A Monkey Bar party happened earlier this evening for Robert Kenner‘s Food, Inc., one of the five nominees for Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It’s presumed that the only real competition it has is Louie Psihoyos‘ The Cove (or vice versa), so it made sense for Magnolia Pictures, Food, Inc.‘s distributor, to hype things up a bit.

Food, Inc. director and co-writer Robert Kenner, Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman — 2.16, 8:55 pm.

Documentarian Alex Gibney (Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson), Martha Stewart — 2.16, 8:25 pm.

“Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser.

Peggy Siegal handled the guest list. Kenner attended along with Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation” (which Food, Inc. is based upon), and foodie maven Martha Stewart, an admirer/supporter who’s hosted several screenings of the film, she told me. Plus the usual array of filmmakers, Academy members and journalists like myself.

The accent was on healthy good, of course. The only unhealthy things served were mini-hot dogs inside toasted mini-croissant buns. The hors d’oeuvres were all-around delicious.

I haven’t written about Kenner’s doc since last June, but I strongly approved when I did.

I never went along with the general Zoe Kazan infatuation, which started with her Revolutionary Road performance, and I can feel myself pulling further away with each successive turn. She seemed irritatingly flighty in It’s Complicated (especially with the texting), and excessively coy and mannered in Happythankyoumoreplease, which I hated at Sundance. And now I don’t know if I even want to watch The Exploding Girl (Oscilloscope, 3.12) after watching this trailer. She isn’t done — she just has to get past what she’s been doing.

Thanks to HE reader Jake Hughes, a Bay Area resident, for taking an hour or so to throw this together. A little weird but I can handle it. Much appreciated.

My interest in Toy Story 3 (Disney, 6.18) has mainly to do with the Pixar honchos having hired Michael Arndt, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, to do the script. I’m therefore expecting a certain snarky urbanity and sardonic flavor. In short, the good old double-track deal (i.e., appealing to kids and hip adults) that the best animated features achieve. The director is Lee Unkrich.

The Jeff Bridges of legend posed during Monday’s Oscar luncheon with his fellow Best Actor nominees. But the portrait in the current Time magazine is…well, the word has to be Luciferian.

Zentropa producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen has told Screen Daily‘s Geoffrey Macnab that he’s “seen it [the story] in the Danish film magazine” about the rumored Martin Scorsese/Lars von Trier remake of Taxi Driver and “what is written there is not true.” Jensen confirmed that the directors had met at the Berlin Film Festival, but that the remake story is “rubbish.”

Positive & negative reviews be damned — the public has already decided to give Shutter Island a strong opening weekend. Definite interest of 46 and 53 among under-25 and over-25 males, respectively, and a surprisingly high 44 and 40 among under-25 and over-25 females. Go figure.

Marlon Brando‘s decision to briefly pause between the words “to” and “fight” in this clip constituted the only moment of wit or subtlety in an otherwise bombastic and broadly emphatic film. Which I’d nonetheless like to see on Bluray some day. Warner Home Video has already mastered for HD-DVD — why not just offer it on Bluray? All 70mm and VistaVision films of the ’50s and ’60s need to turn up in this format, even the somewhat mediocre ones.

The above-quoted dialogue can be found at 6:24.

I’ve been punched, kicked and spat upon, but never face-slapped. I take that back — a pretty blonde who’d had a few drinks slapped me during a high-school party once. But that was eons ago. I suspect that face slaps are mainly a movie thing because they look and sound highly dramatic. I don’t believe people actually slap each other in real life. I’ve almost never seen it happen, nor have I ever heard of it happening.

That said, this clip from Charley Varrick is one of strangest slap scenes of all time.

A quote from Leonardo DiCaprio in the current Esquire goes hand in hand with the Roger Ebert profile, if you think about it: “When I was eighteen, River Phoenix was far and away my hero. Think of all those early great performances — My Own Private Idaho. Stand by Me. I always wanted to meet him. One night, I was at this Halloween party, and he passed me. He was beyond pale — he looked white. Before I got a chance to say hello, he was gone, driving off to the Viper Room, where he fell over and died. That’s a lesson.”

Chris Jones‘ profile of Roger Ebert, one of the most perceptive and deeply moving pieces I’ve read about anyone, is in the current Esquire. Here are portions:

“Roger Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He can’t remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn’t happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory — it wasn’t as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz’s ear.

“The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren’t they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.

“He [once] lived his life through microphones. But now everything he says must be written, either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing — it’s like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone.

“It’s not the food or the drink he worries about anymore, but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left. In this living room, lined with thousands more books, words are the single most valuable thing in the world. They are gold bricks.

“Here idle chatter doesn’t exist; that would be like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. Here there are only sentences and paragraphs divided by section breaks. Every word has meaning. Even the simplest expressions take on higher power

“Ebert’s dreams are happier. Never yet a dream where I can’t talk, he writes on another Post-it note, peeling it off the top of the blue stack. Sometimes I discover — oh, I see! I CAN talk! I just forget to do it.

“In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn’t get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can’t quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he’s never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole.

“We have a habit of turning sentimental about celebrities who are struck down — Muhammad Ali, Christopher Reeve — transforming them into mystics; still, it’s almost impossible to sit beside Roger Ebert, lifting blue Post-it notes from his silk fingertips, and not feel as though he’s become something more than he was. He has those hands. And his wide and expressive eyes, despite everything, are almost always smiling.

“There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.”

Let this become everyone’s motto, regardless of their situation: become an explosion. Do everything you can with every ounce of energy at your disposal in the time you have left.

Unless you’re an HE talk-back hater, in which case I would advise going home and turning on the TV and sitting down on your stained IKEA couch and stewing in your own juices. Because short of some amazing epiphany, that’s as good as it’s going to get for you.