In a chat with In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Last Chance Harvey star Dustin Hoffman confesses to having “strong feelings” about film criticism. “There’s no job description,” he says. “You see someone’s suddenly a new critic, and you say, ‘Oh, I know that name.’ Yeah, he was a food critic. So the newspaper moved him up from food critic to film critic, which is fine, because everybody is a critic.

“But there are other people who know film, who really understand it, maybe even on the level [that] Scorsese does.” That’s me! I’m that guy! I may not have quite the same open-door, Michael Powell-worshipping passion that Scorsese has, but I’m from the same fraternity, the same church, the same faith. If anything I probably care about movies too much, to the point of neurosis and basic denial of life habits.

“I name Scorsese because he’s probably seen as much or more film than anyone I’m aware of, and is sensitive to film deterioration,” Hofman goes on. “And the fact that these critics see so many films, I don’t know…if it’s a job it’s already questionable. And I do think that films are meant to seen with audiences, and they don’t do that. There has to be some self-consciousness, I think.”

At the very least, Tapley writes, Hoffman feels that “the critical fraternity should be more steeped in the process than they are.”

What…the making of movies? Hofman knows that can’t happen without integrity issues coming up. And yet most of the people I know in the writing-about-movies racket are as steeped in the process of knowing movies and as much of the attendant political hoo-hah as they could possibly absorb without being p.a.’s or actors or producers.

Imagine a world in which the assurance of fast wifi on a train trip would be so locked down that you wouldn’t have a moment’s doubt. I’m experiencing considerable doubt right now, of course, as I prepare to catch an Amtrak train from Albany to Penn Station. I found out during a train ride from Grand Central to Norwalk earlier this week that you can have three, four or five bars on your AT&T Air Card but you still can’t connect to the internet if you’re moving.

Albany-Rensselaer train station — Friday, 12.26, 12:35 pm — waiting on 1:05 pm train to Penn Station.

Oh, and some of the yokels up here pronounce Albany like Albany, as in “you can call me Al.” It’s Albany as in “all of me,” of course.

Okay, so Marley and Me/Old Yeller is the big 12.25 to 12.28 champ — bigger than anyone had projected, myself included. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is second, Adam Sandler‘s Bedtime Stories is third and Valkyrie is fourth. Marley‘s success — it will end up with $100 million and then some — is, of course, a bit of mixed-bag thing — bad for our collective movegoing souls, understandable from an economically-afflicted-viewers POV, good for sales of the original book, bad because of the “me too, Marley!” movies it’ll inspire.

This response to Rick Warren‘s 12.23 “this is who I am and what I believe” video is interesting for the points that are made, for the intriguing Latin accent of the speaker, and the fact that he speaks very quietly, so as to not wake someone else up, I’m guessing.

I thought I was all safe and locked in at Park City’s Star Hotel, having stayed there during the ’07 and ’08 Sundance Film Festivals and having left a cowboy hat there as a token of my intention to return the following year. A cowboy hat left behind means you’re a true-blue guy! But I failed to place a proper, formal confirmation call to proprietor Carol Rixey, and now she’s given away my room. So now I have to scramble with the festival starting in 20 days. If anyone knows of a share situation inside Park City proper (just a room, a bed, a chair and good wifi), please get in touch ASAP.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

I was delighted with the sharp, robust, extra-clean image quality of the Fox Home Video French Connection DVD that came out in February ’05. William Friedkin‘s 1971 crime classic probably looked and sounded better than it ever had in Nixon-era theatres.

But it’s not supposed to look too good. Too much attractiveness would take away from the raw-grit vibe that Owen Roizman‘s photography tried very hard to capture as he shot in various Manhattan, Brooklyn and other-borough locales. So I’m wondering what the point is going to be of the French Connection Blu-ray disc that’ll be out on 2.24.09.

Not that I won’t buy it — I probably will, sucker than I am — but I could think of many other Fox Home Video titles that I’d rather see on Blu-ray first.

The Financial Times once defined Pinteresque dialogue as ”full of dark hints and pregnant suggestions, with the audience left uncertain as to what to conclude.” That’s not bad, but I’ve always defined it with seven words: (a) spare, (b) precise, (c) cutting and (d) sometimes a bit cruel. That leaves out opaque, terse, witty, chilly and all the other applicable terms, but however you slice it the man who created this form of expression — playwright Harold Pinter — died yesterday in London at age 78.

I’ve seen The Birthday Party and The Homecoming on-stage once each, and some of the films Pinter wrote screenplays for — The Servant (’63), The Go-Between (’70), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (’81), The Trial (’93) and Sleuth (’07). But being a bit of a Pinter plebe, my favorite is Betrayal, which has been called his most accessible work.

I’m queer for Betrayal because of its reverse chronology, the fascinating game it plays (i.e., what does he/she know, and when does he/she know it?), for the constant expert lying that goes on between the three main characters, and because it happens in a carefully mannered, flush and somewhat shallow middle-class milieu (which provides a form of comfort to me because I’ve lived in this world and feel I know what it is), and because it fulfills my definition of Pinter’s signature style — crisp, knowing and acrid in a less-is-more vein.

“I’ve always liked Jerry,” the cuckolded Robert says to his unfaithful wife about her longtime lover who’s also been his longtime friend. “To be honest, I’ve always liked him rather more than I’ve liked you. I should have had an affair with him myself.”

I saw Betrayal on the New York stage twice (with Roy Scheider, Raul Julia and Blythe Danner in ’80 or thereabouts, and again in a 2000 revival with Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery ), as well as that superb 1983 film adaptation with Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge, directed by David Jones .

Originally released by 20th Century Fox, Jones’ Betrayal came out on VHS in ’84 but that was 24 years ago, for heaven’s sake. I’ve written this seventeen or eighteen times over the last ten years, but will be rights-holder please, please cut a deal with someone to put it out on DVD or Blu-ray? It’s been out of circulation for so long it looks like up to me.

Can anyone imagine any half-savvy online journalist or news site running a December 2008 story titled “VHS Era Is Winding Down”? I can’t. At the same time I shrugged when I read Geoff Bouncher‘s story with this title in the 12.22 L.A. Times because this is the kind of “duhh” story that the LAT sometimes likes to run. It’s about a low-rent, bottom of the barrel VHS distributor named Ryan J. Kugler who’s finally decided to pack it in as far as this format is concerned. Whatever. It’s the Be Kind Rewind of video-format trend stories.