A third prominent African-American commentator (and the fourth overall as far as this column is concerned) has joined the Precious takedown campaign. The writer is Washington Post Metro columnist Courtland Milloy, who has trashed Lee Daniels‘ film with almost an Armond White-like vitriol.

“In Precious, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have helped serve up a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick,” he wrote today. “In it, we glimpse a sweaty, faceless brute of a black man raping the girl while her mother watches from a doorway. Two children are conceived in incest.

“I watched the movie at a theater in Alexandria where showtimes are nearly around the clock, from 10:15 a.m. to 12:15 a.m. The audience was mostly black women and teenagers. When the lights came up, all of the moviegoers appeared sullen and depressed.

“After escaping the abuse of her home life, Precious ends up in a halfway house. She is still functionally illiterate and has two babies to care for, one with Down syndrome.

“Strangest of all, many reviewers felt the movie ended on a high note. Time, for instance, wrote that Precious ‘makes an utterly believable and electrifying rise from an urban abyss of ignorance and neglect.’ Excuse me, the movie ends with the girl walking the streets, babies in her arms, having just learned that her father has died of AIDS — but not before infecting her.

“The story is set in 1987, before AIDS treatment became widely available. Precious is as good as dead.

“At the Cannes Film Festival, members of a mostly white audience gave Precious a 15-minute standing ovation. I guess they can hardly wait for the sequel. Rolling Stone gave Precious 3.5 stars out of four. Three X’s would be more like it.”

The 2007 blowoff of Benicio del Toro‘s landmark performance in Things We Lost in The Fire by critics groups, Oscar pundits and Academy members is one of the most shameful (certainly incomprehensible) wrongos in the history of award-season politicking and handicapping. The people who ignored Del Toro’s work as Jerry the junkie will one day have to stand before the Movie Godz with bowed heads and explain themselves, which will surely be a painful thing all around.

Benicio del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire; Michael Stuhlbarg as he doesn’t appear in A Serious Man.

I’m wondering now who will get Del Toro’ed this year? Life can be unfair and sometimes cruel, especially on the awards circuit. Who will fate slap down with nary a glance?

I’m sensing right now that A Serious Man‘s Michael Stuhlbarg might be a candidate. (I’m telling myself I shouldn’t mention this for fear of this piece being misinterpreted as a flat-out prediction of same.) I know for certain that Stuhlbag’s performance will be one day be savored as a delicious bit of tonal balancing. His persistent and yet faintly farcical performance is of a different flavor and dimension that Del Toro’s in Fire (which I feel, no offense, is a greater achievement), but it is arguably a more difficult thing to have gotten right. Every second Stuhlbarg is on-screen he seems to be simultaneously acting in a farce and a hellish deadpan tragedy, which of course is what A Serious Man is.

For whatever reason a beautiful Blu-ray of David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man, long admired for Freddie Francis‘s ravishing monochome scope photography, is available in Europe but not here. Another standout is Stuart Craig‘s fascinating production design, which almost makes a character out of the aesthetic ravages of industrialism in late 1800s London.

Anthony Hopkins in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980).

John Hurt

“One thing that’s really changed [in the last few years] is the independent landscape,” Hurt Locker screenwriter-producer Mark Boal said in a recent (11.15) Hollywood Reporter ‘Award Watch’ roundtable. “I didn’t know much about it, but I learned in the process of writing The Hurt Locker and producing it. That was a four-year thing, all in, and by the end of that period I felt like, ‘Wow, I’ve learned a little bit about how independent films work.'”

“And in the last year,” Boal concludes, “I’ve watched that entire business model crash and burn. I don’t know that the film I set out to make four years ago could get made again today.” Amazing! Today’s business environment might well prohibit (or come close to squelching) the next Hurt Locker-type boldfacer.

A high-def version of the recently-posted “Cinema Italiano”/Nine music video appeared today. Nobody will be free to say anything about the film until mid-December, but I can at least mention that Nine offers a three-second shot of Positano (also in the trailer from the 10 to 12 second mark), and that this gave me a pleasant jolt, sending me back to my brief visit there in late May 2007.

I completely understand and agree with the view of Italian sophistos that Positano has been degraded by the tour buses and hee-haw Americans who keep the local economy going. I remember being in a Positano internet cafe and overhearing a guy with some kind of Kentucky or Tennessee accent using the international land line and speaking or bellowing too loudly (“Great Italian fewd!”), and immediately flinching and saying to myself, “Uh-oh…the Cancun crowd is here.”

But it’s such a beautiful place anyway. The feeling of being cut off from the world is so special and serene. The magnificent Moorish architecture, the 45 or 50 degree incline, the view from a cheap hilltop restaurant that Jett and I visited during magic hour, etc. I’d go there again in a heartbeat.

I took this video myself with my old silver Canon with the fish-eye lens:

The all-media screening of Chris Weitz‘s New Moon happens tonight on 42nd street. No plus-ones, I’ve been told. I wouldn’t normally run an excerpt of anything from the UK News of the World but this 11.17 review by Robbie Collin has an interesting passage in which he calls it “unnecessarily good.”

Weitz “kicks off with an eerie dream sequence that says more about the main characters in two minutes than the last Harry Potter film managed in two and a half hours,” he writes.

“In fact, special effects aside — which, by and large, are still a bit pony — New Moon grinds recent Potter efforts into the dust because it takes the time to flesh out its characters rather than just slamming them from one manufactured crisis to the next.”

(Pony? Presumably meaning second-tier, not good enough, etc. Great term!)

“These are convincing, fully-rounded teenagers right here. They sulk, they stew, they agonize and they lust. They don’t run around playing kiss-chase in magic school.

New Moon is “a visually serious step up too. Weitz knows how to use pictures to tell a story — a pretty important skill for a director, you would think — but it means the film’s not bogged down with unnecessary chatter.

“Take a short scene in which three months pass, with the camera circling Bella as she sits by the window. Or the masterful chase sequence between the werewolves and bad vampire Victoria (Rachelle LeFevre) scored with a Thom Yorke track. Or the nicely-staged climax in Italy, complete with flashes of James Bond glamor and a predictably ace turn from Michael Sheen as vampire royalty Aro.”

This is over a week old, but on 11.10 Digital Bits columnist “Two Cents Worth” wrote the following about a Martin Scorsese remark heard via satellite at the recent Blu-Con 2.0 conference, to wit: Scorsese “spoke very positively about the Blu-ray format:, saying it has ‘the potential to replicate the original theatrical experience” and “is the best I’ve seen in forty years of [movie] collecting. Blu-ray offers the ability to see the film as it was intended.’

And then comes a passage straight out of the grainstorm monk’s handbook. “The most interesting quote [Scorsese] offered, however, was something I hope was not lost on the audience of studio executives and mastering engineers on hand. He noted that Blu-ray is capable of displaying ‘a film grain texture which I think is very important in recreating the film experience.’ Can I get an AMEN on that?”

Good God. A breakthrough of sorts has just happened with Warner Home Video releasing an almost entirely grain-free Gone With the Wind Bluray — a revelation! — and here’s this guy apparently pining for more grainstorm transfers in the vein of Criterion’s The Third Man. This shows how fanatical grain monks can be. They’re the Islamic fundamentalists of the Blu-ray fanboy world.

There’s no talking them out of their views, I know, and I’m saying this as one who fully understands and respects the concept of proper grain levels — who understands the difference between appropriate grain and digital wipeouts in the unfortunate tradition of the Patton Blu-ray. The only thing to do with these guys, I suppose, is to hang tough and…I don’t know, wait for them to die out or whatever.

You may not find this fact in film-history books, but 1987 was a seminal year for the tarnished moral and ethical authority of the proverbial investigator and law enforcer (i.e., the loosely-allied private dick and big-city cop) in Hollywood films. For this was the year in which they both succumbed to the forces of darkness and crazy-hood.

It was 22 years ago when Shane Black‘s (and Richard Donner and Joel Silver‘s) Lethal Weapon introduced the then-radical idea of a cop who was screwier and possibly more dangerous than the criminals he was chasing. ’87 was also the year when Alan Parker‘s Angel Heart told the tale of a wise-guy shamus who turned out to be the very same grisly murderer he’d been looking to find all through the film.

Before these two movies cops and private eyes were thought to be more or less safe — corrupted and flawed to varying degrees (like Treat Williams‘ narcotics cop in Prince of the City) but still vaguely decent, semi-trustworthy, on “our side,” exuding a recognizable sense of morality. These two films changed all that.

After that pretty good teaser trailer this Salt one-sheet has to be called a disappointment. It’s been obvious from the get-go who Salt is. The fact that Angelina Jolie plays her has been well established by the trailer, as well as the fact that she’s Russian and smoky-eyed and given to various feats of acrobatic derring-do. The other problem is that the face could almost belong to someone else. Is it Angie or a cyborg or Megan Fox‘s malevolent sister?

Through the kindness of a friend, I too have now read Wes Anderson‘s The Rosenthaler Suite, a Universal/Imagine-funded adaptation of Patrice Leconte’s My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), theatrically released in ’06 and issued on DVD on 10.16.07. Or most of it, I mean.

Wes has thoroughly Wessified the Leconte piece and made it his own. And it’s a very enjoyable read. I could see this movie in my head right away, and I quite liked it. More than The Royal Tenenbaums or The Life Aquatic or The Darjeeling Limited, and more than Fantastic Mr. Fox, to be honest. I’d really like to see it made and released soon, or at least soon by Anderson standards, which would be within two years, or Christmas 2011. So let’s get on the stick.

I’ve read four of Wes’s scripts now and they’re all of a piece, each one cleanly and tidily and fastidiously written with that singular sense of dry, understated, cosmopolitan pocket-drop humor, or rather humor that isn’t really “humor” because it’s about an ensemble of vaguely depressive glumheads who are anything but “funny” and yet are amusing in a heh-heh, LQTM, chuckle-about-it-later-as-you’re-sitting-on-the subway-in-the-wee-hours type of way.

It’s basically an emotional growth story about a 40ish New York art dealer named Nicholas who’s myopic and self-absorbed and aloof in a typical Andersonian way (i.e., intelligent, driven, sophisticated, inwardly anxious, looking for serenity). You’re with this guy for less than a page and you’re immediately recalling Jason Schwartzman‘s Max in Rushmore, Bill Murray‘s Cousteau-like undersea explorer in The Life Aquatic, Gene Hackman‘s paterfamilias in The Royal Tenenbaums, and Owen Wilson‘s Dignan in Bottle Rocket.

The point is that Nicholas isn’t especially “likable,” which is never here nor there in Andersonville. (So?) The fact that he has no real friends is noticed and commented upon by an older rich Manhattan woman named Lucinda who occasionally funds Nicholas’s art-gallery purchases and who knows him well. She bets the entire value of a just-purchased cache of paintings by a dying painter named Moses Rosenthaler that Nicholas has no real friends. This is actually true but Nicholas disputes it, of course, and takes the bet, which means he has to find a friend who will stand up to scrutiny.

He zeroes in on an amiable, easygoing, classical-music-loving Polish cab driver named Zbigniew (as in Brezsinski). The relationship between Nicholas and Zbigniew is the heart of the thing, of course. You can guess where it goes from here, or you can rent the DVD or make up your own story.

A much more thorough review was posted yesterday by The Playlist‘s Rodrigo Perez, complete with speculation about who would play Nicholas (George Clooney), Lucinda (Meryl Streep) and Zbigniew (Owen Wilson might not work because he’s doesn’t seem able to handle a Polish accent, and yet he’d be the best, I think….hey, how about making Zbigniew a Texan and calling him Dodge or Dobbs or Shep or Ben Sliney?).

The wifi in the apartment went down early last week and has stayed down. I’ve been using the iMac by piggybacking on a neighbor’s wifi but it’s a very weak and skittish signal and mostly a waste of time to mess with. Using the flaky AT&T air card with the laptop has been close to pointless and mostly futile due to the apartment being located in a weak-air pocket. On top of which the laptop touch pad has Parkinson’s disease. The Time Warner guy is finally coming today between 2 and 6 pm. It’s been hell.