Has wildcat tweeter Ellen Barkin fired her publicity firm or is she just being spritzy or colorful by saying her “pr peeps can fuck their motherfuckin’ PR selves”? A headache, obviously, for the publicist[s] in question but at the same time it’s hilarious. The woman is manic, fearless…a tweet Valkyrie. We live in public. “Jew. Jew. Jew. Muthafukkin Jewish fuckin’ Jew”…shades of Ginsberg and Burroughs!

If consumed in sufficient quantities, rum can make you feel like you’ve dropped a tab of mescaline. This is a 21st Cenmtury concept, I realize. I wish I’d known about it in the old days but I guess the rum industry wanted it kept quiet. Which reminds me that I haven’t gotten any screening invites to see The Rum Diary. Has anyone?

Philadelphia Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey wasn’t elbowed out of her job like so many film critics have been over the past few years. She opted out, she’s saying, because the 60-hour-per-week pace had become so demanding that she could barely keep up , and because she couldn’t find a way to write book pitches on the side. She wants to write long-form.

Rickey will continue to tap out reviews on the side but only six per month, she says, or roughly 1.5 reviews per week.

A Philadelphia Daily News guy told me this morning that many, many people have been offered buyouts by the Inquirer. Not just editorial but people who work in the printing and distribution end. “There just aren’t a lot of resources over there any more,” he said.

The grind of reviewing so many films was “hard”, Rickey says. Well, yeah…it sure is. I imagine that many, many film writers feel the same way about their jobs. I work 10 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. What Rickey is really saying, I think, is that she sort of doesn’t mind the idea of being semi-retired and not having to work as hard as she once did.

“It’s a great gig you have,” I told Rickey this morning, “and if I were you I wouldn’t give it up for anything, no matter how tired I might be.”

Awards Daily today celebrated its first full year of podcasts. Unfortunately this happened to be a dull week so Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino and I covered the usual topics, etc. But this is a flat period right now — the calm before the storm. It was all we could do to keep from nodding off. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

From Matt Taibbi‘s 10.12 Rolling Stone article: “Break up the monopolies. Pay for your own bailouts. No public money for private lobbying. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. Change the way bankers get paid.”

If (and I do mean “if”) an Occupy mob was to somehow block the path of Eric Cantor‘s limousine on Pennsyvania Ave. and smash the windows and pull Cantor out and rough him up like a punk and give him a Robert De Niro-in-Taxi Driver Mohawk haircut and rip his clothes off and tie him to a tree and apply a blow torch to certain parts of his anatomy, I’d initially condemn them, as would any responsible citizen…but I’d also try to forgive.

Once-legendary super agent Sue Mengers, whose career peaked from the mid ’60s to early ’80s, died yesterday. She was a bit of a terror in terms of her personality (or so I was always told) but a very tough and shrewd player. Dyan Cannon‘s character in The Last of Sheila was more or less based on Mengers. She was respected and valued and “liked”, but not especially loved…or so I gathered. Here’s an farewell piece written by Vanity Fair‘s Graydon Carter.

Portrait of Sue Mengers painted by Jack Nicholson, as found on this Vanity Fair q & a page.

Here’s what feels like a knowledgable, nicely balanced obit by N.Y. Times‘ reporter Michael Cieply.

The Guns of Navarone Bluray looks significantly better than any DVD version I’ve seen. It’s worth owning for that fact alone. Compare, also, the two screen captures and notice how the Bluray version (top) contains just a wee bit more left-right information that the DVD version. As insignificant as this may seem to Average Joes, it matters to twisted Bluray fanatics like myself.

“Playing a bad mother is more taboo than playing a serial killer,” Ellen Barkin recently told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg about her role in Sam (son of Barry) Levinson‘s Another Happy Day. “It’s just, you know, the untouchable thing.”

As long as we’re talking about attitudinal undercurrents, a friend suggested this morning that Barkin’s current romantic relationship with Levinson — she’s a MILFy 57 and he’s 26 — will somehow work against the film’s rep in some vaguely values-oriented or creatively suspicious or snooty socio-cultural way. I sharply disagreed. People who work together sometimes wind up knocking boots…and so what? If the film is good then the film is good…period. If Barkin is as snappy and snarly as she seems to be in the trailer, nothing else counts.

It certainly doesn’t matter if people who like to share ideas and fluids and whatnot are 30, 20 or 10 years apart in terms of time spent on the planet. Who cares? We’re all going to die eventually so make it and get it while you can. Just don’t hurt anyone and try and be considerate and unselfish.

And I think Barkin’s f-bomb Twitter postings are kind of rad. She’s…I don’t know what she’s doing but she seems to be…what, getting in touch with her inner Bronx girl or something?

“It was hard for me, but I just kept saying, ‘You’ve just got to fucking strap ’em on, and do it, and not be afraid of them not liking you, of being a bad mother, of putting it out there — because it is out there,” Barkin told Feinberg. “That’s also how I felt very early in my career, with a movie like Diner — like, ‘Don’t be afraid to be the girl who thinks she’s ugly ’cause you do think you’re ugly, Ellen.'”

Another Happy Day premiered nine and a half months ago at Sundance 2011 (where I naturally missed it). Phase 4 Films bought it last May. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on 11.18.

Barkin and Levinson “met on the set of an indie movie” — Shit Year? — “in which she was starring and for which he had been brought on to do some emergency rewrites,” Feinberg reports.

“Barkin recalls that after Levinson had been on the set for a full week, he timidly approached her with a script that he had written and asked her if she would be willing to check it out. On the basis of the work that he had done on that film — ‘which was, compared with what they started with, brilliant’ — she agreed, went home and read it, and called him immediately afterwards to tell him she was in. She also signed up to serve as a producer of the film.”

Like any actress of a certain age, Barkin has to hustle to land meaty, attention-getting roles. She respected Levinson’s writing, like his Another Happy Day script, saw there was a good part for her, decided to bankroll or partially bankroll the film (and thereby boost her own profile and career) and then the romantic thing happened along with everything else. Apparently. That’s how it usually goes.

“His writing was just so off-the-charts,” Barkin said, “with a voice that I have never heard before. I think Sam Levinson is really one of the leading voices of a new generation of American filmmakers, and I think it’s a voice that’s going to be talking to us for decades. It’s just very impressive.”

Their relationship will last as long as it lasts. When one or the other begins to feel that his or her interests aren’t being served as well as before or he/she could do better with someone else…we all know how it works. Eat, drink and be merry, and serve the Movie Godz as best you can.

In a 10.16 post on his site, Zachary Quinto has posted the following: “In the wake of the senseless and tragic gay teen suicides that were sweeping the nation [and particularly] the suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.

“Jamey Rodemeyer’s life changed mine, and while his death only makes me wish that i had done this sooner, i am eternally grateful to him for being the catalyst for change within me.

“Now i can only hope to serve as the same catalyst for even one other person in this world. That, I believe, is all that we can ask of ourselves and of each other. Our society needs to recognize the unstoppable momentum toward unequivocal civil equality for every gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered citizen of this country.”

Nobody cares about Real Steel. (Okay, obviously some people do but I don’t, I mean, and I can’t see how anyone of any taste or refinement or…you know, who sees the world as I do could give that much of a damn.) Nobody cares about Footloose either. Nobody cares about The Thing. Nobody cares about The Three Musketeers. Nobody cares about The Big Year…an eighth-place, $3 million wipeout. Nobody, nothing, flatline…barely a pulse.

The only box-office statistics that matter are (a) the spirited, above-average business done by Pedro Almodovar‘s just-opened The Skin That I Live In, and (b) the fact that George Clooney‘s The Ides of March dropped only 28% from last weekend. The political drama will have $7.5 million by tonight and a $22.2 million cume.

Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants won’t open until 11.18, but the word’s been running strong since Telluride/Toronto, and I think it’s time to settle into a chat about Judy Greer‘s brief but poignant performance as Julie, the wife of a Hawaiian realtor (Matthew Lillard) whose slight relationship to George Clooney‘s Matt King hinges on a relationship her husband has had with Clooney’s wife. She’s only in three scenes, but the final one really gets you and delivers — quietly, almost surprisingly — one of the big emotional moments.

Judy Greer at Le Pain Quotidien — Friday, 10.14, 1:45 pm.

And it hits you later on that it’s not the amount of screen time that counts, but what you do with it and how well you score. And it’s not just about craft but what the audience remembers and feels about your character. (Which is what great acting is finally about, I suppose.) Greer’s Julie has a certain warmth and maturity that settles in. Sensitivity, perception, backbone…the qualities of a good woman. And she sells all this in just…what, ten or twelve minutes? Quality, not quantity.

Everyone knows that George Clooney has a Best Actor nomination locked down and that 19 year-old Shailene Woodley will get lots of recognition for delivering a breakout ingenue performance, but I think Greer is a completely credible contender for Best Supporting Actress. Really. She doesn’t deliver a Beatrice Straight-in-Network performance that just rocks the movie in a single blazing scene, and yet she does kind of do that in a softer, kinder, quirkier way.

In a 9.18 N.Y. Times piece about standout character performances, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott praised Greer’s Descendants turn. “Best known for kooky-friend roles in romantic comedies, Greer makes a strong, poignant impression in three scenes opposite George Clooney. [She’s] playing a fairly tangential character: the wife of the man Mr. Clooney’s wife had an affair with. But whether clueless, bewildered or tearful, Greer shifts the film’s center of gravity and alters its emotional chemistry.”

Greer is currently in Manhattan with the Descendants gang (Payne, Clooney, Woodley, etc.) for Sunday night’s New York Film Festival screening at Alice Tully Hall. She’ll be making the rounds all through the season, I expect.

Greer in The Descendants.

Greer and I sat down yesterday at West Hollywood’s Le Pain Quotidien. It was a bit noisy but I recorded about 60% of our chat. I turned it off at one point because I wanted to say something off the record, and then I forgot to turn it on again. Partly, I suppose, because I was having such a nice relaxing time with her. Greer is my idea of a great conversationalist. She knows everything, hears everything, doesn’t put anything on. Her pores are wide open.

Val Kilmer was sitting a couple of tables away with his daughter, and he was nice enough to come over and say hi at one point, and when Judy and I left we were told that he’d picked up our check. Thanks, hombre.

Greer is known as a spunky light comedian, of course, so The Descendants is a big score in that it reminds everyone that she’s got a lot more in her quiver than just pluck and charm and a way with comedy, and it catapults her into that special realm that all contributors to an Oscar-worthy film reside in during Oscar season.

Greer does a lot of television but I don’t watch episodics. Her next significant feature role is in Mark and Jay Duplass‘s Jeff Who Lives at Home, which I missed at Toronto. She projected her usual spritzy, spirited energy in Love and Other Drugs, but that movie was killed by Josh Gad so nobody talks about it.

Greer’s other significant scores have included M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Village (’04), Cameron Crowe‘s Elizabethtown (’05), Thomas McCarthy‘s The Station Agent, and Spike Jonze‘s Adaptation (’02 — i.e., the waitress whom Nic Cage‘s schlumpy screenwriter has a big thing for).