Yesterday ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons (a.k.a. “The Sports Guy” in ESPN magazine) posted the most bluntly and enjoyably written reviews I’ve read anywhere of 2009’s two most attention-getting sports films — Invictus and The Blind Side — although his ’09 favorites (which he riffs on briefly) were Sugar, Big Fan and The Damned United.

ESPN’s Bill Simmons

Excerpt #1: “Invictus‘s first problem was making Nelson Mandela the movie’s lead character in a misguided attempt to be an important film that transcended sports. Sure, Morgan Freeman nailed the difficult accent as well as the dignified, congenial way Mandela carried himself. But isn’t Freeman always dignified and congenial? This was like watching Red walk around Shawshank with better clothes and a cooler accent. I just couldn’t get past it. Hiring Freeman to play Mandela was too easy — like getting Omar Epps to star in the Mike Tomlin story or something.

“Plus, the same qualities that made Mandela such a wonderful human being prohibit him from being a compelling movie lead. Freeman plays Mandela correctly as a proud man with a huge heart. He speaks softly, in something of a stilted monotone. He keeps smiling and inspiring people despite all the horrible things that had happened to him, except he wasn’t a commanding presence who brought a room to life like, say, Martin Luther King Jr., or even Herm Edwards. There was nothing to figure out about him, no surprises coming, no layers that needed to be peeled back. He was just a great and understated man.

“Hollywood knew this, the filmmakers knew this, and they couldn’t figure out how to translate Mandela to the big screen for two hours. What they should have done was build Invictus around the rugby team, made it a sports movie, and then made Mandela a supporting character for effect. Ideally, we would have seen him five or six times at most to maximize his presence (like how Jack Nicholson was used in A Few Good Men), so every time he appeared on screen, it would have felt powerful and substantial.”

Excerpt #2: “I never thought that Sandra Bulllock, the Nolan Ryan of chick flicks, could carry a sports movie. Wrong. She owns every scene and hasn’t been this likable since 28 Days. Even better, she exhibits the same Southern sassiness/sexiness that Julia Roberts didn’t have in Charlie Wilson’s War. It’s worth seeing this movie just for Bullock. She out-Juliaed Julia.”

Excerpt #3: “Because Hollywood doesn’t get analyzed like sports — we don’t create complicated statistics to evaluate careers or even use recent history to determine whether someone is better or worse than the general public might think — our perception is that Clint Eastwood is one of the best directors.

“Within Hollywood circles, his directing is legendary for a different reason: Eastwood bangs out expensive movies under budget and ahead of schedule. Doesn’t shoot a ton of takes, doesn’t drift from the script, doesn’t waste afternoons waiting for the sun to set just right, stuff like that. He’s the most efficient director working today. Because we like him personally, he gets more credit than he deserves and a free pass every time he makes a clunker. By all accounts, Eastwood bangs out a project, takes a few weeks off, then bangs out the next one.

“So how can we call him a great director? Or even a good one? Is efficiency the best trait for directing? Think of the time James Cameron spent creating a 3-D world in Avatar or Jason Reitman spent crafting Up in the Air. then ask yourself this question: What would have happened if Invictus had been driven by someone with that kind of passion? Potentially, it would have been one of the greatest sports movies ever made, right?”

Movie City News’ Last Film Critics in America list (which stood at 121 when it was last updated in March ’09) didn’t include Washington Times film critics Sonny Bunch and Kelly Jane Torrance. That’s a moot point now because Torrance and Bunch got whacked yesterday, according to a 1.1.10 e-mail from Bunch. “Economics and all that,” he says. “They liquidated the entire arts/features desk.”

Sean P. Means, keeper of the Salt Lake Tribune‘s film critic departed list, should take note. The most recent update I could find of this article/topic is from last May, when Means reported about the dismissal of the Arizona Star‘s Phil Villarreal. (Who has since landed a new film critic gig with OK magazine.) The Salt Lake Tribune‘s search engine sucks eggs.

Paris is the only place in the world to welcome in the new year. The kids and I stood in front of the Eiffel Tower exactly ten years ago tonight, and I would do it again. This isn’t the greatest New Year’s video I’ve ever seen, but it ends with the best upward-pan spectacle shot I’ve ever seen on YouTube. Taken only seven or eight hours ago.

The Obama family saw Avatar in Hawaii this morning — alone. The story doesn’t say if they saw it in 2D, RealD, Fake IMAX digital 3D or real IMAX celluloid 3D. Why didn’t they watch it with a paying crowd? You’re missing something if you see a film like Avatar in a vacuum. Or are you?

The Bowling Green Daily News‘ Michael Compton has chosen United 93 as his best film of the decade. Which isn’t too far from where my Prius is parked — I had Paul Greengrass‘s 9/11 drama fifth among my best aughts.

When someone writes the obit for Variety critic Derek Elley (not for many decades!), it’s likely he/she will feel obliged to mention the biggest wrongo of Elley’s career — his September 2008 pan of The Hurt Locker at the Venice Film Festival. There’s no right or wrong view of any film, of course, but Elley’s view is so drastically divorced from the opinion of 98% of the critics who’ve written about it since that you have to wonder, as I did in my 2008 Toronto review, what Elley saw over there.

You can slam any film you want for any reason, but if it’s doing something well you have to at least acknowledge this. If it seems to be touching a nerve or connecting in some efficient way you have to at least be fair and say, “It knows what it’s doing.”

What are the other notorious missed-the-basic-value reviews? David Poland‘s “hold up there, cowboy!” pan of Brokeback Mountain from the Telluride Film festival, surely. My thumbs-up reaction to Tim Burton‘s Planet of the Apes was a miss-in-reverse. Todd McCarthy‘s Sundance Film Festival pan of The Big Lebowski lives in the annals. Bosley Crowther‘s trashing of Dr. Strangelove in early ’64, and his praise of Cleopatra the year before.

At the end of his best-of-aughts piece (in which he names Charlie Kaufman ‘s Synecdoche as the best of the bunch!), Roger Ebert finishes with a thought that I’ve conveyed several times myself. Actually thousands of times, in a sense.

“All of these films are on this list for the same reason — the direct emotional impact they made on me,” he explains. “They have many other qualities, of course. But these evoked the emotion of Elevation, which I wrote about a year or so ago. Elevation is, scientists say, is an actual emotion, not a woo-woo theory. I believe that, because some films over the years have evoked from me a physical as well as an intellectual or emotional response.

“In choosing the list, I decided to bypass films that may have qualified for their historical, artistic, popular or ‘objective” importance. No lists have deep significance, but even less lists composed to satisfy an imaginary jury of fellow critics. My jury resides within. I know how I feel.

“Almost the first day I started writing reviews, I found a sentence in a book by Robert Warshow that I pinned on the wall above my desk. I have quoted it so frequently that some readers must be weary of it, but it helps me stay grounded.

“It says that while ‘a man goes to the movies, a critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man.’

“That doesn’t make one person right and another wrong. All it means is that you know how they really felt, not how they thought they should feel.”

Here’s my initial reaction Synecdoche, by the way — eighteen months ago, feels like a lot more.

There seems to be a growing consensus that you can’t say “two thousand-something” any more — you have to say “twenty-ten” or whatever. This has been the only century since the acceptance of the Gregorian or Roman calendars in which English-speaking people have referred to a year by saying the word “thousand.” This has mainly been due, I suspect, to the grammatical influence of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve been a twenty-something advocate since ’01, to no avail.

I’ve been feeling more and more persuaded over the last couple of weeks that Zoe Saldana deserves a Best Actress nomination for her motion-capture performance as Neytiri in Avatar. In the manner of a silent-film actress Saldana’s emoting is necessarily broad, and I understand the uninformed suspicion that it’s not she who deserves the credit as much as the motion-capture tweaks that fine-tuned her performance, but my heart knows what it feels. Saldana got me.

Don’t even mention Meryl Streep‘s Dan Aykroyd-y performance in Julie & Julia alongside Saldana’s. When I think of Avatar I think first of the 3D-eyeball-sex aspect, and then the final embrace moment between big Neytiri and Sam Worthington‘s little Jake. That was a huge sink-in for me. I was responding to a woman — her bravery, conviction — and not a technology. I felt her character and emotionality as fully as Carey Mulligan‘s in An Education.

I regret to say that apart from the motion-capture suspicion there’s a slight downside afflicting Saldana’s chances. I don’t mean to sound like a snob, but she doesn’t speak like a cultured actress or, to be completely frank, a woman of great character or feeling in the interviews that she’s done to support the film. She’s a New Jersey neighborhood girl who lived for several years in the Dominican Republic, and she seems to “talk the walk” in this respect. And that argues with what I want from an Oscar-calibre actress. Neytiri has “it”; Saldana not so much.

I watch and listen to Saldana, and I don’t think RADA or Stella Adler or HB Studios. Or a higher education of any kind. Or some kind of up-from-the-streets Edith Piaf kapow factor. I’m trying to fight my way past this, but I felt more enthusiasm for her Avatar performance before seeing her on “Late Night with David Letterman” than after.

And yet MCN’s David Poland is dead-on when he says the following:

“I have been struck by how many people, Academy members included, have remarked on the emotional weight of Saldana’s performance holding [Avatar] together. She is both very physical and very raw emotionally… something we have not really seen since Ms. Weaver in Mr. Cameron’s Aliens.

“There is a lot of education to be done here. My interviews with Cameron and WETA’s Joe Letteri took me through both the intent of the filmmakers and how this first-time ever process truly allowed the actors to do all of their traditional acting work, even as they were computerized.

“But the bottom line is, this is a strong piece of acting. It is a full-out performance. And by the middle of the film, you believe in who Naytiri is, above and beyond being 10 feet tall, blue, and nearly naked. This is a testament to Zoe Saldana’s work. She deserves serious consideration for a nomination, as any other actress who had given a performance like this would.”

Pete Hammond says the following: “The reason Saldana will not get an acting nom is that the whole area of performance-capture is a very controversial one for actors. SAG even has a committee devoted to exploring the negative aspects of it and what it eventually will mean for actors.”

I’d like to add 50% agreement to a recent AOL Moviefone poll verdict, which is that Megan Fox was the worst and the sexiest actress of 2009. I concur with the “worst” part because no other actor in an ’09 film seemed quite as falsely mannered to me — as devoid of anything recognizably human. There’s nothing behind her eyes. She really does seem to exude the personality, attitude and talent level of a porn star.

I’m talking mainly about her acting in Jennifer’s Body, of course. You can’t judge anyone by their performance in either of the Transformers films.

The dead-eye factor is also why I don’t find Fox sexy. So many under-25 guys fail to realize that looks are only a third of the package. (And less when you’re talking about Fox’s porn-star package.) No woman can be called genuinely sexy unless they have a quality about them that suggests (a) they’re emotionally approachable and (b) they’d be breathtaking in bed if and when you scored. Fox doesn’t seem approachable to anyone except for guys offering this or that material or portfolio enhancement, and you can’t believe porn stars during sex — it’s all terrible “acting.”

I guy I knew in college said something really eloquent once about a girl he’d recently met: “The sex was so good, I cried.” That would never occur if you happened to get lucky with Megan Fox.

A Manhattan street artist sold this to a friend, who turned around and gave it to me for a Christmas present. I don’t like to wear anything brown (not even underwear or socks) but this is exceptional. Research hasn’t revealed what “Il Maco” means.

Jett, who tunes out on certain subjects every so often, just asked who the likely Best Supporting Actor winner will be, and when I said “Christoph Waltz, the milk-sipping Nazi Colonel from Inglourious Basterds,” he said “what?” He’s seen Quentin Tarantino‘s film and was okay with it, but the Waltz certainty shocked him. Write a fast piece about why you just said that, I suggested. He’s not responding so I guess not.

This was a banner year of Stephen Lang in Public Enemies and Avatar — why isn’t he in the loop? Peter Capaldi‘s potty mouthed rage-hound performance in In The Loop made him a major indie star. Alfred Molina‘s awkward English dad was wonderfully bent and vulnerable in An Education, and Peter Sarsgaard was curiously sly and winning as Carey Mulligan‘s odd-duck older boyfriend. Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty shone brightly in The Hurt Locker. Christian McKay in Orson Welles and Me! And James Gandolfini‘s In The Loop general turned me around like few smallish comic performances have this year. (Between this and Gandolfini’s comic vulgarian in God of Carnage, who knew?)

Why does it have to be Waltz, Waltz, Waltz and nothing but?