Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I recorded Oscar Poker #35 a day and a half ago. We discussed Beginners and X-Men: First Class, but mainly got into speculating about the likeliest 2011 Best Picture nominees. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

Chris Weitz‘s A Better Life (Summit, 6.24) is a simple, earnest, bare-bones drama. It has dignity and humanity and, for me, across-the-board believability. It’s a solid, honest film that deserves patronage and respect and year-end tributes. Particularly because of strong co-lead performances from Damian Bichir and newcomer Jose Julian. I can’t put it any plainer than that.

A Better Life is basically an LA Latino riff on Vittorio De Sica ‘s The Bicycle Thieves (whether it was intended to be seen in this light or not) and as such is genuinely moving, if a little too grim and deflating at times.

I’m not setting A Better Life up for a fall by comparing it to De Sica’s 1948 classic. It’s not a beat-for-beat remake (the screenplay was apparently based on a true-life L.A. story) but it does use the basic Bicycle bones by being largely about a poor, illegal-alien Latino father (Bichir) struggling to reclaim a recently purchased pickup truck that’s been stolen by another poor man, and with the help of his teenage son (Julian).

It’s basically a tale of a tough, persistent, hard-luck mouse. And in our wildly egoistic me-me bing culture I’m wondering who outside of guilty westside liberals has the patience and humility to tough it out with a sad-sack S.A. who can’t catch a break? Life keeps jabbing and slugging Bichir’s character — bitchslapping him, kicking him in the shins and delivering one form or another of trial and humiliation…but he keeps on plugging and holds onto his dignity and humanity. In the end he wins your respect and affection.

He also manages to win the respect and love of his son, who’s regarded him with mostly pity and contempt throughout most of the film. This achievement is pretty much what the film is about. Like De Sica’s film, A Better Life is not about winning or beating the system or lucking out.

Bichir (who played Fidel Castro in Steven Soderbergh‘s Che films) and Julian’s performances are as solid and open-pored as it gets. They share an emotional confession scene near the very end that pretty much ties the whole film together.

A Better Life trailer prompted an early suspicion that it was basically a white man’s (i.e., director Chris Weitz‘s) take on a Latino situation. Well, it doesn’t play that way. Yes, English is spoken but when it happens it feels right. Ethnically speaking A Better Life felt nearly as genuine and real-deal to me as Carey Fukanaga‘s Sin Nombre. The cast is almost entirely Latino, and over half of the dialogue is in Spanish, and…well, there’s just no “white guy” thing I could detect. Weitz is partly Spanish, it turns out. Maybe a Latino critic will come along and call me blind.

It’s clearly one of the truest and sturdiest films I’ve seen so far this year. It may turn out to be more of a Spirit Awards winner than an Oscar contender but let’s see where it goes.

I saw A Better Life last night at Santa Moncia’s Aero theatre, under the aegis of Pete Hammond‘s KCET screening series. Seitz and producer Christian McLaughlin answered questions following the showing.

For what it’s worth I used to work as a tree-trimmer in Los Angeles. I used to climb up palm trees with spikes and a belt chain and use pole saws and do ornamental pruning and remove dead leaders and limbs and install cables…the whole shot. It’s brutal work and it doesn’t pay all that well either, but I learned how to pull myself up with ropes and swing around with a leather saddle and a half-hitch knot and handle a chain saw and sharpen the blades with a file, etc. I could tell you stories.

It seems nothing short of surreal that the MGM Home Entertainment guys would choose to offer an exclusive special reduced price to Walmart shoppers on their recently released Bluray of William Wyler‘s The Big Country (1958). Walmart shoppers! Surely the lowest of the low in terms of having a cultivated appetite for classic westerns and particularly in terms of knowing what a truly special thing it is for a large-format Technirama film to be transferred to Bluray.

You can buy The Big Country Bluray on Amazon for $24.99 (which is what I did early this morning), but the Walmart crowd can buy it online or in their stores for less than $10 bills. There’s a part of me that wants to drive down to the Baldwin Hills Walmart (i.e., the closest one around) and pick up a copy today. Because for me, a first-rate Bluray transfer of a late 1950s Super Technirama film, particularly one as pastoral and meditative as The Big Country, is a very big deal.

On 6.2 Bluray.com’s Jeffrey Kaufman called it “a mostly spectacular looking 1080p transfer…the widescreen, large format Technirama image is perfect for the high definition medium, and…the depth of field is nothing short of awesome throughout this film, with vistas that extend for scores of miles…clarity and precision are first-rate throughout the bulk of this film, and fine detail is excellent, with gorgeously saturated color.”

For those who aren’t up to speed, here’s an explanation from a Home Theatre Forum guy: “Technirama was essentially VistaVision combined with anamorphic lenses to produce a CinemaScope widescreen image that could then be converted to 35mm CinemaScope prints or unsqueezed and blown up to Super Technirama 70.

“VistaVision and Technirama recorded a large format image by running 35mm film through the camera horizontally, so that each frame was 8 perforations widrather than 4 perforations tall, as in a regular vertical pull down 35mm camera.

Location of the closest Walmart in my sphere. The ghost of William Wyler is bouncing off the walls in heaven. “My 1958 Super Technirama western, one of the most handsomely composed films I ever shot, is being offered on a special reduced rate to effing Walmart shoppers….God! I was no snob during my lifetime but who offers a specially priced Chateaubriand to people known for their patronage of KFC and McDonald’s?”

“This method of exposure increased the size of each frame by about 130% compared to 35mm anamorphic systems like CinemaScope, but was still 28% smaller than 65mm systems like Todd-AO and Super Panavision 70. Effectively you got a lot of the benefits of shooting in a 65mm format, while still using 35mm film.

“Separation masters are essentially a film ‘back up’ of the original camera negative made on black and white film. There are three elements, one each for the yellow, cyan, and magenta components of the colour spectrum.

“Since these elements are B&w film, they don’t fade the way early Eastmancolor negatives do. The separations can be recompiled to produce a new preservation negative of the film that doesn’t have faded color.”

Walmart thought from HE reader: “I am a person who refuses to shop at Wal-Mart, absolutely refuses. Never shopped there, never will. But would good deals on Blurays potentially bring in some new customers? Sure. Absolutely. And it’s part of a whole luring game anyway. You come in for the Blu-Ray and you walk out spending a min. of $50 bucks, easy. On the genre front– a lot of conservatives love westerns. And they also love Wal-Mart. So I guess I don’t look at it so surprisingly. I know a lot of folks who have Bluray players. My wife’s dad is a prime example. He’s a conservative who loves his tech toys and once he got turned on to Bluray that’s all he buys. And you know where he shops? Costco and Walmart.”

I don’t see how the Screen Gems marketing team could possibly go wrong in pushing Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs (9.16) by using the same basic design of the old 1971 Sam Peckinpah-Dustin Hoffman one-sheet. Because it’s still one of the most psychologically unnerving and suggestively violent images every delivered by a movie poster. I would just ignore that 2009 Tyler Perry one-sheet and go for it.

The seeing-is-believing factor is so completely null and void and out-the-window in the CG behemoth Transformers realm that when flying stunts are performed for real it means absolutely nothing to Joe Popcorn. As far as most of us are concerned everyone and everything is digitally reconstituted. The guys who did the actual wing-flying are probably dismayed to hear this, but this is the world we’ve created.

Even my own physical-biological self, the entity known as Jeffrey Wells that I’ve been inhabiting all these decades, primarily exists as a digital reconstitution. In the eyes of most of those who know me, I mean. I obviously exist as a physical being, but who cares or notices outside of my two sons and friends and professional acquaintances and the publicists I deal with? And my two cats?

It’s a fact that I’ve been gradually ceasing to “exist” in a biological form over the last decade or so, and have increasingly manifested as a digital presence or smart-mouth energy field or what-have-you on a drop-by-drop, month-by-month basis. It’s a little bit like Jeff Goldblum‘s transformation in David Cronenberg‘s The Fly — i.e., “Brundlefly.”

I’ve been an online columnist for 13 years now, and I’ve been punching out a continuous stream of items and stories in a bloggy-blog format since April ’06. And I swear to God I myself don’t even feel as if I’m completely in touch with whatever my essence is (or might actually amount to) unless I’m online. I can’t quite feel it (whatever “it” is) when I’m just walking down a street or standing on the beach or talking to Stu Van Airsdale at a bar or whatever. Not like I used to feel it when I was ten years old, or when I was in my early 20s and high half the time.

Every waking moment I’m not online, I’m thinking to myself, “Well, it won’t be long.”

Update: Apparently it wasn’t a symmetrical no-brainer for Paramount/Amblin/Bad Robot to hire Drew Struzan, the illustrator who did all those hand-painted posters for the big Lucas-Spielberg-Zemeckis flicks of the late ’70s and ’80s (Star Wars, E.T., Indiana Jones series, Back to the Future), to create a retro Super 8 poster. Because it’s a fan poster. Not by Struzan. Fake.

I’ll be attending the big Super 8 premiere screening and after-party tonight in Westwood. Abstract impressionism, photos, videos, JJ Abrams-isms, etc. Perhaps a photo of Drew McWeeny?

The September release of the 50th anniversary Ben-Hur Bluray will, of course, arrive almost 52 years after William Wyler‘s film opened on 11.18.59. So the marketing exec who decided to call it a “50th anniversary” release was tripping on something. His own ass-fumes?

The 212-minute-long Oscar-winner, restored from the original 65mm negative and remastered in 1080p, will be contained on two discs along with (a) a commentary track recorded by film historian T. Gene Hatcher and star Charlton Heston, and (b) a music-only track containing Miklos Rozsa‘s award-winning score. Plus a feature-length “making of” documentary including never-before-available images and footage from the Heston family archive, and the 1925 silent Ben-Hur with Ramon Navarro and Francis X. Bushman.

Who likes to slosh around in the surf with a thoughtful, pensive look on her face, and then picks up people who happen to be walking by and puts them into her raincoat pocket. Is the ghost mermaid here to resuscitate a buried Wold War II memory? Something to do with a kid who hid in the basement to avoid being carted away to a Nazi concentration camp? Okay, but what’s this to do with a giant phantom who looks like Kristin Scott Thomas?

Larry Karaszewski and Peter Fonda need to understand that I’ll be attending this Aero double bill of The Hired Hand and The Limey on Friday, June 10th, and politely requesting an explanation from Fonda about his Cannes Film Festival statement, quoted in the Telegraph, that he’s “training [his] grandchildren to use long-range rifles….for what purpose? Well, I’m not going to say the words ‘Barack Obama’ but …”

Seven days ago Blake Lively was a fetching actress I was half-aware of in the periphery of my vision but whom I was never, to be honest, hugely interested in. I’d never seen a single episode of Gossip Girl, and I didn’t see The Private Lives of Pippa Lee because I didn’t care to.

Yes, she stood out in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and yes, she was reasonably persuasive as a barroom floozie in Ben Affleck‘s The Town. And her sassy, sad-eyed features have always had a kind of folksy, arresting quality that said “actress.” But inwardly she never quite projected that special something-or-other that, say, Elle Fanning has in spades. Not in my mind, at least.

But now she’s broken through. Now she’s big-screen. She has my attention and then some. My head will henceforth turn whenever I hear her name. I don’t care if the photos everyone has been passing around are fake or not (although I suspect they’re probably genuine). The point is that she’s now a movie star. She’s a marquee name. She’ll put arses in seats. Tell me I’m wrong.

Five or six days ago Sasha Stone posted a list of films she believes are the most likely contenders for 2011 Best Picture nominations. She began by listing the favorites posted by the mysterious “Peter” at Awards Corner. Sasha and I discussed this during yesterday’s Oscar Poker recording. So I’ve decided to post my own top ten.

HE’s Most Likely 2011 Best Picture Contenders (in this order): 1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (d: Stephen Daldry, screenwriter: Eric Roth); 2. The War Horse (d: Steven Spielberg); 3. The Ides of March (d: George Clooney); 4. The Iron Lady (d: Phyllida Lloyd); 5. We Bought A Zoo (d: Cameron Crowe); 6. God of Carnage (d: Roman Polanski); 7. Young Adult (d: Jason Reitman, w: Diablo Cody); 8. The Descendants (d: Alexander Payne); 9. Moneyball (d: Bennett Miller); 10. J. Edgar (d: Clint Eastwood).

HE’s A-Little-Less-Likely Roster: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (d: David Fincher); Shame (d: Steve McQueen); The Tree of Life (d: Terrence Malick); Win Win (d: Tom McCarthy); Beginners (d: Mike Mills). The Impossible (d: Juan Antonio Bayona); Larry Crowne (d: Tom Hanks); Hugo Cabret (d: Martin Scorsese); On The Road (d: Walter Salles); Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (d: Thomas Alfredson); The Whistleblower (d: Larysa Kondracki); Wuthering Heights (d: Andrea Arnold); In the Land of Blood and Honey (d: Angelina Jolie).

Here’s Peter’s list with my after-comments:

1. David Fincher‘s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. HE comment: It’s a pop genre movie — a creepy thriller, a punk whodunit with shaved eyebrows. It’ll probably be great entertainment but it’s not Oscar material.

2. Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. HE comment: Malick doesn’t make Oscar movies. Damnation by L.A. Times citic Kenneth Turan has probably sealed the deal — the over-50 Academy types will reject it. Parts of Tree are radiant, transcendent. It should make the cut, but it probably won’t.

3. Steven Spielberg‘s The War Horse. HE comment: If this film about a sad hard-luck horse turns out to be in the vein of Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar, a classic about a sad and saintly donkey, then no one will be a more committed supporter than I. But if War Horse turns out to be another cloying and shamelessly sentimental Spielberg film, then it must be stopped at all costs. That’s all I’m going to say.

Thomas Horn, Ton Hanks during filming of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

4. Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar. HE comment: Maybe. The script is a fairly dry thing, a little bit perverse. It may jbe quietly…who knows? But I have my doubts. I’m not feeling major heat.

5. Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo Cabret. HE comment: Never count on a Scorsese film operating outside of the northeast criminal goombah territory to achieve anything too exceptional — there are always problems when he ventures outside this realm. Then again this is a 3D film, etc.

6. Roman Polanski‘s Carnage. HE comment: Terrific play, sure-to-be-knockout performances, the direction of Roman Polanski. A very likely contender.

7. David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method. HE comment: Forget it — Cronenberg doesn’t make Oscar films.

8. Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris. HE comment: A very charming, agreeable and popular film, but it won’t stand up to the fall/holiday competition.

9. Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. HE comment: Definitely.

10. Blah-dee-blah‘s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II. HE comment: Definitely.

11. Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants. HE comment: Definitely.

12. Phyllida Lloyd‘s The Iron Lady. HE comment: Probably, but Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) scares me.

13. Mike Mills‘ Beginners. HE comment: Good enough to be among the ten; may or may not make it.

Georeg Clooney in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants.

14. Blah-dee-blah‘s My Week with Marilyn. HE comment: Doubtful, from what I’ve been told. Possibly Michelle Williams‘ Marilyn Monroe performance for Best Actress, but Kenneth Branagh, I’m hearing, is truly exceptional as Laurence Olivier, and in fact steals the film.

15. Andrea Arnold‘s Wuthering Heights. HE comment: Maybe.

Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily projection:

1. War Horse; 2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; 3. Midnight in Paris; 4. The Iron Lady; 5. J. Edgar; 6. The Descendants; 7. Harry Potter, etc.; 8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; 9. Super 8; and 10. The Artist.

Celluloid Junkie‘s Patrick von Sychowski tweeted a little while ago that he’s “seen [the] French thriller Point Blank at Hospital Club…pure adrenaline…I predict a Hollywood remake within 18 months.”

Magnolia Pictures acquired North American rights to Fred Cavaye‘s thriller, “billed as an action film in the vein of Tell No One,” last February. Gilles Lellouche stars “as a man racing against time through the streets of Paris to save his pregnant, kidnapped wife,” etc.