“A question has been nagging me for a while and recently intensified upon seeing Frost/Nixon,” writes a reader named Mat (one “t” — not a typo). “Why are Hollywood biographies so vapid? Every one i see is ‘just line ’em up and knock ’em down,’ straight facts, predictable arc. it leaves each film at the mercy of how interesting the given subject is, but rarely captures the essence of said subject.

“I’m thinking specifically of Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan doc of a few years ago (i.e., No Direction Home), which brought such a vivid feel to the man’s life and experiences instead of just telling the reader what happened in his life. An interesting life is one thing, but what makes the subject unique is what I’m after, and nothing ever seems to capture that. Or am i simply asking for too much?

“Frost/Nixon is a good movie because it’s an interesting story, but i felt no closeness to it. This happens over and over again and now, as I prepare to see Milk — a movie i want to like — I fear another by-the-numbers only-as-good-as-the-subject biopic coming at me. Is it strange to ask for more than just a vivid recreation, or are we shortchanging these stories by accepting that there is nothing more? Can you suggest any films for me which transcend the genre to get more of what i’m thinking of?”

Wells to Mat: Frost/Nixon isn’t a biopic — it’s a compressed situational drama about a specific chapter in the life of Richard Nixon. Milk is absorbing as ar as it goes, but if you want to really bask in the light of what made Harvey Milk exceptional, you need to see Rob Epstein‘s The Times of Harvey Milk. My favorite biopics with exceptional and particular flavorings: Viva Zapata, Patton, Raging Bull, Sergeant York, Lawrence of Arabia, Lust for Life. These are the ones that come to mind, at least.

For those HE readers who thought it perverse or presumptuous that I addressed Phillip Seymour Hoffman as “Philly” at a Doubt party a week and a half ago, listen to Jon Stewart as he welcomes Hoffman on-stage in this clip from the show.

I’m sick of running Daily Show embed codes because they go on forever (lines and lines and lines of coding) and sometimes they’re not properly written (i.e.. no closing div tags) and because I don’t care for the smallish size of these Daily Show clips. Why can’t the tech guys create a coding that adjusts to the size of a given column area, like any YouTube clip? You know what? Screw these guys. That’s it for Daily Show clips on this site until further notice.

Click here before reading the following: Mira Nair’s Amelia (Fox Searchlight, 10.23.09) was research-screened last Wednesday in Pasadena, according to what Nair told L.A. Times/Envelope columnist Scott Feinberg the day before. If anyone saw it (or knows someone who did) and has heard anything at least vaguely encouraging, I’d be curious to hear some particulars. If the word isn’t so hot then forget it, for obvious reasons.

Hilary Swank as famed aviator Amelia Earhart; the real McCoy sometime in the early ’30s.

Feinberg writes that “it has long amazed me that there has yet to be a major motion picture about Earhart.” Well, in its time Flight for Freedom, a 1943 RK0 Earheart biopic with Rosalind Russell in the lead and Fred MacMurray as a fictional aviator boyfriend, was considered to be at least moderately major.

Apart from being an early feminist figure admired for her aeronautical dash, Earhart’s legend is largely anchored in the mysterious circumstances surrounding her disappearance and death during an attempt to make a round-the-world flight in 1937. The plane carrying Earhart and co-pilot Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island.

“Their fates have caused boundless speculation since then,” according to an IMDB summary. “Most likely they ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific. In 2000 a shoe was found on an island near Howland, but there was no real evidence it belonged to Amelia or Fred. Attempts to do a thorough undersea exploration for wreckage has not worked out.

“Aside from the obvious solution is the theory that Amelia (a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt) was on a spy mission against the Japanese, who shot down her plane. A rumor spread in the 1960s that she and Noonan were captured, she was starved or shot and Noonan was beheaded. But attempts to find human remains in the spot they were buried at proved a failure.

“Still the possibility of Amelia dying in the service of the country was always an appealing solution to the mystery. Flight for Freedom was made during the war against the same Japanese in the Pacific. Rosalind Russell has the role based on Amelia, and Fred MacMurray is her ‘Noonan’, except he is not in the plane when she dies. He is around at the end to fight in the Pacific to try to avenge her death.

“It’s not a perfect fit. Howland becomes ‘Gull’ Island in the film. There is no marriage to George Putnam (i.e., Richard Gere‘s character in the Swank film), the publisher who helped Amelia’s literary career. But the film was so obviously built on the career of Earhart and her demise that there was no trouble for an audience to recognize her.

“And even if there is no truth in this solution to her fate, the amount of dislike for the Japanese in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the ‘death march’ at Bataan, and other similar actions, made the solution not only plausible but one that the American movie going public could actually approve of.”

Where can this guy possibly go in life, given the perverse tomb that he lives in, like a living mummy inside an ancient Egyptian pyramid, and his apparent inability to leave it, step out and renew, re-engage, reinvent himself. He’s Miss Havisham from Great Expectations — bloated, diseased and malignant beyond the darkest imaginings of Edgar Allen Poe, much less Charles Dickens.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Che is off to a strong start at Manhattan’s Ziegfeld and L.A.’s Westside Pavillion, I’m told. In LA the entire weekend was sold out before the first show started, and the big Ziegfeld show (i.e., both films plus intermission) sold out an an hour in advance. People cheered during the Ziegfeld intermission. When Soderbergh dropped by for a q & a, he got a standing ovation. He spoke for about 40 minutes, and almost everyone stayed.

What Doesn’t Kill You director-writer Brian Goodman invited me to a post-screening soiree last night at Almond, a noisy, reasonably priced restaurant on West 22nd near Broadway. By the time everyone arrived around 9:45 or so the news had broken about Bob Yari , the producer-distributor of Goodman’s film, having gone into Chapter 11.

This is bad news for WDKY, which is only just starting to be seen and talked about, and for Rod Lurie‘s Nothing But The Truth , a Yari movie that’s also been caught with its pants down. It would be one thing if they both blew chunks, but they’re well-written, high-calibre tweeners with award-quality performances. Tough deal.

I broke the news to Goodman when he came in, showed him the story on my iPhone. It kind of took the energy down until WDKY star Ethan Hawke showed up and then it was a “hey!” environment again. Hawke and Goodman and three or four others were playing pool on a fair-sized table with a brown-felt top. Goodman, it should be noted, is a very accomplished player. Not Eddie Felson level, but he made 70% or 80% of his shots.

The American public will hand over roughly $31,524,000 to the makers of The Day The Earth Stood Still this weekend. The second place Four Christmases will make $12,234,000 for a cume of $86,900,000.

The third-place Twilight will take in $7,334,000 — $149,129,000 as of Sunday night.

And the fourth-place Bolt will take in $6,946,000

Nothing Like the Holidays, the Hispanic holiday comedy, bombed with a projected total of $4,035,000 and $2400 a theatre. Baz Luhrman‘s Australia will earn $3,865,000 — now to about $37 million domestic. Madagascar will follow with $2,879,000.

The only limited opener that looks like it has legs is Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino, which will take in $268,000 at six situations and about $44,000 per theatre. The best limited starter is Doubt — opened in 15 runs, 32,000 per screen, $492,000 by Sunday night. That’s actually fairly decent.

Gus Van Sant‘s Milk will do just fair after expanding to 330 runs — it’s projected to earn $2,539,000 and $7700 a print. Issue-driven political drama, gay-themed story, etc. I lost the figure for Quantum of Solace but I know it’s expected to come in slightly under the Milk figure.

Slumdog Millionaire expanded to 169 runs, having dded 91 theatres — it’s projected to take in $2,067,000 and $12,000 a print. Okay, not sensational. Frost/Nixon went from 3 runs to 30 runs, $15,000 a print, $605,000 for the weekend — okay, not wonderful. Doubt opened in 15 runs, 32,000 per screen, $492,000 by Sunday night.

The animated Delgo is projected to earn $400,000 — 2300 theatres,.$185 per theatre.

The Reader is playing in 8 situations and is projected to earn $165,000 or about $28,000 a print.

Asked what he thinks the Obama administration “will do about Cuba,” Che director Steven Soderbergh tells Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner the following:

“What they ought to do is really obvious. Whether they’ll do it is one of these questions in which you have a lot of people with certain beliefs controlling the dialogue, and therefore the problem is not getting solved.

“How many years are you supposed to give a bad idea? Would you stay married for 45 years to someone you hated? It’s obvious what we’re doing isn’t working. The answer is [to] lift the embargo and flood that place with tourists, put the onus on them and call their bluff. The people of the U.S. are the best advertisement for its ideals — not its government.”

The absence of a comma between the words “bad” and “can” drove me up the wall the minute I had a look at the Good poster last night. I’m convinced that movie advertising people enjoy running copy that ignores basic punctuation because they know it irritates people like me. I think it gives them a little perverse kick. Seriously.

What Doesn’t Kill You director-writer-actor Brian Goodman on Prince and Lafayette — Friday, 12.12, 4:35 pm. After shooting pics we went upstairs to a friend’s office and did a half-hour interview. An excellent fellow all around — candid, a humanist, unaffected, no bull. Relatively few guys with hard-knocks experience within the criminal world have gone on to a life of writing and entertainment, but Goodman’s a member in good standing.

The career of Van Johnson, whose death was reported earlier today, peaked in the ’40s and ’50s. I never much liked his country-hick accent (he came from Rhode Island) and particularly the way he repeatedly groaned “ohhh, no!” in William Wellman ‘s Battleground (’49). But I’ve been watching that film all my life so Johnson obviously wasn’t that alienating. I’ll always remember his grim- faced Lieutenant Stephen Maryk in The Caine Mutiny (’54), and the pilot he played in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (’44). He lived for 92 years, which is a pretty good long run. He was allegedly closeted.