I’m too whipped to write my review today of Angelina Jolie‘s In the Land of Blood and Honey, but I can tell already that my generally positive reaction, which I wasn’t expecting to have, is a minority view among critics who’ve posted today. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy is at least somewhat admiring.

“It’s clear within the first few minutes of In the Land of Blood and Honey, a blunt and brutal look at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, that this is a serious piece of work and not simply a vanity project for its debuting writer-director, Angelina Jolie,” he begins.

“But while the personal story at its core carries some nuanced shadings, this impressively mounted production gradually reveals itself first and foremost as a compendium of atrocities, a catalogue of pointless abuse and killings no one did much to stop for three years.

“Fueled by her well-known attachment to humanitarian causes, the director trains an intense light on a situation most outsiders at the time preferred not to deal with and now would rather forget about, which means that Jolie would literally have to lead people by the hand into theaters for this Film District release to do any theatrical business beyond the already committed.”

I regret to say that, for me, Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Warner Bros., 12.25) doesn’t work as well as it should, although many with whom I saw it on December 8th leapt to their feet when it ended, clapping and whoo-whooing. I was impressed and touched by aspects of this melancholy 9/11 tale — particularly by a third-act scene between 12 year-old Thomas Horn, who plays the lead, and a supporting character played by Jeffrey Wright — but too often I felt unengaged and at times perplexed.

Thomas Horn, Max Von Sydow in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

My main problem was with the urgent, often hyper manner that Horn uses (i.e., has been told to emphasize) in his portrayal of Oskar Schell, a brilliant, precocious youngster with borderline Asperger’s Syndrome. There, I’ve said it — and I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings. I’m just passing along what I felt as I watched.

The story is about Oskar’s attempt to come to terms with the 9/11 death of his jeweler father (Tom Hanks) by finding the owner of a key he’s found among his dad’s belongings — an effort that takes Oskar, whose off-balance condition makes him feel challenged and threatened by aspects of urban life, almost everywhere within the five boroughs of New York City.

But with Hanks and Sandra Bullock, as Oskar’s emotionally shell-shocked mom, relegated to a few brief parenting scenes (and maybe one or two as man and wife), Extremely Loud is almost entirely about Oskar’s world, and that, I have to say, is an excitable, agitated place I wanted to escape from. The kid has a personality like a nail being hammered into wood, and it’s not long before you’re saying “later” and “lemme outta here.”

I’ve had a chance to read a draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay, which was adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer‘s 2005 book of the same name. Roth’s script works better than Daldry’s film because you don’t have to listen to Horn while reading, and in the film you obviously do as this is not The Artist.

The character with the most screen time besides Oskar is a Man With No Name Who Doesn’t Speak and Communicates With Crib Notes, played by Max Von Sydow. Oskar meets Von Sydow when he visits his grandmother’s place across the alley from the apartment he shares with Bullock (and had shared with Hanks before his death), and is told by the elderly man that he’s a “renter.” Right off the bat you know there’s more to him than that.

So to repeat, the first 75% or 80% of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was a problem for me because of Oskar’s personality. But the Wright scene is by far the best in the film. I loved it especially because it’s one of the very few in which Horn isn’t beating people to death with his Oskar-isms. It’s so welcome when calm and inquisitive Wright settles Oskar and the whole movie down with exquisite conveyances of what and who his character is — his humanity, his sensitivity, his ordinary-ness, his decency.

I’ve never read Foer’s book but let’s presume that Roth’s adaptation does a sublime job of conveying it and perhaps kicking it up a notch or two. Plus all the flashbacks and the layering and the ins and outs. It was apparently quite a task, and it seems like a commendable achievement given the requirement Roth had to fulfill. And the third act brings it all together in a way that solves…well, most of the issues and which feels emotionally complete, for the most part.

Von Sydow delivers a poignant performance, but I didn’t feel it was as brilliant or slam-dunky as early viewers had described it.

There are several plot and character-explanation questions that didn’t come together for me, but which i’m not going to raise at this time. I don’t want to be the spoiler so let’s just hold off for now. In fact, I’m going to stop this review here and now and leave well enough alone. There’s plenty of time to get into my Part 2 nitpicks.

Incidentally: In his 12.18 review, Variety‘s Peter Debruge writes that EL&IC director Stephen Daldry and producer Scott Rudin “were both in Gotham on the day of the [9/11] attacks.” Actually, they weren’t — they were both in London working on The Hours. I double-checked this earlier today with a Rudin p.r. rep.

My admiration and affection for Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (’88) means I’ll have to buy the Criterion Bluray version when it comes out next March. I first saw Scorsese’s Biblical drama 23 years ago in L.A.’s Century City Plitt plex. I remember the barking of Christian hooligans in the plaza outside the theatre, and my being interviewed by one of the local news stations, and seeing the clip later that night.

I’ve always loved the way Scorsese creates a simulation of ecstatic release in the final seconds. (It begins at 14:20 in the clip below.) I’d like to think that Chris Hitchens heard something like this when he left the earth.

There’s nothing especially revelatory in JoBlo’s 12.16 posting of an official Warner Bros. synopsis of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity. It’s roughly the same information passed along by costar George Clooney six weeks ago.

The interesting thing for me is a comment from JoBlo’s Mike Sampson: “There have been rumors that the film will be shot, or at least presented, in one take, which would be fascinating to experience.”

In July 2010 a posting allegedly from Framestore’s website reported that “Cuaron’s long and fluid style (the opening shot alone is slated to last at least 20 minutes) leaves no cut points to hide behind.” But I’d never heard that the entire film might be a zeo-gravity adaptation of the strategy behind Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope.

The official synopsis supplies character names for the two-hander. Sandra Bullock, who has the lead role, plays Dr. Ryan Stone, “a brilliant medical engineer on her first shuttle mission.” Clooney plays Matt Kowalsky, a “veteran astronaut in command of his last flight before retiring.”

I’m sorry but Kowalsky is the name of a buck private or a sergeant or an ensign in a World War II movie. It’s the same kind of name as Muldoon, and Clooney has never struck me as a guy with a meathead name. He’s a Mike Slattery, a Darren Schmidt, a David Fleming, a Hank Grant.

“On a seemingly routine spacewalk, disaster strikes,” the synopsis reads. “The shuttle is destroyed, leaving Stone and Kowalsky completely alone — tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness.

“The deafening silence tells them they have lost any link to Earth…and any chance for rescue. As fear turns to panic, every gulp of air eats away at what little oxygen is left. But the only way home may be to go further out into the terrifying expanse of space.”

One of them is going to die, I’m presuming. Clooney’s guy, probably.

“The Artist has taken the lead in this year’s Best Picture race, according to the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby handicappers,” a spiritually resigned Sasha Stone wrote yesterday morning on Awards Daily. “There is always that point in the year when you just know. And there is no stopping this movie. If there were any doubts before, there are no doubts now.”

Like any half-attuned, half-perceptive film lover out there, Stone knows that The Artist isn’t necessarily the best of anything. It’s the leading cave-in consensus choice among the under-inspired and easily led. It’s the easiest film to vote for if you take comfort, as most do, from the warmth of a crowd. And Stone, I believe, knows whereof she speaks. She lives and breathes and calculates the Oscar race like no other (certainly well beyond what I’m capable of) and when she throws in the towel, I listen.

“As an Oscar watcher this year, since my heart was pulled from my chest and stomped all over last year, I have to just shut down this year and play it as it lays,” Stone wrote.

The majority surely senses or suspects that The Artist is all about re-creation, backward visitation and reflective surfaces, but they’re down with that. They love the silvery sheen and the novelty and the showboat charm. The fact that it possesses and radiates nothing that is truly its own doesn’t bother them — it stirs heartfelt applause. A film that provides a nice pleasant time…yes!

I’m reminded of a line from Glengarry Glen Ross in which a real-estate salesman tells a colleague that an older couple “imperceptibly slumped” toward the end of a sales call. That’s what’s happening right now. The slump is in and the argument is over, and for people like me that’s unfortunate.

I don’t live for the Oscars but for the season, and particularly the various skirmishes in this and that category. Debating which film truly deserves to win Best Picture has always been a fun diversion. And now, weeks before the nominations and more than two months before the Oscar telecast, that debate has come to an end. Terrific. Pass the pretzels.

“My basic impression is that The Artist is a very well-done curio — an experiment in reviving a bygone era and mood by way of silent-film expression,” I wrote seven months ago from Cannes. “Is it a full-bodied motion picture with its own voice and voltage — a film that stands on its own? Not quite. But it’s a highly diverting, sometimes stirring thing to sit through, and the overall HE verdict is a thumbs-up.

“The Artist has been very carefully assembled, but chops-wise it’s not strictly a revisiting of silent-film era language. It visually plays like a kind of ersatz silent film — technically correct in some respects but with a 2011 sensibility in other ways. It has a jaunty, sometimes jokey tone in the beginning, and then it gradually shifts into drama and then melodrama. But it tries hard and does enough things right that the overall residue is one of satisfaction and a job well done.”

I wrote this while sitting on a stool inside the Orange press room, an hour or so after the first Artist screening in the Grand Lumiere. It never crossed my mind that I’d just reviewed the Best Picture Oscar winner for 2011. I doubt that it occured to anyone.

Is there any more tiresome expression in the English language than “whatever”? I’m sincerely sorry to be thinking this right now. My imperceptibly slumping congratulations are hereby offered to the Weinstein Co. publicists and particularly to Harvey Weinstein himself. By any sporting standard they played the game well.

Once more with feeling, HE’s 10 Best of 2011 (in this order): Moneyball, A Separation, The Descendants, Miss Bala, Drive, Contagion, Win Win, Tyrannosaur, The Tree of Life and In The Land of Blood and Honey.

A 12.17 Wall Street Journal article by screenwriter Derek Haas (co-writer with Michael Brandt of 2 Fast 2 Furious, Wanted, 3:10 to Yuma) offers a rare look into the soul and the mindset of a successful Hollywood hack.

I don’t know Haas and therefore have nothing against him personally. The piece makes him sound like a nice enough guy. But Wanted was torture, and it wasn’t all the fault of Timur Bekmambetov — the script surely pointed the way. The shootout at the end of 3:10 to Yuma was ludicrous, and so was the bit when Russell Crowe whistles and the horse gallops after the train. I tried watching 2 Fast 2 Furious on DVD once, and I only got to the 25-minute mark.

The only passage in Haas’s article that I wholeheartedly agree with: “Readers will love you if you layer in theme, subtext and symbolism, but they’ll never forgive you if you bore them.”

Sample passage #1: “As a novelist and screenwriter, I’m sometimes asked to speak to a class of film or literature students at a university. Inevitably, a 22-year-old hipster with designer-chic black glasses and a permanent pout will raise his hand and ask, ‘What does it feel like to sell out?’ I smile. I tell the students, ‘Sell out? Are you kidding me? I sold in!'”

Sample passage #2: “From an early age, I knew that I wanted to write popular thrillers, but when I got to graduate school, I sensed an upturned nose and a haughty eye directed toward the fiction and films that I loved. I was taught over and over, ‘Write what you know.’

“‘Write what you know’ works if your father runs covert ops for the CIA. ‘Write what you know’ works if your mother infiltrated the mob. But when you grow up in the suburbs, you don’t have that sort of material to draw on.

“When I graduated, I had an epiphany. Forget ‘Write what you know.’ Instead, write what you think is cool.”

Wells interjection: “Write what you think is cool” is something you weave into a script or a story after you’ve decided to write something interesting, compelling, urgent or heartfelt. “Write what you think is cool” means that after you’ve got something solid you need to give it a good topspin and some nice pizazzy elements so people won’t be bored. But to start with “write what you think is cool” means you’ll end up with something like Wanted or something that will play well at ComicCon but die out in the real world.

Back to Haas: “What did I think was cool? A dark character, surrounded by a colorful cast, with the entire world turned against him. And then turn him loose and watch him wreak havoc. As soon as I embraced this popcorn side of myself, my work vastly improved.”

Actually, this last sentence I agree with also. To write well you have to accept who you are and what your influences have been and what really moves you and then work with that, which means forget trying to satisfy some arcane aesthetic requirement left over from a college writing class.

If an alternate version of Michael Mann‘s The Insider had been made with different actors (but ones just as good as those who acted in the 1999 version, and if it was directed by Mann and written by Eric Roth) and released in 2011, it would win the Best Picture Oscar…hands down. 2011 has been a good-but-not-great year, and I don’t think there’s any question that Mann’s film would sweep aside The Artist, The Help and War Horse like so much seaweed.

Especially if it had a distributor smart enough to throghly explain to everyone that The Insider is not about the evils of tobacco and tobacco-company executives (which Jason Reitman still believed two years ago) but about corporate interests smothering the integrity of corporate-owned journalistic organs like 60 Minutes.

I explained it all in a January 2010 post, but I happened to watch The Insider earlier today on DVD and it hit me all over again how good it was.

The Insider was nominated for Best Picture but lost to American Beauty.

I’d forgotten that The Green Mile and The Cider House Rules were actually nominated for Best Picture that year. The Green Mile! The death row electric-chair movie with Tom Hanks and the cute mouse! What were Academy members thinking?

Put it this way: If you think a 2011 version of The Insider still would have theoretically lost to The Artist or The Help or War Horse, what pre-2011 film could come along and kick the asses of these three in this year’s Best Picture race? if it hadn’t been released before, I mean, and had magically arrived fresh this year?

In 2000 The Insider was nominated for seven Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and Best Sound…but not Chris Pummer for Best Supporting Actor despite his having won awards for hsi Miek Wallace performance from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics.

Absurdist, steroid-injected action thrillers like Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol are over. They’re obviously thriving commercially as we speak, but they have nowhere to go except in the use of more powerful steroids and more CG ridiculum, and that’s a dead end. There’s only one kind of thriller that can work these days — i.e., the human-scale, back-to-basics-and-believability model found in Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire and Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive.

Action nerds born in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s will disagree, of course, but they’re running around with a kind of ComicCon myopia, which amounts to a kind of poison in their veins. They sincerely believe that action films aren’t worthy of consideration or patronage unless the thrills and spills in a just-opened film vigorously competes with (or more preferably tops) the last flamboyantly unrealistic action film. It has to dismiss if not piss on physical law and be emphatically cartoony and hard-drivey to a fare-thee-well. There is no way out of this morass.

So the nihilistic strain in this Brad Bird-Tom Cruise film can’t be ignored or waved away. And yet (a) I loved the boxy IMAX footage, particularly in the early stages, (b) the sequence with Cruise climbing up the glass exterior of that Dubai skyscraper is highly exciting, despite intense and relentless efforts to convince the audience that what you’re seeing is ludicrous; (c) the older Cruise gets (he’s nearly 50), the more interesting his face becomes, especially due to the fact that his nose has gotten bigger and beakier; and (d) Jeremy Renner gives the best performance.

If I was a Republican, being on the cover of Success would fill me with satisfaction. Ditto my latest film, Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows, being projected to earn $42 million and change by Sunday night [3,703 situations = an average of $11,450].

And I could roll with it badly trailing” the opening-weekend tally of the original (i.e.,$62.3 million). Ir’ll do well enough to justify a third installment, and then the Holmes franchise can diversify (TV series, video game, clothing line) and my portfolio will continue to expand with all kinds of investment and stock options.

“Robert Downey Jr. is currently carrying two movie franchises — the Marvel Iron Man proto-Avengers thing for Paramount and the brawling steampunk Sherlock Holmes series for Warner Brothers — so it is perhaps understandable that he is showing a touch of fatigue,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O Scott.

“In the new Holmes adventure, A Game of Shadows, his imperiousness is hard to distinguish from boredom, and he seems to be in a hurry to spit out his lines, take his lumps, throw his punches and collect his paycheck.”