’t feel genuine. You know it doesn’t. That last nail-biting bit with the police cars hot-dogging the departing jet on the Tehran airport runway? Standard Hollywood bullshit.

(8) “If I was a high-school teacher and Argo was a term paper, I would give it an 87 or 88. Okay, an 89. It’s obviously good, but it doesn’t exude paralyzing greatness. Like many highly regarded Hollywood films, it adheres to familiar classic centrist entertainment values…and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very pleasing thing, but it’s a caper film. Boil it down and it’s Ocean’s 11 set in Washington, D.C., L.A. and Tehran of 1978 and ’89 without the money or the flip glamorous vibe or the Clooney-Pitt-Damon-Cheadle combustion.”

A DVD Beaver screen capture of the new Rosemary’s Baby Bluray reveals an error I’ve never seen before. In the glass on a washing machine door you’ll notice a reflection of one of those old-fashioned studio lights on a pedestal. Definitely a major screwup, especially from a perfection freak like Roman Polanski. Hey, Roman, if you’re reading from Paris — why didn’t you and your Criterion homies digitally correct this? I would have.

DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze calls the Criterion Bluray (out 10.30) ” a great release that doesn;t disappoint…the image quality has wonderful film grain textures and contrast is at Criterion’s usual hallmark standard. Everything is sharper and the more intense colors breathe new life in the viewing presentation.”

There’s an Azazel Jacobs film being assembled called The Grace That Keeps This World. Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reports that Glenn Close, James Franco and Brit Marling will costar, and I can tell you right now that any movie title using the word “grace” is looking for grief.

A movie with “grace” in the title means “watch out…here comes something precious.” Joe and Jane Popcorn, trust me, will avoid this film like the plague if and when it comes to the local plex (which it probably won’t — the title screams “Sundance darling” and “VOD”). Yes, the excellent Maria Full Of Grace was a must-see, but Joe and Jane ignored it. Grace is Gone, Grace Quiqley, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea…”grace” on a marquee is an omen of cancer.

Fleming’s story says Matthew Aldrich‘s script (based on Tom Bailey‘s book) “follows a father and his sons as they prepare for the upcoming hunting season,” blah blah. And that “family conflicts arise when a rookie environmental cop begins an investigation of hunting violations that reveals a family divided by their life choices,” blah blah. They’ll be better off calling this thing Hunting Season, bad as that sounds.

Jacobs’ last film was Terri, about John C. Reilly dealing with a morbidly obese 15 year-old (Jacob Wysocki).