The forthcoming Bluray of The Bridge on the River Kwai looks significantly better than a digitally projected version that I saw last weekend at Suffern’s Lafayette. (I thought it looked a bit too dark.) The Bluray Kwai seems about as perfect-looking as it could get. It’s a life-like, vibrantly colored, finely-tuned celluloid experience, and a very gratifying enhancement over the 2000 DVD.

Canon capture of scene from Sony Home Entertainment’s Bluray of The Bridge on the River Kwai, as played on my Panasonic 42-inch plasma.

Same shot rendered by the 2000 Kwai DVD, as seen on my iMac desktop

In short, the Bluray hasn’t been Spartacus-ed (i.e., turned into a digitally-reconstituted android). It looks like an exceptionally handsome 1957 film straight out of the lab. It looks and sounds absolutely perfect. It might be slightly darker and just a teeny bit browner than the DVD, and yet the jungle greens are lush and full and almost 3D radiant at times. William Holden‘s eyes have never looked so fiercely blue. And more distinctly than ever you can see bloody gashes on the top of Alec Guinness‘s head after he’s knocked over by that grenade fired by Jack Hawkins.

I have two strategic logic issues with the very last portion of Kwai that I’ve never expressed, so here goes.

1. Why do they have to blow up the bridge at the precise moment when the train’s about to cross? Who cares about the train? Wouldn’t this action guarantee that Japanese troops not killed in the blast would hunt the commandos down and almost certainly kill them? How could they expect to escape when they’re positioned so closely? It’s a hopeless suicide mission. The more sensible approach would be to blow up the bridge in the dead of night and then hightail it into the jungle while the Japanese are still waking up. Not getting killed in the aftermath of the explosion isn’t against the rules, is it? Isn’t it better to complete the mission, escape and live to fight another day?

2. Jack Hawkins tells Geoffrey Horne to set up the detonation plunger on the far side of the river and then “swim back” after the explosion. Swim back? He’ll get shot. The smarter thing would be for Horne to scamper into the jungle on his side of the river and then meet up with Hawkins and the others at a rendezvous point a few miles away.

I don’t care if Ernest Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, actually dyed their hair albino while vacationing in the late 1920s along the Cote d’Azur, or if Hemingway invented this idiocy for his novel, The Garden of Eden. I do know that Jack Huston (grandson of director John Huston) looks absurd with white hair in John Irvin‘s film version (Roadside, 12.10).

Hemingway’s Garden of Eden debuted at Rome Cinemafest in 2008. Mena Suvari, Caterina Murino, Richard E. Grant and Matthew Modine costar.

For what it’s worth, HE’s Sean Jacobs (i.e., formidable ad exec) has persuaded me to launch a Hollywood Elsewhere Facebook page. I already have my own Facebook page so I’m not sure I get it, but whatever. As Elliott Gould says to Jim Bouton while pointing to several half-naked, lotus-position girls in the opening minutes of The Long Goodbye, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s yoga.”

Yesterday’s post about the leading Best Actress contenders resulted in a follow-up comment about whether Kids Are All Right costars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore should receive 100% even-steven support from Focus Features, or whether a majority of the energy should be expended in Bening’s favor. Here’s how I explained it:

“People don’t just vote for the performance but also — and perhaps primarily — for the character, and at the end of the day people always feel more empathy and support for the committed-relationship character who gets emotionally betrayed (Bening) rather than the betrayer (Moore). So that favors Bening, and there’s also a little carry-over factor from Bening’s lead performance in Mother and Child. So there you have it.

“Trying to wangle two Best Actress nominees from the same film is simply too much to reasonably expect this year. It’s too much of a feat. There are too many other strong contenders. You have to get real, and Focus knows that. So while the official position is one of equality and “we love them both”, the political hints and whispers say otherwise.

“You have to be hard. You have to be cruel. You have to be unfair by choosing one and cutting the other loose. It’s like being in charge of an over-crowded lifeboat and choosing which people have to go over the side. (I’m referring to a 1957 Tyrone Power film called Abandon Ship.) It’s a terrible choice to make, it’s Sophie’s Choice, but you have to do it. And in their own delicate, hard-to-spot way, I think the Focus Features guys have made their choice.

“Julianne Moore may have gone to the 2010 Berlin Film Festival to accept honors for The Kids Are All Right and is doing the London Film Festival this year, but as far as this fall’s awards race is concerned my sense of the situation is that she’s sorta kinda been handed a life jacket and told “we really love you and no offense, but you’re going to have to do for yourself as best you can.”

Here’s Scott Feinberg’s take on this dilemma.

Oscar Poker #5 is up — Phil Contrino on the weekend’s box-office, Tony Scott‘s Unstoppable, the decline of the tracking companies, the flat response for Hereafter, 127 Hours “puts you through hell but it pays off at the end,” the Anne Hathaway/Love and Other Drugs locomotive, etc.

In David Carr‘s 10.22 piece about Alex Gibney‘s Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (Magnolia. 11.2), Gibney says that Spitzer “was a force for good. There’s always been corruption in American business, but the new class of rich has become untethered to normal people. They are only tethered to other rich people, and here you have a rich and powerful guy who cares about what is happening to those people and decides to punch back.”

In the view of Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Conviction has brought Sam Rockwell “the role of his career, playing the real-life rebellious and volatile Kenny Waters, who grew up neglected and abused and ended up with a murder conviction, in prison for life. His sister, Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank), finished high school, put herself through college and law school, over eighteen years, in order to figure out a way to prove that he was innocent of the crime.

“Rockwell shows us how this guy feels — angry, hopeful, despairing, suicidal, never sure if it will work out, hanging onto his sister to deliver his freedom. It’s tough, real, upsetting stuff.”

Wells response: Put this idea out of your head right now! “Rockwell delivers his usual cut-up performance, playing the doofus-yokel brother who’s indifferent to authority or caution or…I don’t know what the character’s problem is, and I don’t care that much either,” I wrote on 9.30. “I do know that when you hire Sam Rockwell you’re going to get one of his head-scratchy, soft-shoe-shuffle performances that are mainly about how hip-weird and hip-dorky he can be if the director doesn’t tell him to get down and focus his ass and stop hacking around.”

About three hours ago I spent a few minutes talking with Jennifer Lawrence, whom everyone is more or less assuming will be one of the five Best Actress nominees for her performance in Winter’s Bone. She was in Los Angeles for whatever reason, although her primary activity right now is playing Raven Darkholme / Mystique in Matthew Vaughn‘s X-Men: First Class, an origins prequel set in the 1960s. The pic wraps in December and will open next June.

(l.) Likely Best Actress nominee Jennifer Lawrence; (r.) Rebecca Romijn as Mystique.

We didn’t speak much about Winter’s Bone; I just told her what I think is almost certain going to happen with the nominations, and she said “thank you.”

She’s living in a place in London’s Notting Hill distrtict, and that her X-Men commute is mostly a drive to Pinewood Studios. We spoke about how lethal London cab drivers can be. We talked briefly about Mark Tonderai‘s House at the End of the Street, which is kind of Psycho-ish, she said. I tried to talk a bit about The Beaver, which she has a costarring role in, but I’m sure she’s been told to stay away from that subject — she certainly didn’t say much.

Only 10% of her screen time will be as Mystique, she said. It takes X-Men: First Class makeup artists about six hours to transform her into Mystique with the blue skins and the scales, she added. (She has a nickname for the process or the makeup or whatever — “Mystink.”) I asked if official photos have been taken, and she said the idea was to keep her appearance under wraps until just before the film’s release. I said if the world has to wait until next summer for a shot, fine, but if an un-approved shot makes it onto the web I won’t be sorry.

The Best Actress locks are Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman, Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right (no Julianne Moore unless Focus takes Scott Feinberg‘s advice and pushes Bening and Moore together) and Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone. There are three prime contenders for the two remaining slots — Anne Hathaway for Love and Other Drugs , Michelle Williams for Blue Valentine and Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole (a.k.a. The Griefersons).

No offense, but the guys who posted this Movieline Best Actress chart on 10.20 didn’t quite understand all the ramifications and considerations that I’ve pointed out in today’s piece.

Lesley Manville needs to play it smart and go for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Another Year — she’ s a near-cinch to win if she does this. Sally Hawkins‘ Made in Dagenham performance doesn’t match the quality of her work in Happy Go Lucky — let’s face it. When Naomi Watts (portraying Valerie Plame) is outed as a CIA agent in Fair Game, she goes into a strange gopher hole of denial that doesn’t feel all that compelling or admirable. And whatever fervor may have existed for Diane Lane‘s Secretariat performance has gone away due to ebbing box-office, I’m afraid.

One of the oldest award-season prejudices is to deny consideration to any film that feels the least bit romcommy — anything that feels a little too fast or frothy or up-moody. And especially a performance in a film that dances to this kind of tune. This thinking might well be intensified, I’m thinking, in the case of an “emotional comedy” that isn’t exactly romcommy as much as a hybrid of romcom + earnest emotionalism + relationship anguish + grappling with a debilitating disease.

But throw it all together and you have the mule-like refusal of some award-season handicappers to even consider the idea that Anne Hathaway‘s performance in Love and Other Drugs might be Oscar-worthy, even as a speculative who-knows? type deal, which is what at least half of the flotations out there are composed of. This is presumably due to the belief that to qualify for an acting award you have to solemnly suffer and pour your heart out in a somewhat doleful and non-pizazzy way (like Annette Bening does, for example, in The Kids Are All Right).

Also working against Hathaway thus far has been the fear-of-Ed Zwick factor, but that, as noted in my recent review, is not a concern this time around.

I’ve been passing along ecstatic reader reviews of Love and Other Drugs for several months now and some of the awards handicappers won’t bite. A few days ago I saw Love and Other Drugs and earnestly praised Hathaway’s performance, but apart from Gurus of Gold voters Pete Hammond and Suzie Woz and two or three others, awards handicappers aren’t biting.

Two exceptions are Scott Feinberg and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. Both have short-listed Hathaway — fine.

But to my knowledge Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil haven’t touched notions of Hathaway with a ten-foot pole. And what about USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican? You’ve gotta watch that guy, Breznican. Because he’ll pull a fast one if you’re not careful.

And don’t give me that “oh, we haven’t seen the film yet” stuff. Who really knows if Christian Bale‘s performance in The Fighter has the chops to compete in the Best Supporting Actor race, but that hasn’t stopped certain handicappers from saying “Bale looks like a comer!”

There’s one aspect of Paranormal Activity 2 that’s at least semi-noteworthy. The two lead females, Sprague Grayden and Katie Featherstone, look like actual married suburban moms with their somewhat pudgy, unspectacular, slightly droopy bodies — pot-bellied and sway-breasted with no particular evidence of arduous workout regimens. These are the kinds of female shapes you see all the time in the malls, but almost never (or certainly rarely) in mainstream films.

This observation obviously doesn’t apply to the teenage daughter, played by Molly Ephraim, although it can be safely assumed that if she adheres to typical suburban eating and workout habits she’ll resemble Grayden and Featherstone in a few years’ time. But it does apply in a lumbering-dork male sense of the term to Brian Boland.