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.'”

I was led to Jonathan Levy‘s hip-hop Yakuza trailer (posted roughly seven months ago) after writing Tuesday’s “Japan-phobia” piece. It doesn’t blow you away, but Levy at least reminded why Sydney Pollack‘s 1974 Japan-set crime thriller is one of the best of its kind. Plenty of swords and robes and flesh-slicings, but with a tone of existential cool. You have to use restraint and watch the fetishy stuff when visiting Japan.

The Yakuza Trailer from Jonathan Levy on Vimeo.

This other Levy trailer, a celebration of Jacques Tourneur‘s Out of the Past, isn’t so hot. It starts out beautifully with those flash-impact titles, and then cuts to that brilliant image of a trench-coated Robert Mitchum framed by vertical iron bars outside Kirk Douglas‘s Lake Tahoe mansion. And then it falls apart. Just a series of visceral, raggedy-ass, occasionally slow-mo clips that emphasize the primal and ignore the undercurrent. Out of the Past is a bitter and profoundly sad film about fate and resignation, and yet Levy’s trailer seems to go out of its way to ignore that. Fail.

OUT OF THE PAST Trailer from Jonathan Levy on Vimeo.

The best newly configured, jazzed-up trailer for a classic film remains Cameron Arragoni‘s Psycho trailer:

You’re damn right I ordered The Outfit today. I had to after belly-aching for the last five or six years that it wasn’t available on DVD. The Movie Godz are, I think, probably fairly satisfied with this. No special delivery so that means seven to ten days, I’m guessing.

On 10.23.73 Roger Ebert called it “a classy action picture, very well directed and acted, about a gangster’s revenge on the mob for the death of his brother. An outline of the plot would make it sound pretty routine, but what makes the picture superior is its richness of detail. We don’t care much about what happens; the same things are always happening in action movies, and when you’ve seen one car burst into flames you’ve seen them all. But the people in this movie are uncommonly interesting.

“The lead is a guy named Macklin, played by Robert Duvall. He and his brother made the mistake some years ago of sticking up a bank that was owned by the outfit. In revenge, his brother is wiped out by a couple of stone-faced gunsels. (And this is, by the way, the first movie in a long time to resurrect “gunsel,” that great piece of 1930s slang. Maybe it was suggested by Elisha Cook, who has a bit part here and was the archetypal gunsel in The Maltese Falcon.)

“Anyway, Duvall gets out of prison and hitches up with an old partner in crime, Joe Don Baker. They also take along Duvall’s girl (Karen Black), but mostly she just gets to ride in the back seat. Like so many movies of the last five or six years, this one is essentially about a relationship between two males. Duvall and Baker make it work better than usual by suggesting real, fundamental friendship and mutual respect.

“No, these are just a couple of old pals who are quick and mean and very professional. And Duvall is reasonable, too; he doesn’t want total vengeance, he only wants a quarter of a million dollars. The outfit takes in more than that before noon, on a good day — or so observes Robert Ryan, who plays the mob chief. But Ryan double-crosses Duvall, and then it turns out that for $250,000, he would have been getting off cheap.

“Duvall and Baker raid a series of mob operations, including a gambling club and a bookie wire room, and finally they raid the mansion of Ryan himself. The nice thing about all the raid sequences is that they’re carried out realistically; no James Bond gimmicks or impossible heroism, just a few well-executed plans.

“John Flynn, who wrote and directed the movie, fills it with a series of supporting characters who are allowed to seem complex and real.

“I especially remember a couple of dealers in hot cars and the nymphomaniac wife of one of them (Sheree North). And Marie Windsor, as Baker’s wife. And Ryan, in his next-to-last role, playing a man with great strength but very little happiness. The scene at the farm of the two stolen car dealers is handled with such attention to character detail that it could stand by itself; with a few small strokes, Flynn gives us three characters and their relationship, Instead of just throwing in some stock dialog.

“There’s something else that’s good about the movie: The relative restraint with which Flynn uses violence. Instead of going for a lot of fancy gunplay, Flynn more often than not examines the way in which violent situations tend to be clumsy and confused. A scene in a skid row mission, for example, comes alive when Duvall and Baker, trying to escape a couple of hit men, set off a fire alarm. Bums and firemen and cops and killers all mill around trying to find the fire; it’s exciting, but it’s fun too.”