A trusted friend was told by an Oscar consultant/publicist that out of the 5810 members eligible to vote for nominations, last year roughly 500 came in on the final balloting day. That figure, however, was “way lower” this year. Nonetheless, I wonder to what extent this history applies to the number of last-minute voters this year. The ballot deadline, once more, is this Tuesday, 1.17, at 5 pm.

“Young people uneducated about the Holocaust will take as fact what they see in The Reader,” director Rod Lurie (Nothing But The Truth) writes on the Huffington Post. “And that would be a damn shame. For this film gives ammunition to Holocaust negationists, to the Archbishop Williamsons of the world, to the people who would tell us that the Shoah is a mass exaggeration.

“Ron Rosenbaum has already written a brilliant piece in Slate, taking the film to task for more or less exonerating the German population for their part in the Final Solution. Several others have written about the inappropriateness of trying to solicit a kind of sympathy for an SS guard. Others have attacked it for using sexuality to soften and evoke pity for the lead character.

“What I would like to explore are the film’s versions of certain ‘facts’ presented in the film that serve to diminish the culpability of the SS…if you can imagine such a thing.

“First up is the notion that Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz would ever have been allowed into the SS. In the trial portion of the film (especially well done) we learn the SS was ‘recruiting” guards and Hanna volunteered her services. (She was working in Siemens — the giant electronics company that used Jewish slave labor). Hanna is an illiterate. Furthermore, her work ethic was driven by efficiency — doing her job and duty — and not anti-Semitism.

“The problem here is every person, man or woman, who was in the SS was intimately indoctrinated into the teachings of several rabid Jew haters including Julius Streicher in Der Sturmer. In fact, that newspaper was required reading for the SS on Hitler’s orders. One was not entering a job when they came to the SS. They were turning themselves over to an ideology with cult-like obedience. This was especially true of those who were entering the Totenkopf — i.e., the ‘deaths head’ — tasked with being guards at the camps.

“Of course there were some members of the SS who were not educated (though Germany was easily the most literate European country at the time). There may have been a Hanna or two. But is that not the primary tool of the Holocaust denier? To turn the exception into the rule? I am sure the makers of this film are not deniers. But they are helping those who are.

“Because Kate Winslet‘s Hanna Schmitz character is not presented as an anomaly, those uneducated on the Holocaust will assume her character is an accurate portrayal of a member of the SS. Indeed, this depiction leads to the kind of ignorant statement made in this excerpt from a letter to the Los Angeles Times defending the film:

“‘Is it all that wrong to realize that maybe the murdered were not the only victims of that situation? To anyone watching the movie with an open mind, Hanna is a sad victim, an illiterate working as a guard, merely following orders, either her rationality suspended and/or her judgment colored by the atmosphere of the Third Reich.”

“No, Hanna is not a victim. But The Reader helps to foster the notion that she and her contemporaries may have been.

“Indeed, Winslet herself said this on The Charlie Rose Show of the people who entered the SS: ‘These were young men and women who didn’t know what they were getting into.’ And Reader director Stephen Daldry himself has said that the ‘Holocaust was started by normal people.’

“It is a shocking lack of understanding of one of the most important and horrible moments in human history.”

Last night’s Mickey Rourke interview on Charlie Rose was really some kind of beautiful. I haven’t felt quite so affected, softened and soothed by a one-on-one in a long time. The vast majority of Academy members have voted by now and there’s probably no changing fate at this stage, but Fox Searchlight (or someone) has to get that interview captured, embedded and sent out to Hollywood Elsewhere and everyone else. It was good for the soul, good for the heart, good all around. 1:07 pm update: Here it is on Rose’s site.

Rose always zealously guards his interviews, it’s always hard to find embed codes for them, and when they do show up it’s always several days if not weeks later. But Fox Searchlight needs to exert pressure upon Rose and his producers and put it out there rapidamente. And I don’t mean Monday or Tuesday. Now.

I’ve felt admiration and grudging respect for Rourke before but I fell in love with him last night, as far as that’s feasible or possible from an electronic remove. I don’t care if it was an act. I loved it anyway.

That resolution he showed, that knowledge that he needs to focus on the better angels of his nature and not allow the hard side to run the show ever again. The admission that for him it’s not one day at a time but almost one hour at a time, and that he knows deep down it could all fall apart again if he’s not careful, cautious, focused. His calm determination that no matter what goes down there’s no stopping him, no quitting now. His saying that if Penn wins he’ll stand up and cheer because he’s great and a brother and maybe he’ll have his turn a year or two down the road. That quiet, settled, almost-dweeby quality he showed with those black horn-rim glasses…man!

Someone has to grab that interview and put it out there right away. It was important, landmark, for the ages…please.

Tony Scott‘s The Taking of Pelham 123 (Sony, 6.12) with Denzel Washington as Walter Matthau, John Travolta as Robert Shaw and James Gandolfini as the mayor. Doesn’t seem radically revisionist. Half Scott, half Joseph Sargent.

“Few films have evoked the atmosphere of the Bayou State as strongly as Bertrand Tavernier‘s In the Electric Mist,” writes L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas, calling it “a movie that doesn’t seem to have been filmed so much as distilled, on a creaking porch beset by mosquitos and summer heat, with the rumble of a gathering storm in the distance.

“Adapted from the novel by James Lee Burke, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones as Burke’s popular detective character, Dave Robichaux, here investigating the murder of one Cherry LeBlanc, a ‘fatally beautiful’ 19-year-old prostitute whose mutilated corpse washes up on shore in the film’s opening scene. Not long after that, another body — this one belonging to a lynched black man dead and gone some 40 years — surfaces deep in the swamp, loosed by Hurricane Katrina’s churning tide.

“Since it was first announced, In the Electric Mist has sounded like an ideal project for Tavernier. But it’s become entangled in post-production disagreements between Tavernier and the film’s American producer, Michael Fitzgerald (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). And now two different versions of the movie emerged — an ‘international’ cut prepared by Tavernier, which screened at the Berlin Film Festival and will be released in most countries around the world, and an ‘American’ cut supervised by Fitzgerald that runs 15 minutes shorter and will go directly to DVD in the U.S. next month.

“In comparing the two edits, Variety critic Leslie Felperin deemed the American version ‘brisker but less coherent’ with ‘tacky summing up and [an] ooh!-spooky last shot mini-twist that makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie.”

“Having seen only Tavernier’s version, I can say that it’s unfortunate American audiences may never get a chance to experience this superior detective yarn on the big screen, in the form its director intended. Unfortunate, but by no means surprising. Indeed, where the default Hollywood position would have been to strip-mine Burke’s source material for its narrative chassis while junking all its atmospheric touches, tertiary supporting characters and curlicue digressions, Tavernier (working from a script credited to the husband-and-wife team of Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski) does exactly the opposite.

“Much like Burke himself on the page, he plays up the bass at the expense of the melody, showing markedly less interest in the identity of the killer(s) than in a long and winding history of Southern injustice that stretches from Jim Crow to George W. Bush. Long ago, Robichaux says in the lyrical voice-over that opens the film, people placed heavy stones on the graves of the dead so as to weigh down the souls of the departed. But in Burke and Tavernier’s world, every time a storm blows through, those stones become displaced, and restless spirits take to wandering the bayou.”

May I say something? In addition to the mauling of Tavernier’s European version, there’s also the ridiculous mauling of the original title of Burke’s book — In The Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. How could anyone chop off those last three words? That’s like cutting down the title of Hemingway’s Across The River and Into The Trees and changing it to Across The River. The loyal, the devout and the worshipful are surrounded by cattle.

CHUD’s Devin Faraci recently took part in a round-table interview with Joaquin Pheonix, and reports that he was anything but spaced or wackjobby. “While Joaquin had been strange in the past, he had never been as loquacious as he was that day — a complete contrast to his spaced-out Letterman appearance. He was talkative, funny, engaging.

“Most interesting was the fact that he never appeared to actually ramble. He’d give long answers [that] would travel a bit off topic, but would never go off course like the answers you might expect from someone who was really high. His answers were good ones, too, not just bullshit blathering, which made me wonder just what the heck we were seeing in action. This wasn’t simply an opportunity to punk a roundtable — Joaquin was delivering a really good interview. Possibly the best I’ve ever seen him give.

“At one point when asked why he had made the drastic change in his appearance he said that he needed his external change to reflect his internal change, then he looked at me” — Faraci has a beard too — “and said, ‘I don’t know what your excuse is,’ but in a very funny, very good natured way.”

“Because of its unusual pedigree, WALL*E now has the opportunity to make Oscar history and be the first animated feature to win big outside the best animated film and music categories,” writes The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond. “Sure, three of its six nods come for the usual areas (music score, song, animated film)), but it has a real shot in the other three categories in which it’s competing: sound editing, sound mixing and, particularly, best original screenplay. It has a decent chance to rack up at least four wins if the Oscar gods are on its side.”

Mickey Rourke is on Charlie Rose tonight — perfect timing. This plus last weekend’s BAFTA triumph could just do it. Maybe. Rourke heads unite! “Yes, Judah…this is the day.”

Referencing Ron Rosenbaum‘s searing critique of The Reader that was posted on Slate few days ago, L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein says that he’s “not so sure the film’s moral lessons are quite as black and white as Rosenbaum paints them.”

And that’s it. No full-on or half-assed debate follows. Rosenbaum “does burrow into the film’s greatest thematic weakness,” Goldstein allows, “[in] that it uses its 1950s-era story of the sexual intimacy between Winslet and a young German teenager to create audience empathy for a loyal tool in the Nazi campaign to exterminate the German Jews.

“The best part of the piece details one of those classic, carefully orchestrated Oscar taste-maker screenings, where Harvey Weinstein stops by to say hello and Reader filmmaker Stephen Daldry takes polite questions from the audience after showing the film.

“Like a skunk at a garden party, Rosenbaum brought along a friend who was so outraged by the film that he disrupted the decorous atmosphere, inspiring ‘shocked gasps’ when he tells Daldry that the nudity was a manipulative tool used to create intimacy with an unrepentant mass murderer.

“Rosenbaum doesn’t recount Daldry’s response, though he notes that he received an outraged phone call the next morning from the film’s chief publicist, upbraiding him for bringing a rude ‘interloper’ to the screening and reminding him how important it was, in these tough economic times, for films like The Reader to succeed. Incredulous, Rosenbaum responds: ‘You mean, you’re saying I could be the death of Hollywood?’ If only!”

If only?

I had a brief chat yesterday with the great Steve Coogan to talk about his upcoming gig as emcee of the 24th annual Spirit Awards, which will happen per custom under a massive white tent on the beach in Santa Monica on Saturday, 2.21 — one day before the Oscars.

Coogan has been in Los Angeles since 2.10 and is currently working away with some joke-writer friends, refining and fortifying “the act” as it were.

A gifted comedy actor and the current carrier of the Peter Sellers tradition, Coogan delivers a sort of broad quality — a bit giddy and freaky — in his film roles but comes off a lot dryer and more witty-urbane in conversation. Here’s an mp3 link to our little ping-pong match.

“Peter Sellers became ‘Peter Sellers’ because of Stanley Kubrick,” I said at one point. “I think Kubrick understood Sellers better than anyone else, and gave him his greatest roles. And I’m wondering, given the Sellers comparisons, who your Stanley Kubrick is? Or who, given your druthers, would you choose to fill that role?”

“I’m still waiting for my Stanley Kubrick, ” Coogan answered. “I guess Michael Winterbottom, who’s channelled some very inventive currents into our collaborations…he might be a partner of that sort.” But not quite, he meant. “If you can announce I’m looking for my Stanley Kubrick to realize my Peter Sellers potential, please do.”

I said I thought perhaps Armando Ianucci, who directed Coogan in a brief scene in In The Loop, might be the guy. “He may well be,” Coogan replied. “In The Loop has his exactitude written all over it. He’s great….he never says ‘that’ll do.’ He’s quite purist in that way. I’m more populist than he is, but when we work together a nice sort of blend happens. I’ll be sure and mention the Kubrick analogy when I next see him.”

Speaking of funny, nobody’s more hilarious than N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.a.a, “the Bagger”) when he gets a good grump on. From a posting earlier today:

“This is the Bagger’s fourth season at Kudo Camp and he has never seen such a lack of oxygen. The lack of a best-picture throwdown, combined with a class of nominees that don’t have huge traction at the box office, means that we are spending a fair amount of time talking to ourselves. While doing man on the street interviews in Times Square earlier this week, the Bagger discovered that many people thought they might have already taken place.

“Sasha Stone, a bit of den mother in the Ninny Kingdom, lavishes praise on all five films this year, but then finishes with this: ‘The five Best Pictures this year, admittedly, are nothing to write home about, meaning, none of them will really set the world on fire in ten year’s time.’

“Gee. Kind of interrupts the seance about excellence a bit.

“The Biggest Movie Event of the Year, so far, seems like a little bit of a non-event. C’mon people, careers are at stake, there is studio loot on the line, bloggers are getting tired of capping on each other for attention. It’s time to snap to and start paying attention or we just might have to…um, oh, never mind.”