I’m not saying the just-revealed True Grit one-sheet is on the level of that much-derided King’s Speech poster that appeared a couple of weeks back, but it does seem like a bit of a problem in a somewhat similar way.

Like the fake assembly of Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright in the King’s Speech poster, the Grit job is a digital grouping of the four leads (i.e., they didn’t pose together), and the only one who looks right is Matt Damon‘s greasy-buckskin gunslinger (i.e., the Glenn Campbell role).

Halle Steinfeld seems slightly stunned and glassy-eyed and just…I don’t know, giving off a certain vagueness of purpose. She looks flat. You look at her and you go “what?” And Josh Brolin, off on the right, looks like a 9 year-old with an adult face. I know he’s supposed to look smaller due to being in the background, but he looks like a midget. (Is that a bad term to use these days? If so I meant “height challenged.”) And Jeff Bridges is just doing the ornery old bear thing. The big-bellied Crazy Heart drunk with a rifle and an eye patch. Ahm gonna sluhr mah words and all….take a little nip now and then…shoot me a buffalo or a coyote…don’t you go a triflin’!…aah got me a home in old Montecito.

The individual posters are much better. They’re fine, in fact. Just lose or re-do the group thing.

There’s something in an 11.18 Hollywood Reporter story by Daniel Miller about the state of the investigation into Ronni Chasen‘s murder that feels more than a bit surreal. It says that Beverly Hills police are going on a “working theory” that Chasen’s shooting death was “not the result of road rage or a carjacking gone awry” but “was planned in advance.”

Planned? Isn’t that what a hit is? The assailant who fired bullets through Chasen’s passenger door window, they’re saying, was following a plan that had been decided upon at some undetermined point earlier in the evening, or perhaps (go for it) even a few hours or days previously? An impulsive killing is one inspired by a sudden adverse emotional eruption of some kind, and the cops, as I understand this story, are guessing that this isn’t what happened.

I’m sorry but as one to another I feel I know/knew Ronni Chasen’s world, and this just sounds ridiculous. I don’t care what the Beverly Hills cops say. Ronni Chasen was not Michael Caine at the end of Get Carter or Tom Wilkinson at the end of Act Two in Michael Clayton. The sadness of this has made my knees buckle, but it also boggles the mind. The non-logic of it ties you up and wrecks you.

David Poland, whom I am gracious enough to recognize and whose opinion matters from time to time, wrote last night that “the audience that really cares about this story are people who knew Ronni… and it is seriously irresponsible to take one tiny piece of information (the the gunfire came from another car that pulled up next to Ronni’s car) and a working theory (that this was planned) and to spin it into a headline much more salacious than the facts.”

Why is it that every single guy I see these days has a two-week bristle beard? Everyone, that is, with any apparent reaching-for-style (or reaching-for-fashion) sense who’s under, say, 45 (i.e., not too gray or just a little salt-and-peppery) or who’s starring or co-starring in a movie. I didn’t care or even think about this for the last year or two, and now it’s beginning to really bother me. Now when I see some guy at a party or a screening with a two-week bristle beard I have to suppress an urge to give him some shit about it. Because bristle beards, I feel, have become pretentious. They were okay before but the guys wearing them now are just a little bit phony, I’ve decided. They’re posing. Not egregiously, but no more carte blanche cool factor. The jig’s up.

The following conversation actually happened about three hours ago. I didn’t record it, but this is a fairly precise recollection. It was between myself and a Manhattan p.r. guy who knows everyone and everything and has been around the track dozens of times.

Graph stolen from latest Movieline race-assessment chart, which is primarily informed by handicapping commentary from Stu Van Airsdale.

Hollywood Elsewhere: I think the inevitability of Annette Bening thing is over. For now, at least. It could come back but right now all I feel — and I admit this is coming out of the recent Black Swan surge out of Los Angeles — is Natalie Portman, Natalie Portman, Natalie Portman.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: And look what they’re doing to Annette! They’re running Julianne Moore for Best Actress right alongside her, and they’re going to cause Annette to lose all over again.

Hollywood Elsewhere: But they’re not really running Julianne. I mean, they “are,” sort of, but not really.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Of course they are! They’re running them side by side. Annette and Julianne.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Well, the thinking — and I understand this from a political sense — is that they don’t want to offend or alienate either party. Bening and Moore are equal costars, after all, with the same weight and pathos in that film, and so they’re running them as equals.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Look, do they want to win the Oscar or not? If they don’t make it a pure Annette thing, you watch as Natalie Portman just gets stronger and stronger. And you can feel it out there. It’s happening right now.

Hollywood Elsewhere: I’m just worried about Lesley Manville. I realize it’s too late and they’ve made their decision to run her for Best Actress, but if she was running for Best Supporting Actress she’d wipe the floor.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: No, she wouldn’t.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Whaddaya mean?

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Helena Bonham Carter.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Oh, come on! She’s gonna coast in on the coattails of The King’s Speech, you mean?

N.Y.-Based Publicist: That and her history. Howard’s End, Fight Club, Sweeney Todd, A Room With A View, the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

Hollywood Elsewhere: I see. A career-tribute Oscar. Because…you know, she’s very dry and fine in The King’s Speech, but in and of itself her performance is nothing to do handstands over.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Doesn’t matter.

Hollywood Elsewhere: It should. Because in a one-on-one between these two on the strength of performance alone, Lesley Manville would take it hands down.

Marshall Fine has suggested “one final marketing idea” for the Harry Potter franchise, to wit: “Once Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 runs the course of all its platforms (theatrical, pay-per-view, DVD, TV), Warner Bros. should release both films on YouTube along with some rudimentary editing software – and hold an editing contest for everyday moviegoers.

The idea, of course, would be to “see who can best reduce the overlong segments of the two-part film into one coherent final movie. Then put that one out in theaters and all the other platforms. And include it in the inevitable completist’s box set of all the “Harry Potter” films when that becomes a stocking stuffer of the future.”

I turned the sound down after a minute or so, and then turned it off at the two-minute mark. What an awful sound. I’m not sure why I’m even posting this, but Film Drunk‘s Oliver Noble has a strong tolerance.

This is a very minor clip from Banksy’s Exit From The Gift Shop, which has just made the cut as one of the 15 short-listed. The doc is mainly about Thierry Guetta, a free-spirited Frenchman based in Los Angeles, and his obsession with becoming a street artist in the vein of Banksy and/or Shepard Fairey. And so they release a clip of an altercation between Fairey and the fuzz near the Hollywood sign?

Congrats to the 15 feature-length docs that have been short-listed by the Academy: (1) Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, d: Alex Gibney; Enemies of the People, d: Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath; (3) Exit through the Gift Shop, d: Banksy; (4) Gasland, d: Josh Fox; (5) Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, d: Michele Hoze, Peter Raymont; (6) Inside Job, d: Charles Ferguson; (7) The Lottery, d: Madeleine Sackler; (8) Precious Life, d: Shlomi Eldar; (9) Quest for Honor, d: Mary Ann Smothers Bruni; (10) Restrepo, d: Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger; (11) This Way of Life, d: Thomas Burstyn; (12) The Tillman Story, d: Amir Bar-Lev; (13) Waiting for ‘Superman’, d: Davis Guggenheim; (14) Waste Land, d: Lucy Walker; (15) William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, d: Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler.

Lamentable Omissions (possibly due to technicalities or whatever): Errol Morris‘s Tabloid, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner‘s Stonewall Uprising; Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector; Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams; Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg‘s Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work; Don Argott‘s Art of the Steal and Leon Gast‘s Smash His Camera.

Late last night’s Collider‘s Steve Weintraub posted a high-calorie, extremely nutritious q & a with London Boulevard director-writer William Monahan. The weird part is that Weintraub has seen the crime drama but declines to post a sidebar review despite the fact that it’s opening in London eight days from now, on Friday, 11.26.

Weintraub says “it’s a great first film,” “it’s going to surprise people,” and that Monahan has proven “he knows how to tell a story visually, and can definitely shoot action…this will not be his last time behind the camera.” Very glad to hear this, I said in an e-mail. Good news. I can’t wait to see London Boulevard when it opens in the U.S. next spring.

But I still don’t get why Weintraub didn’t post a review with the British opening so close at hand.

Weintraub explained that he was shown London Boulevard as a friend/admirer of Monahan and not as a critic, and that he’s simply respecting Monahan’s request not to review it. “You’re hedging,” I replied. “This movie is presumed to be troubled on some level and is about to be reviewed by all of London, and you’re holding back on the specifics of your admiration because Monahan is a pally? I’d understand if the opening date was a couple of months off, but EIGHT DAYS?”

At one point in his excellent interview Weintraub asks Monahan about his “feelings on the test screening process,” which is a friend-of-the-filmmaker way of asking why the numbers haven’t been all that terrific, and why additional shooting was reportedly done as a result, and why the film didn’t appear at the Venice/Telluride/Toronto trifecta.

“Ninety people walked out of Goodfellas,” Monahan replies, “which is what I think about test screenings. But they’re also irresistible, test screenings, because you want to see the film with an audience and watch the audience. We tested twice, and very well, for an R-rated British film, in Sherman Oaks, of all places.

“On The Departed, when we tested in Chicago, the audience wanted to know the same things the studio had been asking, on behalf of a projected audience — who’s the father of the baby, and what’s in the envelope. Marty’s position was: fuck you, this is art. This is the way Bill wrote it and it’s why I did the picture. I love audiences, but they’re not there to drive the bus. Whenever you ask opinions or anticipate opinions you can get pretty terrible art, or non-art. You need a single guiding intelligence, even in a collaborative form.

“People can get on exactly the same page, which I think we all were on London Boulevard, but it’s rare and difficult. Bands where every member exactly gets it, like the Stones to a certain point in history, are freak and magical occurrences. You’ve got to go it alone.”

No one will be happier than myself if it turns out that London Boulevard works. I love Monahan’s writing, and I’ve been totally queer for London gangster films since the ’70s. But Monahan and Weintraub know that the word on this thing is dicey, and that the general feeling is that it’s a bleeding groaning bear with a bullet in its side. If Weintraub really likes it as much as he says he should be a man and tell the world how good it is — clearly and specifically and passionately.

Everyone presumably remembers Joe Queenan‘s 7.28 Wall Street Journal piece that called 2010 the suckiest movie year ever. No surprise hits, no out-of-nowhere dark horses, and no cunningly hyped film “that either exhumes a noted actor from the grave or greases the skids so some solid journeyman can ascend to the ranks of the Oscar Winners of yore.”

Here it is three and half months later and Queenan looks like a shoot-from-the-hipper with egg on his face. If anything 2010 is feeling more and more like an avalanche of riches — The Social Network, Black Swan, Inside Job, The King’s Speech, Inception, Blue Valentine, 127 Hours, The Tillman Story, Toy Story 3, Biutiful, etc. David O. Russell‘s The Fighter may not be an out-of-nowhere dark horse, but it sure is a hot late-season arrival. The Social Network has clearly greased the skids so that solid journeyman David Fincher is now looking like the most likely recipient of the Best Director Oscar. And if you want a surprise hit, look no further than Ben Affleck‘s mystifying popular The Town.

And what about the praise that continues to be showed upon Banksy‘s Exit From The Gift Shop? And the sudden and surprising critical embrace of Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In (despite the idiotic general-audience response). And the punch-through accomplished by Olivier Assayas‘s epic-sized Carlos? And the avalanche of world-class docs besides those already mentioned? Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Countdown to Zero, Tabloid, Restrepo, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and Smash His Camera.

On Tuesday, 11.16 Radar Online quoted Inferno director Matthew Wilder as saying he’s basically ready to pull the plug on Lindsay Lohan portraying Linda Lovelace. “Although [Lindsay] is still our number one choice, we do have a Plan B if she cannot film Inferno,” he said, alluding to possible longer-than-anticipated court-ordered rehab requirements. “[Because] we have had a great response from other people who really want the part too.”

In other words, Wilder has probably chosen Lohan’s replacement.

So that’s it — Lohan will have to rejuvenate her acting career in some slightly less humiliating way. As A.V. Club’s Sean O’Neal noted yesterday, “The news probably will come as some relief to Lohan once she sobers up and realizes that her life was once in such disarray, she was considering smearing semen on her face and fucking a dog as a way of relaunching her acting career.” Consider some of the lines that Lohan would have said if she’d actually played the part.

Last July Wilder promised he would delay production until Lohan’s release, issuing the following statement: “This is a sad chapter in the ongoing tragicomic circus between the tabloid media and the ‘justice’ system. An outrageously outsized sentence garners attention for all the players involved, but brings only sadness to the poor soul who has to serve it. I am 100% behind Lindsay and can say the same for everyone involved in the production of Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story. Indeed, we are proud to have this remarkable artist work on our film.

“And as for the haters relishing this moment, I can only quote Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ: ‘And those who are laughing now…will be crying after.'”