Yesterday afternoon I saw Angelina Jolie‘s In The Land of Blood and Honey, and liked it a lot. I asked for permission to say a little something and was told nope, the embargo holds…fine. This morning I saw David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and I liked that too. But I can’t write about it until 12.13. And now I’m sitting in a food court and not arguing with anyone about seating. All is well. Just saying.

Steve McQueen‘s Shame opens limited today. It demands a spinach-eating looksee from all non-Eloi viewers, but hoowee, it’s a bucket of bleak.

Here’s my 9.5. Telluride Film Festival review: “Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light.

“Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, doomed.

“Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!

“This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…nope, I can’t do this.

“But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.

“The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung. Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes.”

Chilly and clinical as it is, it’s all but impossible to not think about Shame, a lot, after it’s over. Failing to see it means hanging your head in shame the next time an intelligent film discussion occurs in your circle.

On 9.30 N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis called Shame “another example of British miserablism, if one that’s been transposed to New York and registers as a reconsideration of the late 1970s American cinema of sexual desperation (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, etc.).”

From 11.10: “What if Michael Fassbender’s sex-addict character was called ‘Shame’? And if everyone called him that — all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Shame!'”

The Station Agent, The Visitor and Win Win persuaded everyone that director-writer Tom McCarthy is a skillful provider of the same kind of adult relationship or family dramedy, more or less, that Alexander Payne churns out. For my money Win Win, which I first saw at Sundance 2011, is in the same class as The Descendants. They’re both about families in transition, and about ethics, character, parent-child relations and working through hard stuff.

Win Win director-writer Tom McCarthy — Thursday, 12.1, 12:35 pm, Four Seasons hotel.

The reason Win Win isn’t in the current award-season “conversation”, of course, is the fact that (a) Fox Searchlight has distributed them both, and (b) FS made a decision in late 2010 to open Win Win in March 2011, presumably in order not to have two family dramedies playing during the fall-holiday season.

FS obviously decided to bank on The Descendants as the award-season thoroughbred, primarily for two reasons — Payne has acquired more of an accomplished auteur and prestige factor over the last decade, especially since Sideways, and The Descendants has George Clooney in the lead. Win Win‘s Paul Giamatti is a solid adult draw (for people like me, at least) but Clooney is a top-tier, across-the-board star.

As mature and satisfying as Win Win is, Fox Searchlight also had reason to expect that The Descendants might deliver a little more bing-bam-boom with critics and Academy voters.

How do the two films stack up when you apply the old Howard Hawks rule about a successful movie having three great scenes and no bad ones? You tell me.

I sat down with McCarthy at noon today and talked it all out for…oh, roughly 25 minutes or so.

I wrote last January that Win Win “is warm but not sappy, smartly written, very well acted and agreeable all the way. McCarthy is always grade-A, and this is more from the same well. It isn’t quite as good as Little Miss Sunshine — it’s an 8.5 to Sunshine‘s 9 — but it’s a wise, perceptive and affecting little family-relations flick that works just fine. If only more films labelled ‘family-friendly’ were as good as this.

“Paul Giamatti delivers another one of his dependably solid half-Gloomy Gus/half-wise man performances. But for my money Amy Ryan is the most enjoyably on-target. She’s so solid, so real. And Alex Shaffer definitely holds his own.

“Costars include Jeffrey Tambor, Bobby Cannavale and Margo Martindale. McCarthy wrote the screenplay, based on the story by himself and Joe Tiboni. Michael London (Sideways) produced with McCarthy, Mary Jane Skalski and Lisa Maria Falcone.

Paula Patton is the brunette and Lea Seydoux is the blonde, but I had to research that. Anyway, who cares? This Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol fight sequence is cut too fast. It’s all little pieces; no follow-through. Gina Carono‘s fight sequences in Steven Soderberg‘s Haywire (Relativity, 1.20) are much cooler and far more believable.

Fans of Orson Welles‘ Touch of Evil never mention something that has always seemed odd and repugnant to me. Welles plays a cynical, unshaven and obese police captain named Hank Quinlan…but his appearance is a bit much. He looks like a 60 year-old homeless guy who’s been chain-smoking, guzzling straight whiskey and eating french fries and Haagen-Dazs his entire life, and yet Welles was only 42 when he directed Touch of Evil. 42!

I’ve never read anything about Welles inhaling pasta dishes for two or three months before shooting Evil in 1957 so he’d be as whale-sized as possible. He looks much fatter and saggier than 36 year-old Robert De Niro did when he packed it on for Raging Bull. It makes you wonder what kind of life Welles was living back then. What reasonably healthy 42 year-old today looks even half this gross? The only thing Welles didn’t do in Touch With Evil to make himself more Skid Row-ish was to sprinkle vomit traces on his shirt and tie.

(l.) Welles in Touch of Evil, age 42; (r.) Ten years earlier during filming of The Lady From Shanghai, age 32.

Wells to Lazarus, goodvibe61, reverent & free (update): The photos below dispute your “it was just a fatsuit and fat-face makeup” story. Welles was fairly Quinlan-sized in The Long Hot Summer, which came out in May 1958 also. He may have worn a slight fatsuit prosthetic for Evil, as you claim, but he clearly didn’t need much of one.

(l.) Welles in Evil (l.); in The Long Hot Summer (r.)

Sometime between now and May I’m going to visit Monument Valley for a couple of days, and stay at Goulding’s Lodge. I’ve also decided that however long the drive turns out to be, I’m going to listen to mostly movie soundtracks. Particularly, I’m thinking, Phillip Glass‘s The Fog of War score, which I find curiously soothing. This track especially.

Soundtracks go well with driving because they don’t demand your attention. They’re meant to flavor and complement, not dominate.

Judy Lewis, the secretly-born daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable, died six days ago at age 76. Young refused to admit to Lewis, whose last name came from Young’s husband, Tom Lewis, that her father was Gable until 1986, when Lewis was 50 or 51 and Young was 73.

(l.) Judy Lewis, (center) Clark Gable, (r.) Loretta Young.

Lewis was conceived during the making of Call of The Wild, when Young was 22 and Gable, married to Maria Langham, was 34. Lewis was quietly born and sent away to caregivers, and then “adopted” by Young when she was two or thereabouts.

The big giveaway were Lewis’s big ears, which closely resembled her father’s. Her hair always covered them in photos, or at least the ones I’ve been able to find.

Young, a devout Catholic, felt ashamed for having broken the church’s commandment about having a child out of wedlock. It was more important to her to dodge that shame and her fears of condemnation and damnation than to accept what happened and level with her daughter and raise her honestly and supportively without any buried feelings or guilt. Lewis’s book, “Uncommon Knowledge“, portrayed Young as the worst kind of uptight, self-denying hypocrite.

The Hugo-is-beautiful gang (Sasha Stone, Glenn Kenny, et, al.) is rejoicing and texting and whooping it up and taking the day off work to celebrate the National Board of Review having given its Best Film of 2011 award to Martin Scorsese‘s 3D fable. And why not?

Will this award help Hugo at the box-office, where its been doing fair to so-so business? Maybe. Hopefully. I’m not Hugo‘s biggest champion, but I don’t want to see it go under. It’s a decent film in many respects, and a lovely one during its final act.

The NBR handed out two acting awards to The Descendants — George Clooney for Best Actor and Shailene Woodley for Best Supporting Actress. We Need To Talk About Kevin‘s Tilda Swinton won the Best Actress award. The NBR’s Best Supporting Actor trophy went to Beginners‘ Christopher Plummer.

The NBR announced a list of ten exceptional 2011 films. These included The Artist, The Descendants, The Ides of March, The Tree of Life and War Horse.

Is it okay if I politely describe the NBR as a cabal of clueless asshats for not including Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball? Is it permissible to speculate that the NBR might have included Moneyball if the A’s had won the pennant or the World Series at the end? Or if Brad Pitt had Uggie the wonder-dog as his constant companion?

Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation was named Best Foreign Language Film, Rango was named Best Animated Feature, and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory was named Best Documentary.

Cheers to Girl With The Dagon Tattoo‘s Daniel Craig for underlining the basic take on reality shows and the Kardashians and the end of the world: “It’s a career. What can I tell you? Look at the Kardashians, they’re worth millions. Millions! I don’t think they were that badly off to begin with, but now look at them. You see that and you think, ‘What, you mean all I have to do is behave like a fucking idiot on television and then you’ll pay me millions?'”

Here’s my 5.11 Cannes Film Festival review of Julia Leigh‘s Sleeping Beauty, which opens tomorrow (12.2): “SB is basically a highly refined, carefully poised erotic mood piece with oodles and oodles of milky nudity. I only know that all through it I was saying, ‘This thing is candy for guys like LexG…a bag of Halloween candy. But that’s not what you’re supposed to think.'”

Emily Browning‘s Lucy is a student who does this and that to make ends meet — high-end prostitution mostly, but she also holds down jobs at a copy shop and a bar/restaurant. And she goes to classes in-between. The film is more or less about Lucy being lost or zoned out in this oddly meandering, downswirl life. She’s not unhappy as much as numb.

I felt numb watching it. It’s obvious that Leigh knows how to deliver those Cannes Film Festival-tailored, high-end cinematic chops in a kind of…I don’t know, a late-Buneulian or Peter Greenaway sort of way. The movie is a class act but most of the time you’re trying to figure out what’s going on exactly. Stop allowing the violations, you’re telling Lucy all through it. But mostly you’re saying to Leigh, “Can this movie get off its arse and do something, please?”

Three or four times I raised my hands in exasperation, hoping that the screen or Leigh or Lucy or whomever/whatever would feel my plight and respond.

I was tempted to use the term “erotic horseshit” in the headline but that’s not really fair. You’d have to call Sleeping Beauty some kind of lost-in-space movie but — but! — it’s very nicely done for whatever that may be worth. Leigh and Browning definitely make you feel the angst and the agony of being used and stuck and flirting with drifting doom. This is a woman without a plan or a dream or anything, really, except for a kind of suppressed revulsion at the stuff she does.

The film does hold your interest because you’re constantly sensing that something is going to happen. And it does, but that “something” is the fact that Sleeping Beauty ends. And that is something.

And with her brave and memorable performance Browning has certainly balanced out the demerits she got for playing Babydoll in Zack Snyder‘s thoroughly contemptible Sucker Punch. Aaron Hillis just tweeted that the film could be called Fucker Punch — good one.

The film subjects you to the sight of three old naked guys getting all sick and pervy with Browning, and that, I can tell you, gets very old. Oh, no…here comes another geezer. Please don’t take your clothes off…oh, Jesus, he’s undressing…God. Please don’t show me another withered hairy dick.

But the best moment in the film comes when one of the old guys delivers a soliloquy about the agony of aging and withering and the falling apart of bones.

At least the film ends with a scream. Maybe Lucy has finally had enough, you’re thinking. Some in the audience shared that resolve, I suspect. I’m not sorry I saw Sleeping Beauty — I’m a better man for it, I think. But I’m not exactly delighted either. Leigh, a novelist, can certainly compose and frame and abbreviate and…well, direct in what anyone would call a highly oblique, dry-as-a-bone manner.

There’s “a bit of a movement afoot” to get Fox Searchlight to send DVD screeners of (or otherwise make available) Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret for top-ten lists and whatnot, says critic/essayist Bilge Ebiri. A online petition was launched online yesterday.

“Searchlight is already responding, apparently,” he writes. “There are reports that they’ve set up additional screenings in Chicago and Boston in response. Hopefully we can keep this going and inspire them to make Margaret available to more people. Obviously the Searchlight staffers are good people, but I’m not sure they realized how much interest there is in this film (which is assured a spot on my Top Ten list).”

Sidenote: I’ve just concocted a theory-in-progress that the name “Margaret” or “Margret” is a metaphor in movies for “willful, tough, unsettled, demanding, anguished, afflicted, self-absorbed, bothered.” There’s Meryl Streep‘s Margaret Thatcher, a headstrong and highly assertive woman who certainly didn’t became Prime Minister by being a “day at the beach” type. And the untrustworthy Margaret character in Get Carter whom Michael Caine despises and eventually murders. And…uhm….

Anna Paquin‘s Margaret character is named Lisa Cohen, but she certainly fits the description and the movie is called Margaret so…okay?

Does the feisty and unserene association exist off-screen? Margaret Cho, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Mead…all dig-down toughies. Then there’s the late Princess Margaret and all her issues. And Ann-Margret‘s Bobbie character in Carnal Knowledge…okay, now I’m stretching.

I’m just saying that in movies (i.e., NOT for the most part in real life) female characters fitting the traditional paradigm of the loyal, nourishing girlfriend, wife or homebody — i.e., breeder types who spend a lot of time in the kitchen — tend to be named June or Faith or April or Nancy, and that the flintier, more gnarly and accomplished ones will sometimes (often?) be named Margaret. Somehow or someway, screenwriters have made this association, I mean.