I’ve been got so caught up with this, that and everything else over the last three days that I somehow forgot to post last weekend’s Oscar Poker chat — sorry. Oscar Poker #41 didn’t include boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino, who’s become too much of a swaggering, in-demand big shot to take ten or twelve minutes to discuss box-office receipts with the likes of Sasha and myself. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

It’s 11:30 pm and everyone needs to wind down for an hour or so before crashing. But Joe Johnston‘s Captain America (Paramount, 7.22) screened tonight at the Grove, and I was knocked over, levitated, delighted. I could feel the mixed energy in the room, and it’s obvious that some are going to “meh” this amazing film. “It’s okay,” “Not bad,” etc. Wrong! I’m just going to re-post tonight’s tweets and let it go at that…for now.

Tweet #1: “Retro-Captain America is my favorite Marvel movie ever, by far. LOVED IT! Best Joe Johnston flick since The Rocketeer! Fast & fleet & spiffy. Exactly the right tone for a 1940s-era patriotic superhero flick. Not comic, not satiric, not a jape. And yet it speeds right along, cuts to the chase, does it right.”

Tweet #2: “Captain America doesn’t end traditionally or wholesomely or even conclusively — it ends like a continuing serial — but what happens is a complete surprise. And the film as a whole is a lot more ‘sincere’ than tongue-in-cheek.”

Tweet #3: “Captain America is the delightful opposite of a dark, heavyweight, super-labored, wannabe-Chris-Nolan movie. Loved the brownish-amber colors, the patriotic ’40s ambiance, the concise shape and pace of it. No fat, no slack…punch it.”

Tweet #4: “Anyone who comes out of Captain America saying ‘meh, it’s mildly okay’ is aesthetically blocked. They just don’t get it. Captain America moves, mad-dashes, soars, whooshes, runs, delights & barrel-asses. It’s pure art direction, pure mood, and all of a piece. And mostly unpredictable.”

Tweet #5: “Captain America made me feel good about the spirit of ComicCon. Three hours ago I was still fantasizing about strafing the fanboys.”

Last night I finally saw Mike Cahill and Brit Marling‘s Another Earth (Fox Searchlight, 7.22), a spare but imaginative low-budgeter about loss and recovery and redemption. It’s partly a sci-fi fantasy about the approach of a second earth, but you’re supposed to let that go and focus on the meaning of Earth #2 — a 99% duplicate of our own world — and the escape it offers to people who are unhappy and “want out.”

Another Earth star, co-writer and co-producer Britt Marling, and director, co-writer and editor Mike Cahill following last night’s screening at the Landmark.

(l. to r.) William Mapother, Marling, Cahill.

Marling plays Rhoda, a high-school grad whose plan to attend MIT is destroyed when she absent-mindedly and somewhat drunkenly crashes her car into another. The impact kills a mother and child, and sends the father (William Mapother), named John, into a coma. Rhoda goes to prison for manslaughter and is released four years later. Numbed by guilt and unable to get her life rolling, she takes a job as a high-school janitor. When Rhoda learns that John has come out of his coma, she pretends to be a cleaning-service rep in order to clean up his skanky home (he’s been despondent and drinking) and make herself feel better by brightening his life a bit.

And all the while Earth #2 is up in the sky, moving closer and closer. Voice contact is eventually established and people realize that every last person, personality, car, seagull, cat, dog, continent and iPhone has an exact double on the approaching planet, but also that certain things may be a little different. Rhoda enters a contest that, if she wins, will give her free passage to Earth #2, where — perhaps — her double hasn’t killed anyone in a car crash. But at the same time she’s happy with John by making him feel better and less depressed. He, meanwhile, is starting to fall in love with her, and tries to get her to change her mind about travelling to Earth #2 if and when she’s lucky enough to win.

Yes, it sounds far-fetched and insufficiently worked out, and probably beyond the grasp of a mini-budget indie. But Another Earth works regardless because it’s reasonably well crafted and comfortable with being small-scale, and because Cahill and Marling let you know just enough to float the story and no more. The lack of detail works in its favor to some extent. And it’s short. And it’s convinclngly acted by Marling, a young Meryl Streep-meets-Jennifer Warren type whose eyes are almost exactly like the eyes of a girlfriend I had a long time ago, and by Mapother, and that’s more or less okay as far as it goes. And it ends well.

But it has two problems.

One, Earth #2 gets bigger and bigger as the story moves along and Cahill-Marling don’t explain what’s actually going on, scientifically speaking. Two months ago Cannes journalists saw Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia, which is nominally about another planet crashing into the earth, and I for one couldn’t stop thinking about this and Earth‘s similar shots of an approaching planet. There’s no talk about obliteration, but Earth #2 is heading straight for our own and nobody explains that it’s going to pass us by. Even big-metaphor movies can’t ignore the science altogether. Sometimes you can under-explain things too much.

Don’t even talk about the tidal-gravity affects of a huge planet coming this close, etc.

The second problem is Mapother, who doesn’t have the face or the manner of a guy you can relax with and relate to. There’s a reason why certain actors become movie stars, and that’s because they’re attractive and likable and cool to hang with, and whom we can accept as stand-ins for ourselves. And the truth is that there’s something faintly demonic in Mapother, who has previously played bad guys — most notably in Lost and in Todd Field‘s In The Bedroom — for a reason. He’s a bright and likable fellow in person but he creeps you out in close-ups with that demented face and those warlock eyes, and it just feels wrong for Marling to fall in love with him, and it feels a bit scary when he loses his temper two or three times during the story because you believe it all too completely.

I did what I could do settle into the film being about rebuilding a ruined life and finding the strength to forgive and move on. I managed to do that for the most part, but it would have been a smoother, more absorbing experience if someone besides Mapother had been cast. Sorry, but I couldn’t get down with him.

Robert Redford is going to direct and star in The Company You Keep, based on Neil Gordon‘s 2003 novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by the great Lem Dobbs.

Redford will reportedly play a former Weather Underground militant (in the tradition of Bill Ayres, Bernardine Dohrn or Mark Rudd) wanted by the FBI for a 30-year-old bank job who is forced to abandon his daughter and go on the lam when a young reporter (Shia LaBeouf) outs him. As he “evades a manhunt and seeks out old comrades,” according to a Publisher’s Weekly synopsis, we meet “a sprawling cast of drug dealers, bomb-planting radicals turned leftist academics, Vietnam vets, FBI agents and Republicans who collectively ponder the legacy of the ’60s.”

Another movie about boomers looking back at the ’60s? Okay, maybe this can work. Let’s not pre-judge. But two issues need solving.

Problem #1: The radical left bombings and bank-robbings happened in the early ’70s, so for Redford’s character to still be hiding his identity in 2012 (or whenever the movie comes out) he would have had to be living under a false identity for 40 years. That’s too many decades. Redford and Dobbs would have to back-date the film to the 2000 or thereabouts, if not the mid to late ’90s.

Problem #2: I can’t believe Redford as an ex-radical. He was edgy and watchful but never that angry in his youth. I believed him right away as Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men, as Bill McKay in The Candidate and as the book-reading CIA agent in Three Days of the Condor. But never as an ex-bank-robbing radical. No way. Not Bob.

In “St. George and the Godfather,” Norman Mailer wrote a line about Miami cops chasing protestors with nightsticks and other guys running alongside the action (i.e., not really in the heat of it) “like Robert Redford,” or words to that effect.

I love that Mike Nichols story about casting The Graduate, and about telling Redford that he just couldn’t buy him as the solemnly resentful, sexually inexperienced Benjamin Braddock. “Be honest,” Nichols said to Redford. “Have you ever struck out with a girl?” Redford said, “Whaddaya mean?”

This is for real. An actual Deadline Hollywood game will debut on Facebook this summer. Does this mean that the game (which I presume will have an app for smart phones) will somehow insert the Tyrannosaur-ish personality of Nikki Finke into the software, in the same way that the seething machismo in Sylvester Stallone‘s John Rambo is woven into the various Rambo games?

The Hollywood Elsewhere game would be some kind of travel-and-adventure-and-political-peril thing. The player would go from film festival to film festival (Sundance, Cannes, Toronto), wearing different color shoes, using little cowboy hats as currency, guestimating the value of films, encountering bad wifi, etc. Actually, I take that back — that’s a fairly shitty idea.

What about the David Poland/Movie City News game? What would that be about? How about the Sasha Stone/Awards Daily game? Or the Scott Feinberg game? Or the Glenn Kenny/Some Came Running game?

Maybe the best thing is to think beyond software and going back to the concept of a simple Monopoly-style board game with dice and little plastic men and “get out of jail” cards and all that. I don’t know. Give me time to figure it out. So far I’m not enthused.

Below is an excerpt from Paul Thomas Anderson‘s screenplay of The Master, the so-called “Scientology movie” that’s been filming since June. The Weinstein Co. will release it during 2012 Oscar season. It costars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Laura Dern. The other excerpt is from Herman Melville‘s “Moby-Dick“. Read and compare.

The resemblance between Another Earth star/co-producer/co-writer Brit Marling and Night Moves costar Jennifer Warren isn’t startling, but it’s defintely there. No one under 40 has even heard of Arthur Penn‘s 1975 noir classic, much less seen it. And nobody remembers Warren.

Earlier today comedian Jonnie Marbles, a beefy-looking guy in a plaid shirt, somehow got into the Parliamentary hearing room where Rupert and James Murdoch were giving testimony, and walked up to the Murdoch table and pushed a foam pie into Rupert’s face. (Or onto his head.) The crowd in the small room went “Oh!…oh!” The cameras didn’t have quite the right angle.

Sky News identified Marbles as the assailant. Marbles tweeted shortly before the incident: “It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat.”

I was frankly starting to doze off at James Murdoch’s exacting testimony and shrewd parliamentary sidestepping. The foam-pie attack woke me up.

Wendi Murdoch, the wife of Murdoch Sr., leapt up and swatted the assailant. James and Rupert seemed to quickly recover and shrug the incident off for the most part, and looked all the better for that. Rupert concluded his testimony with his jacket off. Bottom line: foam-pie attack = plus for the bad guys.

Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott: “So in one brilliant move, this guy has made Murdoch senior look vulnerable and sympathetic and Wendi heroic. Well done, fool.”

Wendi Murdoch slappping Jonnie Marbles.

The Parliament security guys are going to catch hell. Marbles looked like an obvious outsider with his bulky frame, sparse and unkempt hair and K-Mart-level plaid shirt. If I were intending to hit Murdoch with a pie, I would have certainly combed my hair and worn a nice suit.

Marbles’ ex-girlfriend has tweeted about the incident.

Wikipedia has a list of famous people who’ve been hit with pies.

This one-sheet seems like a rote, run-of-the-mill way of presenting Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 11.18). It tells you it’s going to deliver a highly detailed, particular and exacting plot about men in suits and ties. The book is about finding a high-level traitor in a haystack of hints and clues. So where are the hints of malice, psychological intrigue, alarm, skullduggery? All I’m getting is “intellectual crossword puzzle.”

The climax of the meltdown of the Murdoch publishing empire is nigh. Tomorrow will see testimony before British Parliament about the ever-worsening phone-hacking scandal by Newscorp’s controversial threesome — chairman Rupert Murdoch; BSkyB chairman James Murdoch; and former Newscorp honcho Rebekah Brooks, who resigned a couple of days ago. They’re going to get raked over the coals, and will naturally say everything they can think of to try and keep more water from filling the hull, and in so doing will be hammered all the more. Mixed metaphors!

How can this not be great television?

N.Y. Times reporter Bill Carter says the testimony will be covered by CNN and Fox News starting at 6:15 am Pacific, 9:15 am Eastern and 2:15 pm London time.

“A spokesman for MSNBC said the network would not cover the appearances ‘gavel to gavel’ but would stay with the coverage ‘depending on the content,” Carter reports. “The testimony will also be widely available in online streaming on multiple sites, including CNN.com and the BBC.”

You know something’s slightly amiss when a movie calls itself one thing, and then shuffles the cards and thinks it over and calls itself something else, and then changes its mind a second time by going back to the original title, etc. It usually suggests that certain parties (usually those involved with the financing or distribution) are uncomfortable with the content or tone of it, and are looking to camouflage things on some level.

I’m referring to a reportedly dark and creepy and (perhaps) somewhat Zodiac-like crime movie called The Texas Killing Fields. Directed by Ami Canaan Mann, it’ll be opening sometime in October via Anchor Bay Films. And the fact that it was initially called The Texas Killing Fields, and then The Fields, and then The Texas Killing Fields again.

Although The Texas Killing Fields has been more or less finished since late 2010 (when it apparently had a research screening) and will be showing this week in Manhattan for long-lead press, the film has no website and no specific debut date in October.

In my book these factors add up to a very slight “uh-oh” vibe. Nothing to get too worried about, but you can sense a vague wobble factor. I’m always a bit hesitant when Anchor Bay is the distributor because they rarely get the pick of the litter — let’s face it.

My interest was nonetheless sparked when I heard about this week’s screening because (a) it’s been produced by Michael Mann (i.e., the father of the director, who’s directed one other feature, Morning, along with a lot of allegedly commendable TV work), (b) it has an interesting cast topped by Sam Worthington, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chloe Moretz, Stephen Graham, Jessica Chastain and Annabeth Gish; and (c) two years ago Danny Boyle was planning to direct it before he bailed in fall ’09 to make 127 Hours, but not before calling the script “almost too dark to get made.”

The Texas Killing Fields is about the Texas I-45 Murders, a series of unsolved killings of prostitutes and lonely girls in the ’80s, probably by more than one assailant, in a blighted area south of Houston near Interstate I-45, which runs from Dallas down to Galveston Bay.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported 15 months ago that Don Ferrarone‘s script is “a true story of a pair of detectives investigating [the] murders in a stretch of bayous near the oil refineries in coastal Texas where as many as 70 bodies have turned up over the past 30 years.

(l. to r.) Michael Mann, Sam Worthington, Ami Canaan Mann.

“Worthington will play Jake, this tough-minded misanthropic Texan, who with his partner Brian wind up waging something of a war against these unknown assailants, a ferocious battle to save each other and the life of this young street kid.

“It’s a brilliant screenplay,” Mann told Fleming, “filled with things you cannot make up in Hollywood, things you would have had to find the dead bodies in a heroin operation to understand. That’s why it’s such a haunting piece. This is such a spooky zone in Texas where cell phones don’t work, where the homes sit on trailer stilts, and where there’s a hand-painted sign on the bridge that reads, `You Are Now Entering the Cruel World’.”

Well and good. I’m intrigued. I asked earlier today when an L.A. screening might happen and if I could be among the invited. I’m always queer for perplexing policiers about cases that can’t seem to get solved.

On top of which anything with the Michael Mann stamp is automatically presumed to be a cut or two above, and you have to also assume that Mann’s relationship to his daughter during production was probably akin to the relationship between Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby during the making of The Thing (’51).

But you’d also think Anchor Bay would have their shit together a bit more by now. You’d figure they’d have a firm release date, and that the film, which has all kinds of true-crime history behind it and which will be in theatres roughly three months from now, would have some kind of snazzy, stacked-up website up by now.

You’d also have to consider that screening The Texas Killing Fields at the Toronto Film Festival might make sense. If it’s as dark as Boyle said it is, you’d want to show it to people who aren’t instantly thrown by high-style crime movies with grim stories. How do I know The Texas Killing Fields is high-style? I don’t, but I’d be very surprised if it isn’t.

Here‘s N.Y. Times media guys David Carr and Brian Stelter riffing on tomorrow’s testimony before the British Parliament by Newscorp’s Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks. They’ll answer questions about the phone-hacking scandal, of course, and in so doing will probably get verbally beaten all to hell.

Meanwhile Bloomberg’s Carol Hymowitz, Jeffrey McCracken and Amy Thomson are reporting that “independent directors of New York-based News Corp. have begun questioning the company’s response to the crisis and whether a leadership change is needed, said two people with direct knowledge of the situation who wouldn’t speak publicly.”