Anyone who still says Hugh Jackman is half-gay deals with me. I don’t care if he’s twice my size!

I just differed with a guy about James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know (Sony, 12.17). He says it isn’t a problem movie like others have said, and claims to know someone who feels it may be Brooks’ best film since Broadcast News. This isn’t a review (I’ll be waiting until early next week), but that’s horseshit, what that guy said.

How Do You Know has some lines and little moments that work very nicely. It’s not my idea of a disaster — I can foresee a portion of the critics saying it’s okay — but my main impression was that of a very bizarre, strangely un-life-like film. The writing is simultaneously clever and constipated, and the lighting and the cinematography seem overly poised and prettified. It looks and feels like a play at the Lucille Lortel, in a sense. Or certainly like it’s happening in some kind of Hollywood fairyland that feels a lot like a sound-stage set (i.e., one that’s meant to simulate certain indoor settings in Washington, D.C.).

It seems as if Brooks has entered his formalist, out-of-time, older-director phase. The look and tone and pacing of How Do You Know reminded me of the look and tone and pacing of Alfred Hitchcock‘s films after The Birds — the increasingly rigid and old-fogey-behind-the-camera feeling of Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Family Plot, etc. (Some believe that Frenzy was an exception; I don’t.) I’m talking about a phase in which a director is not only repeating the kind of brush strokes that felt fresher and less constipated 20, 25 or 30 years earlier, but emphasizing them so as to say “I know this may seem unnatural to some of you out there, but this is how I like to do things, no matter how stylistically out-of-touch this film may seem. This is me, take it or leave it.”

The casting of Clint Eastwood‘s Hoover is getting loonier still. It was nutty enough that the six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered, Germanically-featured Leonardo DiCaprio was cast as the short (5′ 7″), bulldog-resembling, perpetually middle-aged J. Edgar Hoover. But now The Social Network‘s Armie Hammer, who stands 6’5″, has been cast as Hoover’s lover, Clyde Tolson. As the photo below (initially used by Award Daily‘s Ryan Adams) seems to indicate, Tolson was two or three inches taller than Hoover, or maybe 5’10”.

So proportionately, DiCaprio and Hammer are a kind of fit. But otherwise they seem way off the mark. These are two young, well-built, relatively imposing glamour boys playing a couple of pudgy, modestly-proportioned dorks who apparently didn’t have the courage to fuck each other. One solution, a la Marion Cotilard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, is to make DiCaprio-Hammer seem shorter with large-size furniture, extra-high door frames and other props that will simulate men of a shorter height.

It just feels bizarre that a couple of exceptionally handsome, almost model-pretty guys with basketball-player frames and the usual glamour-swagger are going to play a couple of closeted bureaucratic assholes whose features were dull and rigid, or at least cautious — faces that seemed to exude the very antithesis of ease and glamour. I know, I know — Warren Beatty bore almost no resemblance to Clyde Barrow, but this kind of casting discrepancy used to be the exception.

I’ve noted before that the long-standing Hollywood law of casting famous-person roles with actors who bore at least a faint resemblance to the people they were playing (Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln, Broderick Crawford as Hoover in Larry Cohen‘s 1977 biopic , Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson in The Buccaneer, James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis) is pretty much out the window these days. Anyone of any size, shape or ethnic heritage, it seems, can play anyone of any size, shape or ethnic heritage. Nothing matters. The Greek-Italian Gwen Stefani playing the milk-fed and totally Midwestern-looking Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese‘s The Aviator was a sloppy joke, and yet representative of the current casting norm. Anything goes for the most part. Kelsey Grammer as William Shakespeare, Madonna as Eleanor Roosevelt, Pee-Wee Herman as Thomas Jefferson…why not?

Last April I reported about Dustin Lance Black‘s Hoover script. “The scenes between Hoover and FBI ally/colleague/friendo Clyde Tolson (whose last name Black spells as ‘Toulson’) are fairly pronounced in terms of sexual intrigue and emotional ties between the two,” I wrote. “Theirs is absolutely and without any qualification a gay relationship, Tolson being the loyalty-demanding, bullshit-deflating ‘woman’ and Hoover being the gruff, vaguely asexual ‘man’ whose interest in Tolson is obviously there and yet at the same time suppressed.

“The script flips back and forth in time from decade to decade, from the 1920s (dealing with the commie-radical threat posed by people like Emma Goldman) to the early ’30s (the focus being on the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping case) to Hoover’s young childhood to the early ’60s (dealing with the Kennedy brothers), the mid to late ’60s (Martin Luther King‘s randy time-outs) and early ’70s (dealing with Nixon’s henchmen). Old Hoover, young Hoover, etc. Major pounds of makeup for Leo, I’m guessing.”

The night before last I experienced the most surreal rest-room experience of my life. It happened in a small, spartan, darkly lighted facility on the top floor of The Standard, the high-style, high-design hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. I need to put this discreetly, but when you “sit down,” so to speak, you’re looking at nothing but pure floor-to-ceiling glass and beyond that the nighttime splendor of Manhattan. I’m talking total exposure, or what certainly feels like being on full display in front of the greatest city in the world.

The glass is presumably tinted on the outside to prevent photography, but it’s hard not think as you’re sitting there that if someone in a nearby tall building had the right kind of telephoto-lens camera with night-vision capability, they could snap a fairly bizarre shot.

All I can say is that it’s an astonishing thing to regard the dazzling lower Manhattan skyline with your pants down. It’s something that needs to be sampled at least once by any visitors to Manhattan with an appreciation for the unusual and the perverse. I intend to re-experience it tomorrow night (i.e., Friday, 12.10) during the after-party for The Fighter following a special screening at the School of Visual Arts theatre.

That 12.6 report about a ballistics test indicating that Harold Smith‘s suicide gun wasn’t the one that killed publicist Ronni Chasen has been debunked or erased or whatever. Now they’re saying it is the same gun, and that Smith acted alone in some kind of half-assed robbery attempt, and that Smith was riding a bicycle.

I was in London when John Lennon was shot exactly 30 years ago this evening. I was there to do a GQ interview with Peter O’Toole, for a piece about his performance in The Stunt Man. I was crashing on a couch in some guy’s apartment in Stockwell, adjacent to Brixton, and was woken up with the news on the morning of December 9th. I’d had a few pints hours earlier and was on the groggy side. “Holy shit,” I remember saying. “Really?”

I told Paprika Steen during a lunch earlier today that she seems to have moved beyond “acting” in Martin Pieter Zandvlier‘s Applause (12.3), about a brilliant but half-unhinged alcoholic actress. She performs the part, of course, but I didn’t fully believe that Steen (a Danish dogma star best known for Susanne Bier‘s Open Hearts and Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Celebration) was 100% acting. Deep down I was persuaded that she was mostly playing herself.

Applause star Paprika Steen outside Italian joint on West 4th and 10th Street — Wednesday, 12.8, 1:10 pm.

I’m not saying that she was, but that I believed as much. That, in my book, is acting of a very high and unusual order.

“Uh-oh,” she replied. “Maybe that’s not so good, people might think I’m a problem alcoholic.” No, no, I said — it’s a very good thing if people really understand, as I think I do now. For the record Steen, who’s on the tallish side, looks and seems un- addicted in most respects. She speaks perfectly fluid English without much of an accent. She has a exotic, vivacious smile and a magnificent mane of blonde hair and absolutely no trace of the somewhat puffy, boozy complexion she has in the film.

In short I thought she was okay and vice versa. We’re both Scorpios, etc. She seemed to enjoy my resemblance to Chris Walken. I taped our conversation, of course, and will run some of our conversation sometime tomorrow.

ditto.

“Ms. Steen doesn’t just surpass herself in Applause — she gives one of the best screen performances of the year,” wrote Karen Durbin in the N.Y. Times on 10.29.

“[She] plays Thea, a famous theater actress fresh from a lengthy stint in alcohol rehab who is eager to regain at least partial custody of her two young sons. Applause intercuts the tense drama of her troubled present with pungent flashbacks to Thea triumphant as the drunken Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We see that she was not only great but, once offstage, viciously abusive to her young dresser.

“Playing an alcoholic has been known to bring out the scenery chomper in the best of actors, Ms. Steen never puts a foot wrong, even though she’s playing two alcoholics, wild Martha with the meat-cleaver mouth and the more alienated, calculating Thea.

“There are no melodramatics in the latter portrayal, just a silent, simmering rage at everyone but her children, a tormented sense of being forever on the outside looking in, and a self-destructiveness so willful that when her ex-husband lets her take the boys on an outing near a lake, it’s impossible not to think she’s going to drown them.

“To say that Ms. Steen commands this film is no exaggeration. She’s in every scene, with Thea’s drink-ravaged face often shot in unforgiving close-up. There is even a single eerie, fleeting moment when we can’t tell if she’s Martha or Thea: Ms. Steen is that good.

“Thea’s story is harrowing. Yet for all the pain she depicts, Ms. Steen is delving so deep and with such unerring precision into the human psyche, not even for a moment do we want to look away.”

Just before my 4 pm screening of How Do You Know, Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that the MPAA has overturned the NC-17 rating previously given to Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine and decided on an R. The problem was reportedly a man-on-woman, Ryan Gosling-on-Michelle Williams oral sex scene. Presumably the MPAA guys read the various posts asking why Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan had been given an R rating despite a girl-on-girl oral sex scene, etc.

Blue Valentine Michelle Williams at last night’s gathering at Manhattan’s Standard Hotel following a MOMA screening. An American Cinematheque tribute will happen on Saturday at L.A.’s Aero theatre at 7:30 pm. Timothy Blake will moderate a discussion with Williams as well as show include clips from her numerous films. A screening of Blue Valentine will follow.

Blue Valentine director-writer Derek Cianfrance (r.) at same gathering — Tuesday, 12.7, 10:45 pm. (Apologies for being unable within my usual tight time frame to find the name of Derek’s wife. I asked two publicists…zip.)

Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein “personally argued his position in today’s hearing,” Fleming reports,” adding that he’s “been told the appeal board’s decision was unanimous.” This whole thing couldn’t have worked out better for the Weinstein Co. The NC-17 rating jacked up the film’s profile, and now it’ll benefit from all the attention without having to deal with the ad restrictions that would have hindered the films’ release if it hadn’t been overturned.

This morning I suggested to a columnist pal that he needs to focus “on the surging of The Fighter as a Best Picture contender. This is a really well-made, deeply populist, authentic blue-collar drama that’s much better and far less sappy than…I don’t even want to mention Sylvester Stallone‘s Rocky because it just diminishes The Fighter‘s brand when I do that.

“I think you’re going to find that ticket buyers will start responding to it big-time…maybe. This could be the compromise Best Picture choice — the happy middle-ground contender that could/should satisfy the King’s Speech and Social Network camps.”

Strange as this may seem to some, the term “Best Picture” actually does mean that. It doesn’t mean “Best Liked” or “Most Comforting” or “Most Emotional” or “The Movie My Cleaning Lady Likes The Best.” THerefore The Social Network really and truly happens to be the best film of the year, but — I’m saying this carefully — if it were to lose to The Fighter, I would not collapse on the floor in spasms of grief and protest and outrage.

“Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, taking a radical step backward from his Oscar-winning debut The Lives of Others, The Tourist illustrates what happens when you cast two giant, self-orbiting stars and then are either too intimidated or too confused to actually direct them,” writes the Star-Telegram‘s Christopher Kelly. “It also illustrates what happens when you compound a bad idea with poorly telegraphed twists and no dramatic tension whatsoever.

“Von Donnersmarck has conjured up a movie in love with its own Hollywood artificiality; at one point, and for no discernible reason, Jolie is dressed up to look like Sophia Loren and attends a formal ball. But there’s nothing to care about here, and the action is all ineptly staged. Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton end up leading Keystone Kops routines that are funny for all the wrong reasons. The movie sputters to a conclusion so predictable you first feel embarrassed for all involved, until your embarrassment turns to indignation: How stupid does Hollywood believe audiences to be if they think they can put a turkey like The Tourist over on us?”

I’ve just about had it with listening to “The Little Drummer Boy” under any circumstance, and especially while sitting in Starbucks. “Bah-rumpa-pum-pum,” my ass. Wouldn’t the racket of a drum upset a just-born child? Maybe if the drummer boy had brushes, but of course they hadn’t been invented 2010 years ago. I’m down with Christmas Carols as far they go, but this is one of the all-time dumbest. It bothered me even when I was an eight year-old.

Watch these silent acting-sample videos from the N.Y. Times Magazine site, and particularly Lesley Manville. The idea, apparently, is to simulate silent-film acting…but not entirely. They’re all pretty amazing.