I may not agree with all of the 2011 Chicago Film Critics awards, but I respect all but one. Which is more than I can say for the SAG nominations. Best Picture: The Tree of Life. Best Director: Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life). Best Actor: Michael Shannon (Take Shelter). Best Actress: Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn). Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks (Drive). Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life). Best Original Screenplay: The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius). Best Adapted Screenplay: Moneyball (Steven Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin). Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezski (The Tree of Life).

We all want smart, quirky, neurotic Cage (Adaptation, Matchstick Men) or serious wackadoodle Cage (Vampire’s Kiss), but nobody wants mythical horseshit CG flaming-motorcycle Cage.

Variety‘s Steven Gaydos pointed out this morning that the recently published Film Comment best-of-the-year poll of 120 top critics has Hugo at #9, The Artist at #27 and Moneyball at #38.

My response: “Well and good, but much of that relentless Hugo love stems from an impassioned conviction-belief on the part of most big-city critics, and summarized as follows: “Marty is our guy, a Film Catholic Extraordinaire, and we’ll stand by him to the end, no matter what.” So whatever and however and even with a film as oppressive or agonizing as Kundun, Marty gets a pass — that’s simply how it is. Clint Eastwood enjoyed the fruits of this same arrangement of trust and faith for many, many years (until, that is, the double whammy of Invictus and Hereafter). So don’t give me with the high Hugo approval ratings. This is an elitist, intra-fraternal Tammany Hall dynamic.”

Is David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo “entertaining and well-made?,” asks critic Marshall Fine. “Absolutely. For the audience that would never dream of seeing a foreign film, this movie will be the last word in Dragon Tattoo movie-making. And they’ll get a quality product.

“Aside from a few visual fillips, Fincher has not cracked Stieg Larsson‘s novel in a new way or plumbed it for previously undiscovered depths. His visual approach is different, but not so much that the material seems newly revealed.

“Is Fincher’s film better than Niels Arden Oplev‘s 2009 Swedish-language version? Not really. I’m not impugning Fincher’s intentions; I’m just saying that, as good as his film may be, it’s redundant and unnecessary. It’s a solid film – a well-made and highly suspenseful film. But I saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last year. And it was just as good.”

Wells dispute: Fincher, agreed, is working well below his abilities with Dragon Tattoo, but the chops and the fumes are of a higher order than what Oplev presented in his 2009 version. Oplev’s Tattoo was, for me, a satisfying, well-assembled thriller, but somewhere between a 7.5 and an 8, execution-wise. Fincher’s version is at least an 8.5 if not a 9. I mean, the opening-credits sequence alone puts the Fincher above the Oplev.

The biggest “what?” in Oscar Talk #74 (posted Friday, 12.16) is Anne Thompson‘s remark that Moneyball‘s Bennett Miller may not make the DGA and Academy Best Director finals given competition from Hugo‘s Martin Scorsese, War Horse‘s Steven Spielberg and…The Artist‘s Michel Hazanavicius?

Reality check: Enjoy The Artist and vote for it if you must, but the efforts of a director of “a cute gimmick stretched to feature length” (in the words of N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis) cannot be ranked above Miller’s immaculate Moneyball finessing. The Godz will simply not have it.

On top of which War Horse is mostly sentimental crap and Hugo is too long and labored and doesn’t really lift off the ground until the last 25 minutes so c’mon…get real.

Otherwise it’s fascinating to hear Tapley and Thompson differ sharply over The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — i.e., Tapley’s seething contempt for almost everything in it except for Rooney Mara‘s performance as Lisbeth Salander vs. Thompson’s appreciation of David Fincher‘s film being, in her view, a first-rate genre piece, and superior to the 2009 Danish-Swedish film

The recent announcement that Lawrence Kasdan‘s Darling Companion will open the 2012 Santa Barbara Film Festival stirred a “hmmm” reaction. 20 years ago a Lawrence Kasdan relationship drama starring Diane Keaton, Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest and Sam Shepard would have been released during award season, and Kasdan’s fans (i.e., 30-and-older quality seekers) would have been wetting their lips. It would have been at least a moderately big deal.

But Kasdan’s last truly tasty film, Mumford, came out 12 years ago. I will never stop respecting or believing in his craft and vision, but over the last decade he’s generally been regarded by the media mob as M.I.A. or “on hold” or past it. So right off the top I was wondering if this is a potential rebound or a place-holder or what. Because my suspicions at this point in time, no offense, are skeptical.

I don’t mean to speak dismissively of one of the strongest and most distinctive director-screenwriters of the ’80s and ’90s. Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, Mumford — that’s a hell of a 20-year run. For a while there Kasdan was looking like an American Jean Renoir. But writer-directors have only so much psychic essence, and the prevailing view is that after they’ve shot their wad (as most wads are lamentably finite), that’s it.

But let’s presume otherwise. Tomorrow is another day. Ya gotta believe.

The nominal focus of Darling Companion (Sony Classics) is obsessive dog love on the part of a middle-aged woman (Keaton’s character). Which means, I gather, that the actual focus is the unfulfilling nature of many relationships today among older, well-to-do GenXers and boomers.

Keaton, married to Kevin Kline in the film, saves a stray dog on the side of a freeway in Denver “and then the husband loses the dog,” etc. SBIFF executive director Roger Durling called it “a fantastic film to kick off the festival.” But how so exactly? Because the plot thumbnail suggests something quirky, eccentric and perhaps minor.

A Sony Classics press release called Darling Companion “comic, harrowing and sometimes deeply emotional.” It will screen at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre on Thursday, January 26.

This apparently posted two or three hours ago — an allusion to “Safe Sheep Haven.”

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.