“My sense is that Milk wound up as the I-can-live-with-that compromise choice for [New York Film Critics Circle] voters blocking Slumdog Millionaire and voters blocking Rachel Getting Married.” — Twitter remark attributed to critic Mike D’Angelo.

Scott Ruffalo, the late brother of movie star Mark Ruffalo, shot himself Russian Roulette-style? That’s what this HuffPost story says. What a thing to deal with. So sad.

The friends of Clint Eastwood‘s Gran Torino now include the L.A. Weekly/Village Voice‘s Scott Foundas, critic David Ehrenstein (“I see it as Clint’s Umberto D…it’s a lovely, deeply felt movie”), the N.Y. Observer ‘s Andrew Sarris , EW‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny, etc. All big guns, highly esteemed, influential.

Of course, any film critic worth his or her salt isn’t supposed to care about expressing a majority or a minority opinion, but critics are just as human as the next guy.

If we lived in a Banana Republic those early dissers (Poland, et. al.) would probably be thinking about packing up their laptops and heading out to the desert for a few days until things cool down, just to be on the safe side. But of course, we live in a civil society so they have nothing to worry about. They can say anything they want about Gran Torino and nobody will think less of them.

Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner has thrown together a list of 2008’s Top Ten Political Films. My favorites among them, and in this order: Che, Nothing But The Turth, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, Recount, Frost/Nixon.

The New York Film Critics Circle has just handed Gus Van Sant‘s Milk its Best Picture award. This obviously firms things up big-time for the Focus Features release, and makes it look right now like the only Best Picture contender with the energy, muscle and the staying-power to overtake Slumdog Millionaire. Here‘s a rundown of the other NYFCC awards.

“If The Dark Knight, that piece of overblown crap, gets nominated for Best Picture it’ll go down in Oscar history alongside Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth [which won the 1952 Best Picture Oscar]. Heath Ledger was great and ditto the effects, but the script was asinine drivel — populist pablum and ‘escapist entertainment’ at its best and worst. And they could have saved Somalia for that budget.” — a female producer friend writing this morning from Los Angeles.

“One of the great weapons any interviewer has is his enigmaticness,” Frank Langella said during our chat last Thursday. I wasn’t being very enigmatic myself, I’m afraid, as I kept trying to get Langella to draw comparisons between Richard Nixon, whom he plays so expertly and cagily (and with such empathy) in Ron Howard‘s Frost/Nixon, and George Bush. But Langella wouldn’t bite.

Frost/ Nixon‘s Frank Langella

Even about whether Bush has the character to someday say “I let the country down” regarding the lies that he and his neocon cronies used to put us into the Iraq War. Nor could I persuade Langella to comment on Chris Wallace‘s reported statement that Bush is nowhere near as bad as Nixon, who, Wallace feels, was motivated solely by selfish motives, whereas Bush was trying to protect his country from terror.

So I just asked this and that and we just danced around, Frank and I. He’s quite the kindly, elegant and settled-down fellow. Very soft-spoken, very polite. Tends to say less rather than more. Here‘s the mp3.

Langella’s stage-bound Nixon won a Tony award, and he will most likely land a Best Actor nomination for his current screen portrayal, althoughit must be said that Sean Penn ‘s performance in Milk, to go by the critics groups so far, seems to be enjoying the favoring winds.

Langella’s final performance as Sir Thomas More in the Broadway revival of Robert Bolt‘s A Man For All Seasons was last Sunday. When we spoke he was looking at four or five more performances. How did that feel? “Do you remember what you were like when you were in school and watching the clock reach a quarter to three?,” he said.

New York/Vulture‘s Lane Brown has posted a slapdash, mostly tongue-in-cheek riff about rationales to use against the Slumdog Millionaire juggernaut, to wit: (a) It’s too dark, (b) It’s not starry enough, (c) No big performances, (d) Everybody’s sick of underdogs, (e) Not WWII-y enough, (f) Ending too uplifting, (g) It pals around with terrorists, and (h) Too oddly constructed.

12:40 pm Update: The New York Film Critics Circle has just handed its Best Actor prize to Milk‘s Sean Penn, its Best Foreign Film award to Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days , and its Best Documentary award to James Marsh‘s Man on Wire.

11:45 am Update: The New York Film Critics Circle has just handed its Best Supporting Actress award to Vicky Cristina Barcelona‘s Penelope Cruz, who took the same honor yesterday from the L.A. Film Critics Association. And Frozen River director Courtney Hunt won for Best First Film.

11:25 am Update: Oh, my God — Happy Go Lucky‘s Mike Leigh has just been named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle. What is this? Are the New York crickets going to give HGL their Best Picture prize also? It’s a fine, well-made film as far as it goes, but c’mon…it’s not some drop-dead masterwork teeming with visual splendor. It’s just a lively, well-honed thing about a woman who drives people crazy with her happy vibes.

Previously: The New York Film Critics Circle began voting around 9:45 am, and they’e given Sally Hawkins their Best Actress award for her performance in Mike Leigh‘s Happy Go Lucky, and Milk‘s Josh Brolin has won for Best Supporting Actor. And WALL*E, of course, for Best Animated Film.

Hawkins won the same award yesterday from the L.A. Film Critics Association, and Brolin was nominated in the Best Supporting Male category yesterday morning by the BFCA.

I’m okay with Hawkins’ win, but at the same time not quite overjoyed. As I’ve said several times, I admire Hawkins talent and pizazz but loathed her HGL character. On top of which Kate Winslet‘s Revolutionary Road performance has gotten blanked, blanked and blanked again. Why is this happening? And what about poor Kristin Scott Thomas? Something’s really and truly not right here. Meryl Streep, Melissa Leo, Anne Hathaway and Kate Beckinsale have also been elbowed aside.

It’s interesting that the BFCA didn’t even nominate Hawkins. No accounting for taste in either camp.

10:35 am Update: Rachel Getting Married screenwriter Jenny Lumet has taken the Best Screenplay award, and Slumdog Mllionaire‘s dp Anthony Dod Mantle has won for Best Cinematography.

Incidentally, in 1956 the New York Film Critics Circle gave its Best Picture prize to….wait for it….Around the World in Eighty Days. It was bad enough that the Academy gave this nothing film its Best Picture Oscar, but the NYFCC? A major historical embrassment.

And in 1938 the NYFCC gave its Best Picture award to King Vidor‘s The Citadel. Until this moment I’d never even heard of this film, much less seen it on DVD. Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, Rex Harrison, etc..

“Like the 1961 Richard Yates novel it is faithfully adapted from, Revolutionary Road might make you cry,” writes the N.Y. Observer‘s Sara Vilkomerson. “It could very well make you mad. But perhaps most unsettling of all — particularly in this, our new Age of Anxiety, with layoffs and money troubles and the ever-increasing pressure, especially in New York City, to have everything, in spite of it all — it might force you to examine your own life.

Sam Mendes‘ film “is, in part, a portrait of a marriage,” she explains. “But it is also a dissection of personal failure, of what happens when we disappoint ourselves, when we end up on the road we never meant to travel. As you might imagine, the view from that road, when one really stops to look, is very bleak indeed.

“Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple who seems to have it all: genetically blessed looks, charm, adorable children, a sweet, green-lawned house within commuting distance from the city. They’re the shining stars of their block, the enchanting and interesting couple everyone wants to have a drink (or four) with.

“Unlike the sad sacks in his office, Frank is cut out for bigger and better things, and April is the woman meant to be married to someone like Frank — she’s the unintentional housewife who is different, more intelligent and introspective than the other women planting greenery along their identical drives. Or so the Wheelers liked to think. Thanks to events both in and out of their control, they must confront the people they have actually become out in suburbia, and the cold reality that they will never lead the lives they intended to. And then they begin to disintegrate. Spectacularly.

“‘I think it’s perfectly possible for human beings to spend a large part of their life convincing themselves that they’re happy,” Winslet said recently, speculating on why it is that Revolutionary Road will resonate with people so deeply. She was perched on a sofa in the Waldorf Astoria, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and ashing elegantly into a bottle of water.

“‘Ultimately, when reality kicks in and you dare to allow yourself to think that you might actually be living a life that you haven’t planned, or living a life that you don’t want to be living and feel trapped in, then that’s when your problems begin. I think for human beings to feel trapped and isolated and lonely in a life that they thought they were happy in…well, it’s just a terrible, terrible place to be.

“I think everyone has been in that place — even if they tell you they haven’t, I think they have. I think there are more people who have been in that place than people who have been blissfully happy forever.”

According to Patrick Goldstein‘s inside-the-LAFCA-awards-debate reporting, Slumdog Millionaire “sparked the most divisions of any film. Its partisans praised its filmmaking energy and social consciousness . But its scrum of detractors said they wouldn’t vote for it under any circumstances, with some critics claiming it was too derivative, coming off like an amped-up Satyajit Ray film.

“The only slam dunks in the voting were Penelope Cruz, who won best supporting actress for Vicki Cristina Barcelona and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. The voting for best picture was extremely close, with the joke being that whether the vote went for WALL*E or The Dark Knight , that it was still a thumbs-up for an animated film, since Dark Knight is loaded with computer animation effects.”

Between LAFCA’s snub of Revolutionary Road Best Actress contender Kate Winslet (they went for Sally Hawkins first and Melissa Leo second) and Winslet being blown off yesterday morning by the Broadcast Film Critics’ Association, there appears to be a block of serious (and perplexing) resistance to Sam Mendes‘ angst-ridden period drama. What is wrong with everyone? Why can’t they see how sublimely made and full of feeling this film is?

On 12.3 Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny asked, “Does it give too much away to say that Gran Torino, which Clint Eastwood stars in and directed, represents, for this critic at least, the final film in a trilogy that began with Unforgiven and continued with A Perfect World? No? Good. Let me then add that I found the film a very fine conclusion indeed to the trilogy I just made up.

“As you may have heard, Eastwood here plays a guy named Walt Kowalski, a Korean war vet and retired Ford assembly line worker living in an unspecified Michigan quasi-suburb. He’s tough as nails, still (or so he’d like everyone to believe), cranky as fuck, recently widowed and thoroughly alienated from his kids and grandkids. In other news, his neighborhood seems to be getting overrun by Hmong immigrants.

“Did I mention Walt’s a bigot, too? Indeed he is, and he doesn’t care much for his new ‘gook’ neighbors. When Thao, the young, introverted son of the Hmong family next door reluctantly participate in gang initiation by trying to jack Kowalski’s mint condition ’72 Gran Torino, Kowalski gets out his old army rifle and goes — well, there’s no other way of putting it — all Dirty Harry on the kid, albeit without, you know, killing him.

“He hones that act on varied other miscreants in the area, and along the way winds up forging a tentative friendship with Sue, Thao’s older sister. Which leads to a more intense involvement with her family, with Sue acting as tour guide to Hmong traditions and beliefs.

“But the aforementioned gang is insistent. As is the young priest who promised Walt’s late wife he’s look out for the widower, specifically with regard to getting him to go to confession. These varied forces converge to force Walt, who’s still haunted by memories of war, to ponder going to war again.

“I may have given away too much already. So I’ll stop with the plot specifics and say that I was mightily impressed by Gran Torino, and that I also understand the rather contradictory opinions that are already flooding the intertubes. After the screening, a critic friend who also dug the picture mentioned that it reminded him a bit of a Sam Fuller film. Yes. Eastwood is a more nuanced filmmaker than the late, great, Sam, but Gran Torino does have an old-fashioned bluntness and sincerity that runs counter to quite a few contemporary modes.

“In the early portion of the film, Eastwood’s performance skirts caricature, and not narrowly, either–he literally growls to show displeasure. But from there, Eastwood the performer, Eastwood the director, and screenwriter Nick Schenk build. The overblown archetype is revealed as a singularly tortured individual.

“But Eastwood’s plain approach — and it should be noted here that, trailer to the contrary, this is not an action film; it’s largely made up of dialogue scenes, and what violence occurs is ugly and brutal and hardly…oops, I’m saying too much again — is so thoroughly out of fashion that it practically invites cynicism from certain parties.”