Nicholas Kristof‘s “Johnson, Gorbachev, Obama” column (12.2) is brilliant — please read while listening to the King/Moore interview.

“What are you doing setting a deadline…it’s like crazy. If they’re the enemy you fight them until they lose.”

By the usual spitball standards, here are some of the new Sundance 2010 standouts — premieres, spotlight, midnight, etc. — that were announced a couple of hours ago. The coolest-sounding are Floria Sigismondi‘s The Runaways, the Joan Jett/birth-of-’70s-girl-rock biopic with Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, and Untitled Duplass Brothers Project, which co-director and co-writer Mark Duplass confided last summer will almost certainly not be called Please Don’t Fuck My Mom.

Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett in Floria Sigismond’s The Runaways

Premieres

Untitled Duplass Brothers Project, directed and written by Mark and Jay Duplass, about a recently divorced guy meeting a new lady…and then her son. John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, Catherine Keener.

Floria Sigismondi‘s The Runaways (Apparition). Stewart, Fanning, Scout Taylor-Compton, Michael Shannon, Alia Shawkat and Tatum O’Neal.

John Wells‘ The Company Men, a corporate downsizing drama starring Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper and Rosemarie DeWitt.

Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini‘s The Extra Man, a comedy-drama about a down-and-out playwright and escort to wealthy Upper East Side widows who takes a young aspiring writer under his wing. Katie Holmes, John C. Reilly, Paul Dano, Kevin Kline and Alicia Goranson.

Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low (Sony Classics, previously at Toronto), an offbeat story of a mysterious ’30s hermit who schemes to stage his own funeral while still alive.

Philllip Seymour Hoffman‘s Jack Goes Boating (Overture), about a limo driver whose blind date trggers an offbeat love story that involves two working-class New York City couples. Costarring Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Tom McCarthy.

Michael Winterbottom‘s The Killer Inside Me. Costarring Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba, Simon Baker and Elias Koteas.

Nicole Holfocener‘s Please Give (Sony Classics), about a New York City husband and wife who come into conflict with the granddaughters of the old woman who lives next door. Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Keener and Sarah Steele.

Joel Schumacher‘s Twelve, about “sex, drugs and murder among the young Upper East Side elite.” Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Kiefer Sutherland, 50 Cent and Zoe Kravitz.

World Premieres (Some of Which Have Premiered Before)

Gaspar Noe‘s Enter the Void, Luca Guadagnino‘s I Am Love, Rodrigo Garcia‘s Mother and Child, Jacques Audsiard‘s A Prophet, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari‘s Women Without Men.

Spotlight Documentaries

Reed Cowan‘s 8: The Mormon Proposition, which looks into the role played by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in promoting and passing California’s “Proposition Hate” against gay marriage.

Adrian Grenier‘s Teenage Paparazzo, about how “a photo taken of the actor by a 13-year-old boy prompts an examination of the effects of celebrity on culture.”

Dan Klores‘ Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. the New York Knicks.

Doesn’t Johnny Depp‘s reported decision to play Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in Emir Kusturica‘s Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman With Six Fingers sound like a 1950s thing? The kind of casting exemplified by Victor Mature as Chief Crazy Horse, Marlon Brando as Emiliano Zapata and a Taiwanese named Sakini, John Wayne as Genghis Khan and Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese kabuki star, I mean? I thought filmmakers had moved past that kind of thing. Unless, of course, Kusturica’s film is a jape of some kind.

Jonny Depp; Pancho Villa

The National Board of Review has kicked off the official Up In The Air bandwagon by giving Jason Reitman‘s film four major awards — Best Picture, Best Actor (actually a tie vote between UITA‘s George Clooney and Invictus‘s Morgan Freeman), Best Supporting Actress (Anna Kendrick) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Reitman, Sheldon Turner).

I told someone at last night’s Lovely Bones party that I had a feeling that the NBR would give Precious its Best Picture award. Not a strong feeling, but a gnawing one. Not that it matters either way. Remember when the announcement of NBR awards used to create a brief electric surge? Back in the ’90s and before that, I mean? Congrats to the Up In The Air team — well deserved — and the other winners, but what matters in early December are the film critic awards.

Clint Eastwood was named best director for Invictus and given the NBR Freedom of Expression award. Eastwood’s director award means Invictus almost won the Best Picture trophy and that the two Eastwood bestowings were basically a consolation — a gimme.

Carey Mulligan was named Best Actress for her performance in An Education, and Woody Harrelson — Woody Harrelson? — was named Best Supporting Actor for his work in The Messenger.

Other NBR awards went to The Prophet for Best Foreign Film, The Cove for Best Documentary, Up for Best Animated Feature, It’s Complicated for Best Ensemble Cast, The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner for Breakthrough Performance by an Actor, and Precious‘s Gabby Sidibe for Breakthrough Performance by an Actress.

A Serious Man‘s Joel and Ethan Coen won for Best Original Screenplay. Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson was handed a Special Filmmaking Achievement Award. The other two NBR Freedom of Expression honorees are Burma Vj: Reporting From A Closed Country and The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellseberg And The Pentagon Papers.

I was talking to a Manhattan journalist just after Tuesday night’s all-media screening of Up In The Air at the Lincoln Square. He said he had found Reitman’s film unsatisfying because it doesn’t specifically explain what career-related or life-changing path George Clooney’s character will be taking at the end. He then said, “So do you think Up In The Air will be nominated” — nominated, mind — “for Best Picture Oscar?” I looked at him cockeyed and went, “What?”

“Most interpretations I’ve seen of Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams‘s greatest contribution to dramatic portraiture, ride the glistening surface of the character’s poetry, turning Blanche into a lyric, fading butterfly waiting for the net to descend,” says N.Y. Times theatre critic Ben Brantley in a review of BAM’s A Streetcar Named Desire. “What Cate Blanchett brings to the character is life itself, a primal survival instinct that keeps her on her feet long after she has been buffeted by blows that would level a heavyweight boxer.

Cate Blanchett, Joel Edgerton in BAM’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

“Blanchett’s Blanche is always on the verge of falling apart, yet she keeps summoning the strength to wrestle with a world that insists on pushing her away. Blanche’s burden, in existential terms, becomes ours. And a most particular idiosyncratic creature acquires the universality that is the stuff of tragedy.

“Blanche DuBois may well be the great part for an actress in the American theater, and I have seen her portrayed by an assortment of formidable stars including Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, Patricia Clarkson and Natasha Richardson. Yet there’s a see-sawing between strength and fragility in Blanche, and too often those who play her fall irrevocably onto one side or another.

“Watching such portrayals, I always hear the voice of Vivien Leigh, the magnificent star of Elia Kazan‘s 1951 movie, whispering Blanche’s lines along with the actress onstage. But with this Streetcar, the ghosts of Leigh — and, for that matter, of Marlon Brando, the original Stanley — remain in the wings. All the baggage that any Streetcar usually travels with has been jettisoned.

“[Director Liv] Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have performed the play as if it had never been staged before, with the result that, as a friend of mine put it, ‘you feel like you’re hearing words you thought you knew pronounced correctly for the first time.'”

Last night’s viewing of Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones was a fresh experience, as I’ve never read Alice Sebold‘s book, and a guarded one given the conflicted (i.e., leaning negative) advance word plus my own resistance to Jackson’s tendency to over-saturate and over-flourish his films with visual imagery that always seems to say “look at what I’m doing!” But I have to say that I wasn’t all that unhappy with The Lovely Bones, and that it even got me at times.

Lovely Bones costars Rose McIver, Saoirse Ronan at last night’s after-party at the Plaza’s Oak Room.

Was I jumping up and down after it ended? No, but I wasn’t feeling too badly about it either. As Jackson films go it’s a fairly decent sit, at least for the novelty of it. I felt at the very least diverted by much of it, and it has some passages that are very affecting (especially the way it conveys the poignancy of Saoirse Ronan‘s Susie Salmon being simultaneously involved with and forever cut off from the lives of her mortal family and friends) and even brilliant at times. I was reasonably impressed for the most part, which is a significant admission for a longtime Jackson disser like myself.

The Lovely Bones is not restrained — far from it. It would have been better, I feel, if Jackson had dialed himself and the film back about 20% or 30%. Art isn’t easy, but the final canvas always seems grabbier if you’ve stepped back at the last minute and not gone whole-blitzkreig. And yet Bones does enforce a certain discipline at times. (“At times,” I say.) It seems in fact like the most intimate and exacting and emotionally expressive Jackson film since Heavenly Creatures, even with the full-spigot digital effects that overwhelm the delicacy and etherealness of the story and themes.

Jackson will always be Jackson, but this time the visual flamboyance makes sense as it conjures Susie’s afterlife experience after being murdered by a neighborhood creep. The otherwordly compositions tie in with certain bits and real-time echoes and memory fragments from the real world so at least there are underlying connections that lend a certain cohesiveness.

And Ronan’s performance is vivid and bold and open-hearted — she’s really quite the natural presence, and not incidentally a natural and well-chosen component in a world of Jackson’s feverish composing. And it all sort of comes together in a way that feels fairly novel and provocative — it’s like nothing I’ve seen in a long while, and a good deal more transporting than What Dreams May Come, for what that’s worth. It’s also very Jacksony in 40 or 50 different ways, of course. But that’s okay. It’s not a hate film — it’s “hmm, yeah, not bad” thing.

I loved that Jackson chose not to show Ronan’s murder — I really, really didn’t want to go there, even glancingly — and particularly his decision to show her escaping from her own death, running away from something that has happened but is so horrible that she instantly imagines or wills herself into a fantasy-escape mode. I got that right away and quite liked Jackson’s way of showing this sudden transformation.

Stanley Tucci‘s fungusy life form is interesting in a kind of nerdy and peculiar way that feels mostly right. It’s a contained performance that he doesn’t have a big “this is why I am who I am” moment — thank the Lord. The underserved are the adult actors and performances — Rachel Weisz‘s mom, Mark Wahlberg‘s dad, Susan Sarandon‘s alcoholic chain-smoking grandmother, Michael Imperioli’s investigating detective. I don’t know why Jackson bailed on Seebold’s subplot in which Weisz would have had an affair with Imperioli, but I guess there wasn’t time. Rose McIver stands out as Susie’s willful younger sister. I know I didn’t have the slightest problem with Wahlberg’s ’70s hair wig. The period flavorings (’70s cars, haircuts, home furnishings, wardrobes) are completely authentic.

There’s a moment near the end when a certain party doesn’t reveal that she’s gotten hold of an incriminating piece of evidence, and I must say this quickly drove me insane. “Why is she hesitating?” I screamed to myself. Very irritating, a serious misstep.

Will I find myself doing a down-the-road turnaround like I did with King Kong ? I doubt it. The Lovely Bones doesn’t feel overly long, although my ass was telling me it should have been more like 115 or 120 minutes rather than 136 minutes. I know I’d like to see it again, and that in itself is another significant admission.

Ronan, Jackson during filming.

It is an unusual film, and obviously a disturbing one with all kinds of different tone shifts and movements and burrowings and whatnot. I went in presuming there would be a show-offy quality to the after-life compositions, and it is a bit overbaked and over-cranked, but I was able to roll with it. I know what it is to be moaning and coughing and slapping my leg through a Peter Jackson film, and I didn’t do this last night.

It may be that The Lovely Bones will slip into the Best Picture running after all, especially given the general view that Invictus is a shortfaller.

It seemed curious — certainly unusual — to see this morning a N.Y. Times front-page story (i.e., the front page of the web version) by executive editor Bill Keller that heartily endorses Morgan Freeman‘s performance as Nelson Mandela in Clint Eastwood‘s Invictus.

Keller knows Mandela quite well personally, having been the Times‘ Johannesburg bureau chief from ’93 to ’95, so his opinion obviously carries some weight and authority. What he’s done, in effect, is to heartily endorse Freeman as a Best Actor contender in this year’s Oscar race. I’ve heard some arguments against Freeman over the last two or three days — his Mandela is appealing but “thin,” the film gives him nothing to play, etc. — but Keller’s article could turn things around. Maybe.

“Morgan Freeman has been cast as God — twice — so he evidently has no trouble projecting moral authority,” Keller writes. “The challenge of portraying Nelson Mandela, then, was not the size of the halo, but knowing the performance would be measured against the real, familiar Mandela, and his myth. ‘If we can say any part of acting is hard, then playing someone who is living and everybody knows would be the hardest,’ Mr. Freeman said in a phone interview.

“The role has defeated actors as varied as Danny Glover (the 1987 TV film Mandela), Sidney Poitier (Mandela and de Klerk, 1997, also for TV) and Dennis Haysbert (Goodbye Bafana, 2007), in vehicles that were reverential and mostly forgettable.

“But as someone who studied Mr. Mandela over the course of three years while he replaced an apartheid regime with a genuine democracy, I found Mr. Freeman’s performance in the film Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood, uncanny — less an impersonation than an incarnation.”

Keller’s story is dated 12.6, so it’ll be in this Sunday’s print edition.

I want to hear Michael Bay dissing Avatar composer James Horner right back on his website within 24 hours. Actually, make it twelve hours. The cycles on these things are getting faster and faster. You can’t sit around and drink tea and read Faulkner on your patio for fear of missing the latest who-whatta?

Here’s the excerpt:

LA Times‘ Geoff Boucher: “It’s interesting, too, that small moments become so key when a movie gets as big as this one. The machinery of the movie is so big that without successful small moments and human emotion, it could turn into a video game.

Horner: “Absolutely. Yes, that’s right. And, not to mention names, but if it was Michael Bay making this movie we wouldn’t be having this conversation. These things, [heart, story, soul], wouldn’t matter or they certainly wouldn’t matter as much. Jim Cameron knows the importance of it not just becoming mecha. Jim knows that a movie can become swamped in just unbelievable imagery and that it becomes hollow. Jim won’t allow that and my job is to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

“You won’t find a more devoted supporter of the Bourne franchise than me,” says departed Bourne director Paul Greengrass in a prepared statement. “I will always be grateful to have been the caretaker to Jason Bourne over the course of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. I’m very proud of those films and feel they express everything I most passionately believe about the possibility of making quality movies in the mainstream.

“My decision to not return a third time as director is simply about feeling the call for a different challenge. There’s been no disagreement with Universal Pictures. The opportunity to work with the Bourne family again is a difficult thing to pass up, but we have discussed this together and they have been incredibly understanding and supportive. I’ve been lucky enough to have made four films for Universal, and our relationship continues. Jason Bourne existed before me and will continue, and I hope to remain involved in some capacity as the series moves on.”

Every time the Sundance Film Festival announces their competition slate, I respond with one of those blah-blah, gee-this-seems-interesting, well-maybe-not-because-most-of-the-descriptions-seem-boring, blah-dee-blah, I-don’t-actually-have-anything-to-say pieces. This time, however, I forgot the power cord and I’m in a Starbucks on Eighth Avenue and there’s only about 20 minutes left so I can’t really go to town. But some of the stand-outs are as follows:

(1) Blue Valentine, directed and co-written by Derek Cianfrance, with Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams, Mike Vogel and John Doman costarring. Relationship drama of some mild interest because of Gosling and Williams, but I’m not holding my breath. I don’t know why I just said that.

(2) Douchebag, directed by Drake Doremus, written by Doremus, Lindsay Stidham, Doremus, Jonathan Schwartz and Andrew Dickler. Great title! Where’s the poster?

(3) Happythankyoumoreplease, directed and written by Josh Radnor. “Six New Yorkers negotiating love, friendship and gratitude when they’re too old to be precocious and not yet fully adults.” I smell a mumblecore movie. Is that what it is? If it is a mumblecore film why don’t they just say that and stop plotzing around? And if you can’t say “mumblecore” any more, what term is everyone supposed to use as a substitute?

(4) Holy Rollers, directed by Kevin Tyler Asch. Young Hasidic guy becomes an international Ecstasy smuggler. With Jesse Eisenberg!

(5) Howl, directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Allen Ginsberg, 1950s obscenity trial, horn-rimmed glasses, the horror of the Eisenhower era. James Franco, David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeff Daniels.

That’s it…the battery is going. I’ll be dead in 90 seconds.

Universal had it right with the Emily Blunt Wolfman poster, going the suggestive/subtle route. And then, I’m guessing, some marketing guy said, “Uhhm, I hate to mention this but surveys are showing this Blunt poster isn’t doing well with the dumbasses…we need to punch things up.” And so they did. Just a guess. I do know that I didn’t see the right-side poster until recently.

“Keep in mind something I was recently told,” a friend writes, “which is that Universal doesn’t officially have a marketing department now as no one really and truly replaced Adam Fogelson in the job. So the marketing executive is now head of the studio calling all the shots about this stuff. That poster not only represents his direct personal taste, but how they’ll sell the movie which they’re now shaping as something for the Saw audience as opposed to ‘classic gothic horror.'”