Arrived at Heathrow this morning at 7:40 am, bought an Oyster card, took the Underground to Hyde Park station and registered at the Dorchester by 10:30 am or so. (Things always take longer than you expect.) I then ordered a pricey breakfast in the salon, sharing a table with the Boston Herald‘s Stephen Schaefer, also here for the Fantastic Mr. Fox junket. I got about 90 minutes sleep on the plane, at most, and am consequently too fried to write anything. So the best I can do for now is simply post photos.

Dorchester Hotel salon — Monday, 10.12, 10:55 am

Monday, 10.12, 10:20 am

In most English-speaking environs, the past tense of “ask” is “asked.” Except in borough cultures surrounding Manhattan, of course, where the past tense is conjugated as “axed.” I finally realized today that better-spoken borough people say “I axed him a question” while common-cattle types tend to say “axe” without adding on the “d.”

Michael Cieply‘s 10.10. N.Y. Times piece about Roman Polanski’s situation takes stock of today’s tougher attitudes and standards about congress between older men and younger women, and — for the first time in my readings — seems to forecast a longer sentence than expected for Polanski (i.e., more than 12 to 18 months) if and when he’s extradited to the States and faces a judge.

It suggests that Polanski really should have seen the process through back in ’78 rather than skip. It also tells me that it would be at least somewhat unfair to apply today’s mandates and mores in the matter of Polanski’s sentencing. It would almost be analagous to a man having been busted for illegally selling liquor in 1912, and then skipping for 10 years, being re-arrested and extradited and facing a sentence in 1922 during the height of prohibition. He was guilty by 1912 standards, of course, but would be seen as more guilty by 1922 standards. That doesn’t seem right to me.

“If [Polanski] is extradited from Switzerland, Mr. Polanski could face a more severe punishment than he did in the 1970s,” Cieply reports, “as a vigorous victims’ rights movement, a family-values revival and revelations of child abuse by clergy members have all helped change the moral and legal framework regarding sex with the young.

“Mr. Polanski’s lawyers — including Reid Weingarten, a Washington power player — are likely to argue that Mr. Polanski does not even qualify for extradition from Switzerland, because he was set to be given a jail term of less than one year when he fled to France in 1978.

“But Stephen L. Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, has signaled that he believes much stiffer penalties may be in order. Questioned by reporters just after Mr. Polanski’s arrest, he said the filmmaker had received a ‘very, very, very lenient sentence’ that ‘would never be achievable under today’s laws.'”

Nine months after An Education preemed at Sundance, it finally opened limited last Friday. I’m guessing that some of those who feel I’ve overpraised it and/or made too much of Carey Mulligan‘s performance were among the viewers. Reactions?

I get why Couples Retreat, which almost every critic thinks is shit, is the #1 movie this weekend. People refuse to consider reviews (naturally!) and the trailer made it look half-decent and some imagined, I’m sure, that a remnant of the old Vince Vaughn/Wedding Crashers aura might be part of it. (Or that Vaughn plus Jon Favreau meant a possible reviving of the old Swingers thing.)

I’ve been in Atlanta since last night. A strictly personal thing. No industry tie-ins or allusions of any kind. Everyone deserves a little down time, and perhaps even an occasional semblance of a life. Out of here tomorrow morning and off to London tomorrow night for the Fantastic Mr. Fox junket.

Downtown Atlanta

“When Lincoln ran into trouble during the Civil War, he got new generals. He brought in Grant. I hope that President Obama will bring in some new generals on the financial front. I don’t think that any individual who had a responsibility in creating in creating this [financial] mess should be in charge of cleaning it up. I honestly don’t think they’re capable of it.” — Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the star of Capitalism: A Love Story, speaking on a just-aired Bill Moyers Journal.

I voted for Barack Obama, of course, and I can’t help loving the guy. But I’d really and truly rather have Rep. Kaptur running the show on the economy rather than he.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/a-moment-of-truth-with-bi_b_314797.html

“It’s a very sacred thing, the nest egg…the egg is a protector like a god, and we sit under it and we are protected by it. Without it…no protection!” Arguably the single greatest rant (certainly the funniest in a marital context) ever delivered in the history of American motion picture comedy.

For me, the Toy Story 3 standout factor — apart from the content of this relatively new trailer, and the slightly odd fact that it has no website despite a 6.18.10 release date — is that it was penned by Little Miss Sunshine Oscar-winner Michael Arndt.

The slogan is “no toy gets left behind.” The theme is about abandonment, homelessness.

Woody, Buzz, and the rest of their toy-box friends are dumped in a day-care center after their owner, Andy, departs for college. Voiced by Tom Hanks, Michael Keaton, Tim Allen, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Cusack and R. Lee Ermey.

Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Bronson is an extreme-fury, absurd-testosterone package about a 57 year-old bellowing beast who’s spent almost all of the last 35 years in prison, and most of these in soilitary, primarily due to an anger-management problem of ridiculous animal proportions. Born Michael Petersen, he’s called himself “Charles Bronson” for much of his life behind bars. But his story, which I admit has a certain intrigue as an object d’art, isn’t nearly compelling enough to fill a feature-length film.

I began to think about escaping 35 or 40 minutes into it. Half my brain was processing the film, and half was figuring out what I could get done (i.e., write about) if I left early. As it happened I stayed to the end, but I had no idea what all the people who were praising this film at Sundance ’09 were on about. “This?” I said to a couple of them. L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen has called Bronson “a searing operatic vision…a phantasmagori\a motored by a dazzling performance by Tom Hardy.” Actually, it’s an oppressive and confining vision because it forces the viewer to sit in prison for year after year, and because it gives the viewer little more to contemplate than Hardy screaming and howling and banging his head against the bars.

“An Education, which was shot by John De Borman and designed by Andrew McAlpine, is a morality tale that often plays like high comedy,” says Wall Street Journal criicket Joe Morgenstern. That’s due in large part to Carey Mulligan.

An Education‘s Carey Mulligan

“After seeing the movie last month at the Telluride Film Festival, I wrote that everyone there seemed to be comparing her to Audrey Hepburn. The comparison is irresistible, and not only because Jenny sometimes wears her hair upswept in a Holly Golightly do, or because Hepburn played a young woman opposite an older man in at least three movies — Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon and My Fair Lady. (In five if you count Funny Face and Charade, neither of which dwelled on the age difference.)

“The 24 year-old Mulligan, like Hepburn has a way of endearing herself with little more than a lilting phrase — her speaking voice is as rich as Juliet Greco‘s singing voice — or a flashing glance. But it’s her own way, and she’s her own special edition of a dazzling new star.

“The first time I saw her was almost a year ago, in a superb Broadway production of The Seagull, with a cast that included Peter Sarsgaard as Trigorin; she played Nina, the sacrificial creature of Chekhov’s title. She was electrifying from her first entrance, when Nina speaks of having been in a fever all day, and cries joyously, ‘The sky is clear, the moon is rising!’ Either an actress has the skill to make those extravagant lines her own or she doesn’t, and Ms. Mulligan had skill, and passion, to burn.

“In An Education, where she’s completely convincing as a 16-year-old — the movie was shot two years ago — she has created a complete original. Jenny is, to toss off a French phrase, always on the qui vive; it’s as if she’s listening intently to the life around her for clues about how it works. Both her beauty and her agile mind allow her to be precocious without being insufferable. And she isn’t merely sufferable, she’s admirable for the purity of her responses to culture — Jenny plays the cello as an ardent amateur — if not the clarity of her insights about love.

“When David takes her and a couple of his philistine friends to a concert, she’s the only one who loves the music. (The cello is a magnificent instrument, but I do wish filmmakers would occasionally use another one to signify a lyrical spirit.)

“If purity were Jenny’s main quality, she, and the movie, would be a bore. No danger of that, though, because her motives are mixed, her gift for deviousness is impressive and she, like her semidrab middle-class parents, becomes complicit in a series of choices that may put an end to her dreams of going to Oxford, and bring down the shining promise of her life before she’s ever had a chance to take off.

“The director, Ms. Scherfig, is Danish, but she is manifestly at home working in English. (Her previous English-language features, both highly recommended, are Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and Italian for Beginners.) Direction can’t be seen, but Ms. Scherfig’s approach makes itself felt in a sparkling stream of felicitous choices. She’s a poet of natural rhythms and intimate insights, and this new film will make her a star in her own realm.

“What it will do for the movie’s star is another matter. One thinks not only of Hepburn, but of Julie Christie bursting upon the world in Billy Liar. That was a very small role, though. Ms. Mulligan is the heart and soul of An Education, and she’s phenomenal. The whole film is phenomenal. I love it.”

I have to catch a 6 pm Newark plane so I have to start the run-around now or I’ll wind up missing it. So that’s it until I hit the airport around 4:30 or so. I’ll see how it goes.