I know a beautiful Christian lady who believes that having a relationship with the one true God (i.e., the Christian one written about the in the King James version of the Bible) and with his only begotten son Jesus is the only way to go. You’re just not part of God’s chosen flock, she feels, if you’re not on this train. “I have a problem with that,” I said. “That’s okay,” she replied. She needs to talk, I think, with the guy who put up this sign.

Roger Michell‘s Morning Glory (Paramount, 11.10) more than held up during my second viewing last night. Here’s my initial reaction and a riff I did on Rachel McAdams a few days ao. The Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews I’ve read so far are just “what?”. It’s a weird feeling to know that a film works, and then to read a couple of reviews that just veer off the road and crash through a stone wall. What were the authors thinking? Drinking?

Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford in Morning Glory

A few wrong turns and a few wrong moves (i.e., broader, more slapstick, more dumbed down) and a different kind of lead actress with different instincts, and Morning Glory could have been a Kate Hudson movie. It could have been painful, predictable, and right-down-the-middle cliched (as the one-sheet and trailer seem to indicate). The difference is in Aline Brosh McKenna‘s script and Roger Michell‘s direction and the quality of the actors and the acting and a certain high-throttle, tightly-wound quality mixed with a generally realistic atmosphere.

Morning Glory is a comedic survival story by way of Rachel McAdams‘ Becky Fuller, a morning-show producer. But it also deals with the lowering or cheapening of TV journalism standards — the pandering to TV audiences interested only in goofiness and personality and glamour. It portrays Harrison Ford‘s Mike Pomeroy, an older distinguished newsman, being sidelined and marginalized and asked to indulge in fluffy banter.

In Broadcast News (which is re-opening, in a sense, on Criterion Bluray in January), an ethical battle is waged serious news vs. fluff, infotainment and ratings. 23 years ago fluff and infotainment (i.e., William Hurt‘s Tom Grunick character) was winning but news (Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks) was still hanging in there. But now, it seems, that ethical battle is over and done with in Morning Glory. And no one is fretting about it. As Fuller says to Pomeroy, “Your side lost.”

Broadcast News was about a hard-news network broadcast show and Morning Glory is about a third- or fourth-rate morning show in the vein of Today — different animals. But the news ethics vs. entertainment debate is very front and center in Brooks film, and in Morning Glory there’s prolonged grumbling from Harrison’s guy about what he’s being asked (i.e, forced) to do. Otherwise there’s no debate or anguish at all about infotainment anchors going shallow or going for the emotion. The broadcast world is what it is, and the game, as always, is about survival and ratings.

In Broadcast News, Hurt’s Grunick character is portrayed/characterized as “the Devil” — the good-looking smoothie who’s good as selling news and taking down our standards, bit by little bit. He also rationalizes his actions by saying that the news business keeps moving the marker for what is ethical and unethical, and so on.

But — let’s face it — if Tom Grunick and McAdams’ Becky character were to work together, they’d probably get along. She’d enjoy his attitude and personality and find him a nice and amiable professional. She obviously has a problem with Ford’s grumpy Mike Pomeroy (attitude and personality clash), but she and Grunick, I think, would understand each other completely. This is a woman, remember, who’s half into the idea of doing a segment on Pomeroy getting a prostate examination.

Another thing that Broadcast News had was a semblance of a romantic triangle. Holly Hunter wanted to sleep with Hurt, and liked/loved Albert Brooks as a friend. But there’s also a curious romantic triangle in Morning Glory. McAdams/Fuller has sex and evening dinners with Patrick Wilson, but the genuinely driving and “meaningful” relationship she has is with Ford/Pomeroy. Sex with Wilson is strictly a sideline thing, and yet Wilson (unlike Adrien Grenier‘s character in The Devil Wears Prada) never complains about this. He even suggests at the finale that she accept Ford’s offer of an invitation (“He won’t ask twice”).

Love and Other Drugs, I regret to say, didn’t play quite as well the second time. I’m still a genuine, whole-hearted fan of Anne Hathaway ‘s performance, but my difficulties with Josh Gad got worse and worse as I began to grumble and moan and shift in my seat when he appeared. My first thought was that it wouldn’t have been a problem if Gad has been picked off with a high-powered rifle. But other scenarios began to take shape in my mind. Gad being hit by a speeding bus, poisoned, garroted by a waiter, stabbed in the shower. No, not the shower.

Last Wednesday Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino predicted that Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls “should manage $27 million from 2,127 locations.” That didn’t happen. The current Colored Girls projection is for $20.1 million, which is the lowest opening weekend for Perry since The Family That Prays, an ’08 release which took in $17.4 million.

For comparison’s sake, Perry’s Why Did I Get Married 2? took in $29.3 million when it opened earlier this year, I Can Do Bad‘s opening weekend earned about $24 million in 2009, and Medea Goes to Jail did $41 million during its first three days.

If I had the dough and the freedom to really swagger around, I’d probably be attending a Biutiful below-the-line discussion group, which, as we speak, starts about two hours hence (or 5 pm) at the Linwood Dunn on Vine Street. (Wait…5 pm? That’s for short naps, making a salad, taking showers, walking your dog.) Moderator Guillermo del Toro, director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, composer Gustavo Santaolalla, dp Rodrigo Prieto and editor Stephen Mirrione. Alas, I’m sitting on the fake-marble floor of a 42nd Street plex and being told by the manager that I can’t plug into the wall outlet.

“Keith Olbermann is right when he says he’s not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts, the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance’s sake. That the Left is just as violent and cruel as the Right…there’s a difference between a mad man and a madman.”

In a comment thread for yesterday’s “Strange Pundits” story, HE reader PastePotPete wrote that he’d recently seen Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan (Fox Searchlight, 12.3) and that people generally seemed to find it “astonishing.” And yet despite that reaction “there were a lot of women [in the audience] who seemed to despise the movie. And I didn’t talk to or overhear a single male audience member disparaging it.

Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

“I think this disparity, which I believe Sasha Stone has brought up on the Oscar Poker podcast, will prevent it from garnering the awards it deserves, aside from Portman’s in-the-bag Best Actress award.”

So I wrote him write back and asked, “Did any of these women explain their feelings?

“My impression since the Venice Film Festival is that some women don’t like Black Swan (and this seems like a very weird reason to slam a film) because Portman’s character is too weak and distraught. Because she’s besieged by feelings of insecurity, anxiety and panic. And because some women resent the fact that she’s allowed herself to become torn and frayed, and is finally undone by her demons.

“Are we to presume that women viewers consider the character of Portman’s performance dishonestly conjured because…what, there are no such women in the performing world? Female artists who are worried about whether they’re good enough or not, about whether they might be replaced, or whether they’ve got enough talent or ambition to really make it? I don’t want to go out on a limb, but I believe there are many male artists out there with the same hang-ups and concerns.

“The implication is that some women don’t like this film because Portman’s self-destructive character isn’t positive enough — that she’s not an upstanding role model and that it’s not good for female characters of this type (or performances about same) to be admired too much or put on a pedestal. Is it me, or is that the single lamest rationale for disliking a film ever put forward in Hollywood history, or at least since the days of Stalinist Russia?

“By the same token did women of 1965 declare that Catherine Deneueve‘s character in Repulsion was also a negative role model, and therefore shouldn’t be admired too highly?”

The big surprise in Laura Israel‘s Windfall, a doc that I saw just before the Toronto Film Festival, is that wind-turbines, the “green” energy source that everyone is in favor of, are oppressors — bringers of discomfort and anguish and headaches and lawsuits. They’re 400 feet tall these days and weigh hundreds of tons and look like huge white Martian invaders out of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and they have a proven history of making the lives of people who live near them miserable.

(l.) Windfall director Laura Israel, (r.) cartoonist-activist Lynda Barry

Last night, I’m told, the film played to a sold-out house at the IFC Center. During the q & a Israel and cartoonist Lynda Barry discussed the ravaging and plundering of economically hard-up communiities by the wind turbine industry.

Barry is writing a book about how wind turbines invaded the small burgh where she lives in Wisconsin. She’s already interviewed more than 20 families and has done some initial drawings that have appeared on her website. She also runs the anti-wind turbine development website below.

My first thought when I saw this photo was that Mark Wahlberg, star of David O. Russell‘s The Fighter (Paramount, 12.10/12.17), has some serious forehead creasing going on these days. I’m counting at least three if not four rows. I’ve never had creases of any kind. I can contort my forehead all day and it won’t go there.

Art for David O’Russell’s The Fighter taken from recently received screening invitation.

I’m flattered to report that after this morning’s Love and Other Drugs press conference and the “talent” was walking out, director Ed Zwick leaned over and said he’d really enjoyed a piece that I’d written “about Ernest Becker.” I know Becker for his cultural and philosophical writings, but at that particular moment I couldn’t remember what Zwick was referring to. So I searched and found this 8.27.10 piece. Of course. Came right back.

(l. to r.) Love and Other Drugs costars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, director-co-screenwriter Ed Zwick during this morning’s press conference on the 18th floor of the Waldorf Astoria — Saturday, 11.6, 10:55 am.

11.6, 11:20 am.

11.6, 11:35 am.

Jill Clayburgh lived, I’m told, a good full life, but in terms of cultural synchronicity and being an iconic, self-defining actress who ignited her own perfect moment, she had four peak years — 1976 to ’79. Arthur Hiller‘s Silver Streak in ’76, Michael Ritchie ‘s Semi-Tough in ’77, Paul Mazursky‘s An Unmarried Woman in ’78, Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Luna (a misfire) in ’79, and Alan Pakula‘s Starting Over later that same year.

Clayburgh’s feminist-icon phase had peaked with An Unmarried Woman, but it seemed to pretty much fizzle out five years later with the failure of Costa Gavras‘ Hanna K. (’83). For all intents and purposes, that was the last “Jill Clayburgh film.” She appeared and acted and certainly had a “life” after Hanna K., but not as a name actress with any exceptional expectations.

Claudia Weill‘s It’s My Turn (’80) was a minor love story (woman-in-relationship falls for Michael Douglas‘s retired baseball player, winds up jilting b.f. Charles Grodin). She played a conservative Supreme Court Justice who tangles with liberal Justice Walter Matthau in Ronald Neame‘s First Monday in October (’81), a tame little film. This was followed by I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can (’82), a valium-dependency, life-crisis drama directed by Jack Hofsis and written by David Rabe.

And then came the Hanna K. death blow. A muddled but interesting pro-Palestinian drama, it was critically panned and abruptly withdrawn from distribution by Universal, apparently due to political pressure from pro-Israeli factions. Clayburgh played an American-Jewish attorney assigned to defend a Palestinian accused of terrorism. But the plot was overshadowed by her character’s conflicting romantic entanglements, one of them with a character played by Gabriel Byrne.

It was three years before Clayburgh’s next film, a injustice melodrama titlled Where Are The Children? Her next, Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Shy People (’87), was a success d’estime costarring Barbara Hershey and Martha Plimpton. It was regarded as a worthy but minor effort, and it had the unfortunate stamp of being a Cannon release.

Clayburgh played a distinctive eccentric in the commercial flop Running With Scissors (’06), and has a too-small role as Jake Gyllenhaal‘s mom (and George Segal‘s wife) in the about-to-open Love and Other Drugs.