“You might want to ask your readers about audience reactions to Let Me In starting today,” says HE reader Christian Hamaker. “I saw it last night with a large contingent of press, but also a sizable audience of regular moviegoers. And the reactions to this film were perplexing.

“People simply don’t know how to respond to a vampire movie that doesn’t deliver traditional scares. They tittered with expectation that a Big Scare was about to come, and laughed at some of the early relationship between the two young principal characters — both somewhat understandable in the earlygoing. But at some point, they were laughing too hard, presumably, I’m guessing, they simply don’t know how to respond to a movie that doesn’t offer up Freddy Krueger-ish boo-scares.

“At one point, a frustrated critic behind me shouted to the other audience members, ‘Shut the f*%k up!’ I think he spoke for several of us who appreciated the movie’s artistry.”

Note: The “moron” screening technically happened in Maryland, just over the border from Washington, D.C., but it was held for Washington, D.C., or D.C.-area media.

A powerful metaphor from the mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald looms large in Shawn Levy‘s review of The Social Network in The Oregonian as well as Ann Hornaday‘s review in The Washington Post:

Levy: “Indeed, as in David Cronenberg‘s The Fly, when a drunken lovers quarrel leads the hero into a rash act that changes him forever, Aaron Sorkin‘s Mark Zuckerberg sets down the path that will eventually lead him to billions while soaking in a beer-fueled snit fit at a girl (Rooney Mara) who won’t have him. In a sense, all that follows — the programming marathons, the less-than-above-board business dealings, the efforts to position the web site and turn it into a phenomenon — is spurred by Zuckerberg’s yearning for this dream girl. She is Daisy Buchanan to his Jay Gatsby, and the green light on a distant dock has morphed into the refresh button on a Facebook page.”

Hornaday: “What ensues is a narrative that hews closely to classic American tales of ambition, ingenuity, competition and betrayal; The Social Network has understandably been compared to Citizen Kane in its depiction of a man who changes society through bending an emergent technology to his will. But with its leitmotif of striving, resentment and cherchez la femme, the story also evokes Fitzgerald at his most longing and elegiac. A modern-day Jay Gatsby, the ‘refresh’ button on his keyboard standing in for Daisy Buchanan’s flashing green dock light, Zuckerberg — or at least Sorkin’s version of him — embodies all those timeless contradictions and of-the-moment tics (the hoodie, those flip-flops) that make for a classic literary anti-hero.”

It feels very strange to sympathize with Paris Hilton, but paparazzi are a pestilence. Watch this video and tell me what happened here (fat female paparazzo with plaid shorts has her foot run over when Hilton’s boyfriend inches his car forward) as a hit-and-run incident is delusional. Stuff happens, just desserts.

I’ve been lazy but no longer. Sometime this weekend I’ll settle in with the DVD of Jerome Salle‘s Anthony Zimmer, a French-language thriller (plastic surgery, money-laundering, mistaken identity) which Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck‘s The Tourist (Sony, 12.10) is a remake of. And as long as I’m researching, I’d be grateful to receive a PDF of the script (written by Donnersmarck, Chris McQuarrie and Julian Fellows)

Update: A 2008 draft of The Tourist script says “screenplay by Julian Fellows, revisions by William Wheeler, based on “Anthony Zimmer” by Jerome Salle, current revisions by Jeffrey Nachmanoff.” So it’s Fellows, Wheeler, Nachmanoff, von Donnersmarck and Chris McQuarrie. Wait for McQuarrie, regarded in some circles as a bit of pompous dickwad, to start strutting around and taking most of the credit for the screenplay when it opens in December.

In Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In, 13 year-old Chloe Moretz gives a deeply affecting award-calibre performance as an emotionally conflicted 300 year-old vampire named Abby, and she does it almost entirely with her eyes. She’s Jodie Foster in 1975 only more so, and has really earned consideration as a Best Actress nominee. Catching this emotional puppy-love vampire pic for the second time convinced me. As did Moretz’s appearance this evening at the School of Visual Arts Theatre — she’s got poise, smarts, the whole package.

Let Me In costars Elias Koteas, Chloe Moretz, director/cowriter Matt Reeves following School of Visual Arts theatre screening — Thursday, 9.30, 9:45 pm.

Let Me In star Chloe Moretz following post-screening q & a — Thursday, 9.30, 9:55 pm.

“If the over-60 Academy members fail to note that The Social Network is a brilliant, whippersnapper Citizen Kane-level movie about the Realm of the Now (and the Very Recent) that addresses CLASSIC THEMES, what am I supposed to do about it? Send them a complimentary month’s supply of Depends?

“I’ll tell you what SHOULD be done about it. All past-it, over-the-hill geezers should be COMPASSIONATELY EXPELLED FROM THE ACADEMY. This is not a put-down or a putsch or a purge. It’s just that when a genuinely good movie comes along and people are too thick to at least show respect and acknowledge that it’s doing several things right, then there’s only one thing to do and that’s to cut them off. Because all they’re doing is STANDING IN THE WAY.

“What did George S. Patton (George C. Scott) do when he found a mule obstructing his troops in Italy? He shot the mule and had him thrown over the side of a bridge.” — my response to a question from Gold Derby/Envelope guy Tom O’Neil about how Academy members may react to The Social Network‘s first big membership screening on Saturday, 10.2.

Other know-it-alls — Sasha Stone, Anthony Breznican, Stecve Pond, Dave Karger, Eric Davis — are also heard from in O’Neil’s piece.

Having seen Secretariat, I really don’t get where the alleged faith-based Christian marketing angle fits in. The film is aimed at family audiences– it has a square and conservative vibe — and director Randall Wallace is something of a rightie, I’m told, but there’s nothing in the story/screenplay that proclaims Christian or conservative values per se. I saw that vein in The Blind Side but it’s simply not in Secretariat.

Thematically it’s a quasi-feminist thing, being about Diane Lane‘s Penny Chenery defying her husband (who wants her to stay at home and raise the kids and cook) and brother (who wants her to sell the horse farm) in order to nurture and bring along her horse, Secretariat, to a Triple Crown victory. The tone is little like The Adventures of Spin and Marty — nice and tidy and middle-class, but in no way a religious-type deal except for the strange playing of the spiritual tune “O Happy Day” twice on the soundtrack.

Two seconds after glancing at this ad for The Freebie (Phase 4, 9.17) my eyes went right for those red sores or chicken-pox spots on Dax Shepard‘s upper right arm, right above the tattoo. “What’re those…self-applied needle marks?” I asked myself. “Or pimples? Who has pimples on their upper arm? The movie’s about a couple who decide to give each other permission to play around for a single night, so why introduce an element of bacteriological infection on the husband’s arm? How could this possibly boost the want-to-see?”

In Contention‘s Kristopher Tapley has seen Tony Goldwyn‘s Conviction (Fox Seatchlight, 10.15), and said yesterday that he “liked it.” Okay. I saw it myself the night before last, but I have to say it didn’t exactly wind me up. It’s one of those films that you just want to pat on the head and smile at and offer best wishes to and leave well enough alone.

Conviction is a stacked deck of uplift cards that’s based on a true-lfe story and made in the vein or spirit of Steven Soderbergh‘s Erin Brockovich, but it just isn’t that snappy or well-written or forcefully acted or all that well constructed. It’s okay as far as it goes but Goldwyn is no Soderbergh — sorry.

I don’t want to put Conviction down or make an issue out the fact that it’s primarily a humdrum thing. Conviction has enough problems on its own. I’m actually hoping that others will echo Tapley’s view that they “liked” it so Fox Searchlight will feel placated enough to run ads on the Oscar sites. How’s that for naked honesty?

Heres another honest comment. The audience I saw it with on Tuesday night broke out in applause when efforts by Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) to free her wrongfully imprisoned brother Kenneth Waters (Sam Rockwell) began to finally pay off.

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 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.

The film “is based on the true story of Betty Anne Waters, an unemployed single mother who, with the help of attorney Barry Scheck from the Innocence Project, exonerated her wrongfully convicted brother, Kenneth,” the Wiki page says. “In order to do this she earned her GED, then her bachelor’s, a master’s in education, and eventually a law degree from Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. She accomplished this while raising two boys alone and working as a waitress part-time. While in law school she began investigating her brother’s case.

“Kenneth Waters, her brother, was convicted of murdering Katharina Brow in Ayer, Massachusetts, in 1983 (the murder occurred in 1980). His sister Betty Anne located biological evidence and then worked with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to overturning wrongful convictions, to obtain DNA testing on the evidence — proving Waters’ innocence and leading to his exoneration on June 19, 2001.”

Here’s the weird part. Less than three months after being freed on 6.19.01, Kenneth Waters, 47, killed himself after falling off a 15-foot wall and fracturing his skull. He was on his way back from a dinner with his mother (presumably in the evening) and chose to scale the wall because it led to a shortcut back to his brother’s house. Now, c’mon, I ask you — who climbs over 15 foot-walls after having dinner? Who dies from falling a mere 15 feet? It seems a little funny. I don’t know if alcohol was involved or if it was just one of those stupid accidents that sometimes happen, but what does it sound like?

A 9.19.01 story reporting Waters’ death has Betty Anne Waters saying that Kenneth “was adjusting to life on the outside fairly well, noting that he particularly liked his new cell phone.” He “liked” his cell phone? What was he, a simpleton? Was he Lenny from Of Mice and Men?

“Kenny’s had a lot of tragedy in his life,” Ms. Waters said earlier this month. “He was very happy to be free.” So happy that he stupidly killed himself 120 days after getting sprung. Brilliant.

Okay, so Melville Shavelson was no Sam Fuller or Budd Boetticher or Nicholas Ray. But the sight of a spry and relatively trim James Cagney prancing and tapping around on a big banquet table, and with very few edits to interrupt the action, feels cool right now. (Even with the deeply irritating Pentagon clown Bob Hope huffing and puffing alongside.) Call it a Thursday afternoon mood-pocket thing.

Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, Get Low star Robert Duvall, Focus Features chief James Schamus and Conviction star Hilary Swank will be specially tributed at the Gotham Independent Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on 11.29. Which sorta kinda sounds like they’ve already decided to give Black Swan the top Gotham award for best feature…no? Maybe not. And maybe Duvall hasn’t been selected to win the best actor prize.

Limo guy Steve Coppick drove Tony Curtis around once, and says he “was one of the warmest and nicest celebs I’ve come across over the years. At first I didn’t think it was going to be, as that day the company I was with was stretched thin for sedans so they had decided to upgrade Curtis to a stretch. He walked out a little past the pick-up time, and I knew from the body language he wasn’t in a good mood. I had the back door open, but he just glanced inside.

“‘I ain’t gettin’ in there…I’m not dead yet!’ he said, very serious.

“I explained that he was being treated and why. Instantly he softened and asked, ‘Can I ride up front with you?’

“So after clearing out my bag and other things, off we went with Curtis playing with the radio until he found a hip-hop (!) station and then settled in for the ride to visit a private gallery up behind the Magic Castle to talk about his Marilyn paintings. Soon, when he discovered that I was a film fan, he began to tell me various little snippets of his own history. Which is why I know that the still-vacant lot on Franklin at Outpost was the very first place he lived after moving to L.A.. (The apartment building was still there when we passed by.)

“But you didn’t need to know his history to quickly realize this was a guy who had enjoyed his hedonistic life in an almost humble way. Unlike some successful people I’ve met over the years, Tony Curtis did not make it seem like his good fortune comes from sort sort of ‘I’m a winner, you’re a loser’ strand in his DNA. He might be unapologetic about his appetite for life, yet he always remembered he was the kid from Bronx who also gotten very, very lucky in life.

“It was shortly after this that he moved full time to Henderson, Nevada (next door to Las Vegas), but every time I was heading south on the 101 that mural of him on the overpass would bring back our encounter.”