Critic Pally: “Calling For Colored Girls the best thing Tyler Perry has ever done is pretty faint praise. Terrific performances buried inside an after-school special about abuse, sexual repression, rape, etc.”

Me: “A journalist friend said it has great performances.”

Critic Pally: “Except one character is a high-powered magazine exec whose lofty status apparently has emasculated her stockbroker husband to the point that he’s gay.”

Me: “He turns gay at…what, age 35 because his wife makes him feel unimportant and diminished? That sounds ridiculous. Does the movie feel like now or like a ’70s thing, which is when the play was written?”

Critic Pally: “Call me crazy, but I think that devoting a long segment to a girl getting a back-alley abortion — in New York City in 2010 — is a tad anachronistic. That had resonance in 1976, when Roe v Wade was still a recent thing — but it seems kind of clueless today, unless Perry means it as a pro-life statement.”

Me: “What about Janet Jackson?”

Critic Pally: “I have to say that Janet Jackson looks/sounds like a transgender Michael Jackson. She’s distractingly unnatural-looking.”

Me: “It sounds perfectly dreadful.”

Critic Pally: “I actually admire the original for what it is: a series of poetic monologues. But Perry, in adapting it, felt compelled to create characters with stories and intertwine them in trite and obvious ways.”

Me: “Perry is a mediocre director, at best, who feeds a niche audience (i.e., older African American women with no taste) and that’s all he’ll ever be. Lionsgate’s release and awards campaign is strictly a good-manners political gesture. They’re basically saying ‘thank you, Tyler, for making us lots of money with your previous terrible movies.'”

Bruce Harrison Smith, producer and screenwriter of The Fields, wrote and asked for my help in getting thousands of “we want to see this!” petition signatures that might persuade a distributor to cut a theatrical deal. An M. Night Shyamalan-type suspenser, The Fields is based on Smith’s real-life experience as a kid back in ’73.

Pic costars Cloris Leachman and Tara Reid. Smith wants to see play the midnight section at Sundance 2011. The trailer is obviously M. Night-ish. It tells you that the directors, Tom Mattera and David Mazzoni, are (a) into old-fashioned tracking shots and (b) are willing to let the camera just absorb the anticipation and the stillness.

The Fields “was shot last year from 9.15 to 10.27,” Smith informs. “It completed post two months ago. It’s not specifically a horror film as much as a suspense thriller based on what happened to me as a boy on my grandparent’s farm in the fall of 1973.” The press notes describe it as being about “a young boy and his family terrorized by an unseen presence emanating from the miles of corn fields surrounding their small farm.”

Smith said he’s looking for a million signatures, and I said “why so many? I would think 100,000 would suffice.” He replied that “in speaking with Ryan Buell of Paranormal State on his visit to the set, he felt 1 million was a target number as he had some involvement with Paranormal Activity‘s promotion.

“At the present time we have been courted by Indican distribution and have a number of sales agents including Shoreline, Showcase and Spotlight. We were accepted to the Hollywood Film Festival but feel we have a strong shot at Sundance.”

The slightly Elmer Fuddish-looking guy with the big gray beard in the second video is Smith’s uncle, Harrison “JR” Kline, Jr., who’s the actual son of the real Gladys whom Leachman portrays. “I am another Harrison also named after my grandfather,” Smith explains. “I am the screenwriter and not featured in any of the videos.”

Why do I feel vaguely bummed out by Variety‘s totally-confirmed report that James Cameron has committed to making two Avatar sequels, to hit theatres in December 2014 and December 2015? I can roll with it, but my first reaction was “oh, gee….that’s not the greatest idea.”

It’s a downer because it’s basically a corporate cash-grab move. (Rothman and Gianopulos: “They’ll pay to see this again…twice! Revenues! Hah-hah-hah!”) Because it’s a creatively lazy enterprise for Cameron as it’ll be no great feat to come up with a prequel and a sequel. Because Avatar was a great four-course meal, and I’m not feeling a need to go there again. Because the ending of Avatar was perfect (i.e., the opening of the transformed Jake Sully’s eyes), and I’m thinking “leave it there.”

And because a guy like Cameron committing to a two-movie, four-year rehash project that is primarily about making money (i.e., certainly on 20th Century Fox’s end) is a kind of capitulation to the golden-calf mentality.

Cameron is an adventurer — I get that. And I realize that he’s doing this because the task will be technically challenging and thrilling and draining and fulfilling in a whoo-hoo! sort of way, but what Avatar fan believes that the Avatar world needs to be re-visited two more times? C’mon, be honest.

There are two kinds of money that we enjoy in life — fresh and vibrant money from hard work and inspired enterprise, and rote somnambulent money that comes from some idea or conquering that somebody thought up or accomplished years or decades ago. All real adventurers understand that there’s something vaguely soul-killing about the second kind of money, however plentiful and comforting it may be. Every day God tells all living things that they must find fresh fruit, climb new mountains, and dig into fresh earth. This is the only way to live.

With so many stories happening in the world that he could explore as a director, and with so many tens or hundreds of millions in his bank account, why would Cameron, savoring the last four or five years of his sixth decade and in the creative prime of his life, want to do this?

What would have been the reaction to the idea of a Titanic prequel and sequel? The separate but fated-to-be-interwined adventures of Jack Dawson (kicking around in Paris) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (quietly miserable in English schools), and then a sequel in which Jack’s ghost gives counsel and support to Rose as she makes her way through her 20s and 30s? I’ll tell you what the reaction would have been. People would have jumped off bridges.

If I was Cameron and Fox had told me they’re making a couple of Avatar sequels with or without my participation, I would have agreed to produce — no more than that. This would give me the time and freedom to create the next fresh movie. But no. Cameron has decided to be the Super-Sequel Guy.

In my initial 10.20 review of Love and Other Drugs, I predicted that it would run into trouble from “the Eric Kohn-Guy Lodge nitpick crowd.” Neither of these two have run a review yet, but In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, whom Lodge writes for, gave Ed Zwick‘s film a little slapdown today, so my prediction was…well, vaguely accurate.

Anne Hatahway, Jake Gyllenhaal in Love and Other Drugs

I’m also claiming clairoyance by predicting the reasons that detractors like Lodge (or Tapley) would use. “Eeew, it’s two different movies…eeew, it doesn’t blend….eeew, it veers too sharply between broad comedy and disease-anguish and hot sexuality and heartfelt love and heavy emotionalism.”

Tapley puts it as follows: “There are too many ingredients in the soup, many of them tasty. But they clash in the mixture. There was an opportunity here to delicately balance comedy and drama, [but] the film never finds that balance.” If it had, Tapley writes, “it could have been this year’s Up in the Air.”

I don’t think Zwick was trying for an Up In The Air-type thing. I’m not sure he was trying to fit any of the paradigms or models that people are familiar with. I think Zwick has put together a different type of concoction that some aren’t going to “like” because it doesn’t quite follow the form they’re looking for. I only know that when a film gives off that special feeling of assurance with everything clicking, you can smell it like tasty food in a nearby kitchen.

I agree with Tapley that Josh Gad‘s fat brother character is a pain in the ass. I would have been totally fine if an assassin had picked him off with a high-powered rifle early on. And I agree that the film “run[s] through the usual high-gloss romantic comedy motions” rather than “expand thematically,” but these typical motions are handled so deftly and with such spunk and charm that I was mostly taken in.

And I’m intrigued, rather than thrown and unsettled, by how Love and Other Drugs “isn’t any one thing.” In fact, I wrote, “That’s the fascination of it. It’s not dark enough to be The Apartment, it’s not easy and it’s not ‘farce’ and it’s not just hah-hah funny, and it’s not dramedy as much as comedy with a thorny and guarded edge.”

“It just works, is all. LOAD has charm and pizazz and, okay, sometimes strained humor, and yet it never slows down or goes off the rails, or at least not to any worrisome degree. So you can be Eric Kohn and go ‘no, no…I want something else! This doesn’t fit into my comfort-blanket idea of how movies like this are supposed to work.’ And that’s fine, Eric. Go to town and send me a postcard.”

Variety‘s Justin Chang says LAOD “is rather too eager to please,” but also “super-slick, snappy, smartly packaged [and] saucy” with “an uncommon degree of sexual candor for a mainstream picture” and “ingratiating performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway.

“If one can get past the calculation inherent in the drug-pushing-boy-meets-disease-stricken-girl setup, Love & Other Drugs clicks largely because its actors do. Their ribald pillow talk lends the film a verbal tartness that’s complemented visually by the abundant nudity, though tasteful use of shadows and strategic camera placement still leave plenty to the imagination.

“That the film’s treatment of Parkinson’s disease feels as respectful as it does is a credit to Hathaway’s sensitive, understated rendering of her character’s symptoms, which appear to manifest themselves only when most convenient for the narrative.

“Crucially, the actress makes Maggie a vivacious presence, the sheer force of her spirit serving as a rebuke to her physical setbacks and countering the film’s generally insulting view of women (who fall into three basic categories here: bimbos, opportunists and Parkinson’s patients). As Jamie, the ideally cast Gyllenhaal turns on the charm full force, his energetic puppy-dog demeanor all but daring the viewer not to buy whatever he’s selling.”

There’s an explanation, of course, for the mysterious 1928 cell-phone woman walking on the sidewalk near the premiere of Charlie Chaplin‘s The Circus on Hollywood Blvd. But one question never raised in this video is who she may be talking to.

I once wrote that I have a problem with the name “Danny.” I don’t like characters named Danny. I don’t like people named Danny (although I’ve gotten past this with Danny Boyle, an altogether brilliant and vibrant fellow). And I don’t like the Irish ballad “Danny Boy.” But the discomfort really boils down to any name that has “eee” sound at the end. I don’t like Billy or Frenchy or Sparky or Binky or Buddy — they’re all dopey-sounding 1940s and ’50s-era Italian-American street names.

But the worst offender of all is Frankie. Frankie is the ultimate sentimental-machismo slinky nickname from the days of James Dean and post-comeback Frank Sinatra (who can never be called Frankie) and Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. It’s a generic goombah name for all those nice oily neighborhood guys who played pool and ran crap games and dressed up slick on Saturday nights with a carnation in their lapel. It’s a name that belongs on the street of Little Italy and the Bronx and the dicey areas of old Brooklyn (i.e., pre 1990s) and Hoboken and Newark. And I’ve always hated the sound of it.

I can remember getting angry at a childhood friend when he referred to the Frankenstein monster as “Frankie.” I never liked the sound of Frankie Laine. I don’t even want to think about Frankie Avalon. I grimaced when I heard that Martin Scorsese wanted to film The Winter of Frankie Machine. And this is part of the reason I never liked Frankie and Johnny, the 1991 Al Pacino-Michelle Pfeiffer movie that was based on Terrence McNally‘s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.

And so I’m naturally feeling a bit guarded about about Geoffrey Sax‘s Frankie and Alice, an indie-type “”70s-set psychological drama” that stars Halle Berry as a woman with multiple-personality disorder. I’ve come to believe that any film or play or TV series or comic book that uses the name “Frankie” for any purpose is all but jinxed. This sounds like one of my neurotic nonsensicals, I realize. But we all know about certain jinxed locations where restaurants always fail, and all I’m talking about is a jinxed name. You use it, you die.

It was announced yesterday that Freestyle Releasing will give Frankie and Alice a New York and Los Angeles award-qualifying run on 12.17.

Freestyle is kind of a vanity distributor that offers “service deals” to hard-up producers of films struggling for cred and recognition. The Frankie and Alice Wiki page says that filming began in Vancouver, Canada in November 2008 and ended in January 2009. Berry plays both Frankie and Alice. Stellan Skarsgard plays a character named “Dr. Oz.”

Also from the Wiki page: “Following a screening at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, the Hollywood Reporter reportedly described the film as “a well-wrought psychological drama that delves into the dark side of one woman’s psyche”. The review also said Berry was ‘spellbinding’ as Frankie, with ‘rock-solid’ supporting performances.”

Until I saw various comparison shots on DVD Beaver, I didn’t fully understand or accept, I suppose, that the Apocalypse Now Bluray would really and truly render the 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio that Vittorio Storaro originally captured. I thought the wider Bluray version might come from top-and-bottom cropping the 2 to 1 aspect ratio version that Storaro insisted upon in the various DVD versions over the years. But no. It really is wider. And is quite captivating for that.

DVD Beaver frame capture of 2.35 image from Apocalypse Now Bluray

DVD Beaver frame capture of same scene rendered via 2 to 1 “Full Dossier” DVD.

So why hasn’t Tilda Swinton‘s heartily-praised performance in Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love popped through in this year’s Best Actress conversations? For one thing I Am Love is not universally admired. It’s all lavish and cranked up in a orchestrated Visconti-ish sense. That’s what’s sublime about it, of course, but at the same time it feels like an art-film exercise in “quotes.”

And yet the reviews Swinton got were something. “Tour de force” and all that. Consider this paragraph from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, written as part of his I Am Love review last June:

“This is the film toward which Tilda Swinton has been tending. Put together the chill of her majesty in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; the brunt of her motherly love in The Deep End; the leonine wildness that ate her up, in Erick Zonca‘s Julia; and the awful sense, in Michael Clayton, of a woman waiting to buckle beneath the formal demands of a working life — package all that, and you get Emma Recchi, winding the ribbon from a newly unwrapped gift around the spool of her worried fingers.”

But by Oscar season rules, it’s probably naive to think that a performance might rank as a contender for one of the Best Actress slots on mere “quality of performance” alone. And it’s pretty clear to everyone, I think, that Swinton’s Love performance just isn’t punching through. She’s not percolating. She has no heat. The last thing Tilda did that got people’s attention was that Laurel & Hardy flashmob dance number at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

On the strength of her performance alone (and I Am Love itself, which is like Visconti back from the dead) Swinton is quite mesmerizing. Quite the passionate woman, and slightly mad by way of erotic abandon. But I don’t have to tell anyone that the game, certainly at this stage, is about much more than that.

In a few weeks, I’m told, Swinton will be in LA for a big round of screenings and then on to New York. Magnolia will be sending screeners to the entire Academy, SAG Nominating committee and HFPA for starters.

In an email, columnist Scott Feinberg says that Swinton “has a very real shot at a Best Actress nod. Obviously the field is very crowded, and it may be tougher to get some voters to watch a two-hour foreign-language flick that came out months ago, but I suspect that those who do will not only vote to nominate her but place her very high on their ballots.

“Keep in mind that she’s very popular among her fellow actors, who I imagine admire her fiercely independent streak on-screen and off. While her supporting performance in Michael Clayton — which was good, but far from her best — lost the SAG Award, it won the Oscar, and it’s worth considering who she beat if you want to appreciate just how well-liked/respected she is.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone says “you never know with Tilda” and that “nothing is set in stone right now.”

Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich says this reminds her of “last year’s situation with Julia, another tiny movie with a terrific Tilda Swinton performance that couldn’t get any traction. During the NYFCO vote for Best Actress there was a strong cadre of support for Swinton, but Meryl Streep wound up winning anyway. This year it feels like even fewer people have seen I Am Love, and plus the performance is a lot less baity — more restrained, more technically impressive but less gritty, desperate, that kind of flashy stuff that really gets you noticed.

“So she probably doesn’t have a chance. And with plenty of other female performances out there that need a champion — Jennifer Lawrence, Nicole Kidman, maybe even Lesley Manville — there just might not be room for Tilda.”

Swinton’s p.r. rep claims that “there are many champions for this film out there. Like Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson, Richard Jenkins in The Visitor and Melissa Leo in Frozen River, this is a performance and film that was the talk of the fest circuit at Toronto and Sundance last year, and the film did very well for a foreign film at box office. Buzz may not be crackling at the moment but it’s out there. Actors have seen the film although several key awards-season bloggers calling the race haven’t yet.”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley says, “I still need to watch it. It’s sitting on my DVD player. I imagine it’ll be the same for Academy members all season long unless they feel a great need to give it a look.”

Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas says he “barely got through 45 minutes of the movie.”

The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy says he “can’t see” a Swinton headwind kicking in “but then I was an outlier on this: I believe I gave I Am Love its lowest score on Metacritic. I found it unbearable. But bully for Ms. Swinton if they can do it, I guess.”

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson says “the only way for Tilda Swinton — who is admired by critics and art house audiences alike — to make the best actress Oscar grade this year for I Am Love is for critics to make a fuss over her in their year-end wraps and ten-best lists, and for critics groups and the Golden Globes to reward her and thus turn the screener into a must-see for SAG and Academy actors. Swinton has been nominated once (and won, for Michael Clayton).

“Metascore critics (32) gave it a 79, which is a strong score — they love Swinton’s performance. Who will the critics groups single out for best actress? Will Tilda Swinton beat out Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Annette Bening, Jennifer Lawrence, Lesley Manville and Diane Lane? The problem is that someone has to mount a viable campaign for her. Magnolia has not beaten the bushes for Oscars in the past. But the movie reached an almost $5 million gross which is good in today’s market.

“It’s not impossible.”

Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet says, “I’m probably not the best one to ask when it comes to this film, as I didn’t like it in the slightest. I can understand where people are coming from when they found it sensuous and passionate, like biting into that perfectly ripe piece of fruit, but it didn’t move me in that way. In fact it moved me in the opposite direction.”

But there are plenty of admirers out there, enough so that one can say that Swinton ought to at least be in the running along with the others. Do I think she has an actual prayer as things stand? Nope. I mean, not the slightest tendril of a slender reed of hope. But maybe I’m wrong, and I wouldn’t mind at all if I was.

I Am Love has an overall 81% on Rotten Tomatoes. The I Am Love Bluray/DVD came out on 10.12.

The problem, of course, is that Dustin Hoffman‘s scenes are almost certainly going to feel somewhat artificially tacked on because he came into the shoot at the very end. I fear that his scenes are going to feel like Frank Sinatra‘s in The Cannonball Run II. If they don’t feel tacked-on it’ll be a miracle — put it that way.

A 10.25 New Yorker “Back Issues” piece by Jon Michaud about critics of ’60s rock music is written so concisely and with such comfort that I just have to paste the whole thing:

“In his review of Keith Richards‘ memoir in this week’s issue, David Remnick quotes the following passage from the book, in which Richards recalls the irrepressible force of youthful adulation:

“‘The power of the teenage females of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, when they’re in a gang, has never left me. They nearly killed me. I was never more in fear for my life than I was from teenage girls. The ones that choked me, tore me to shreds, if you got caught in a frenzied crowd of them — it’s hard to express how frightening they could be. You’d rather be in a trench fighting the enemy than be faced with this unstoppable, killer wave of lust and desire, or whatever it is — it’s unknown even to them.

“This echoes something our first rock critic, Ellen Willis, wrote in a 1969 review of the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet and The Beatles’ White Album:

“It’s my theory that rock and roll happens between fans and stars, rather than between listeners and musicians — that you have to be a screaming teenager, at least in your heart, to know what’s going on.

“Willis goes on to say that though she never identified emotionally with Elvis, she learned to appreciate the Stones: ‘I became a true Stones fan — i.e., an inward screamer — and I’ve been one ever since.’

“The review is instructive for those of us who have trouble remembering a time when the Stones’ songs weren’t being licensed by Microsoft, Anheuser-Busch, and E*Trade, a time when the band had been together less than a decade. Willis found Beggars Banquet to be ‘something of an anticlimax,’ though she argues that the album’s best song, Street Fighting Man, is ‘infinitely more intelligent’ than the Beatles’ Revolution. (Willis also wrote about the Stones in 1972, 1974, and 1975.)

“More recently — in 2000 — John Seabrook published a Talk story about cover versions of the Stones anthem (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by Britney Spears and Cat Power. In the story, he relates how Richards came up with the song’s immortal riff:

“The origins of Satisfaction are appropriately Romantic — it is the ‘Kubla Khan’ of pop tunes. According to one legend about the song, in 1965 Keith Richards, the Stones’ lead guitarist, woke up in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Florida with the song’s famous riff — dunt dunt, da-da-dahh — ringing in his head. Richards, who was in the habit of keeping a tape recorder beside his bed to capture such moments, grabbed a guitar and taped the riff, then fell asleep again, leaving the machine running.

“‘In the morning, he forgot about the incident, and later, listening to the tape, he thought it was blank and was about to record over it when he stumbled on the riff and quickly figured out the rest of the song.'”

Seabrook notes that in her cover of the song, Spears changes the ‘how white my shirts can be’ line to ‘how tight my skirts should be.’ The Stones themselves have taken such liberties with their own lyrics. In a 1995 Talk story, Hendrik Hertzberg described how they adjusted the words to their song “The Spider and the Fly” for an album of acoustic reinterpretations of their classics:

“The Spider and the Fly tells the story of a touring rock and roller getting picked up by a slightly used female fan in a bar after a show. Fans will recall one of the original song’s growly couplets:

“She was common, flirty, she looked about thirty…she said she liked the way I held the microphone.”

This, more or less, is how the lyric is rendered on the liner notes of the new album, too. But obsessive listening to the record itself reveals a sly alteration:

“‘She was shifty, nifty, she looked about fifty…she said she liked the way I held the microphone.’

“And, no doubt, she was also much less frightening than a gang of teen-age girls.”

“If you’re feeling woozy, just cover your eyes. There’s nothing wrong with covering your eyes. It took 40 minutes [for Aron to cut his arm off], so what Danny showed is mercifully short. It’s visceral, but it’s about the exhilaration of getting free and leaving in the end.” — 127 Hours star James Franco speaking to Vulture‘s Jada Yuan about getting through the tough part. And he’s not lying about the exhilaration at the end. It really does kick in. (I was mentioning this yesterday during Oscar Poker #5.)

Badass correspondent Moises Chiullan reported this morning that Elaine May‘s Ishtar will be issued exclusively on Bluray on 1.4.11, bypassing DVD entirely. I’ve run two or three stories about the travails of Ishtar, but the best was posted on 1.8.10.