MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is six feet tall? She’s shorter than me by only half an inch without shoes? TV and movies always conceal and never reveal body size. I remember meeting James Mason in ’83 or thereabouts and feeling startled by the fact that he was a fairly sizable guy, very nearly my height, which strongly contradicted my movie impression that he was maybe 5′ 8″ or 5′ 9″, at best. I have 100 stories like this.

James Mason

“I would be happy to watch James Marsh‘s documentary Man on Wire on a continuous loop, preferably shown on the wall beside my desk, volume off, while I try to write,” says author Ann Patchett in a N.Y. Times “Screens That Matter” piece compiled by Emily Gould.

“Aside from being deft on a high wire, Philippe Petit was smart enough to have made plenty of footage of his gorgeous and glorious youth, rolling around in tall grass in the French countryside with his friends, walking the wire with his girl on his back. But the film’s true moment of glory was also Petit’s: the 45 minutes he spent traversing the space in the air back and forth and back and forth between the two World Trade Center buildings. He bows, salutes, kneels and then, as if the glory of the world has finally overwhelmed him, he simply lies down in the clouds.

“His art was exhilaration, fearlessness, a wild grab at life. The wire he and his friends strung at night between the two towers formed the intersection of recklessness and precision. And those buildings, those silent supporting actors, you can’t help marveling at how young they are.

“In August 1974, when Petit took his morning stroll, they were still raw on their upper floors, not completely finished. I would wish for those buildings that they could someday be remembered for how they began — with the felonious act of a young man who was madly in love with them, their height, their audacity, their doubled beauty — instead of how they ended. Man on Wire gives those towers back to us, at least for a little while. It also reminds us of all that art is capable of when what is risked is everything.”

Five days ago Mitt Romney wrote a N.Y. Times Op-Ed that made great sense, saying in essence that the Big 3 Detroit car manufacturers have to do a major overhaul (including the removal of General Motors’ Richard Wagoner, Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli and Ford’s Alan Mulally) before the government can begin to think about helping out.

I was amazed to find myself in total agreement with Romney of all people, who had done nothing but anger and irritate me all through the primary campaign season. He basically said the auto industry needs to hire some Steve Jobs-type guys to streamline and revamp, and that means the Big 3 dickwads need to go.

And once it became known that Wagoner, Nardelli and Mulally had flown to Washington, D.C., in three separate corporate jets, I channelled Frank Pentangeli in that Lake Tahoe scene in The Godfather, Part II. “I want those Rosotto brothers dead,” he told Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone. “No,” snapped Pacino. “Morte,” Pantengeli said again.

In an 11.21 Daily Beast piece, “best-selling vampire expert” Leslie Klinger expresses disappointment with Twilight for not being fang-y, bloody and batty enough. But there’s a quote that stands out. Twilight author Stephenie Meyer, he notes, “imagines the curse of the vampire as the difficulty of restraining the monster within, overcoming the desire to consume human blood. It is easy to see this as her metaphor for premarital sex, a conservative agenda masked as a vampire tale.”

In this light (and I didn’t share this precise impression when I saw the film last Tuesday night), I think it’s fair to call Twilight the most effective covert-conservative-values movie to be released since Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which made me feel an allegiance with the right-to-lifers. Because it makes sexual abstinence seem like a fairly hot, pure-of-spirit state of being. And I say this as something of a lifelong libertine.

If you buy this interpretation (or even if you don’t), Twilight can be seen as selling the exact opposite abstinence mentality as the one portrayed (and made stupid fun of) in 40 Days and 40 Nights, the ’02 Josh Hartnett sex comedy.

Is Twilight a sexual right-wing movie in sheep’s clothing?

I love watching this scene on a Sunday morning. For some reason it works especially well on this day and at this hour (i.e., around 10 am). Fresh from the shower, a cup of strong coffee, the morning sun faintly filtering through the curtains, Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, that train along the Hudson and Ernest Lehman‘s dialogue.

“It’s so sad. I guess it’s always changing. What else can I say? I just wake up each day in a slightly different place. Grief is like a moving river, so that’s what I mean by ‘it’s always changing’.It’s a strange thing to say because I’m at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It’s just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone. In some ways it gets worse. That’s what I would say.” — Michelle Williams speaking about late partner Heath Ledger with Newsweek‘s Ramin Setoodeh.

Congrats to new SNL cast member Michaela Watkins — right on the money.

I see the Four Christmases posters, I know it’s coming soon, and the trailer tells me it has some fairly decent Vince Vaughn energy. But nobody I know has said zip about it, there isn’t a hint of any kind of cultural vibration going on and the trailer tells you it’s aimed at the easy-lay crowd. So in a way it doesn’t exist. I may or may not read the reviews when it opens three days from now, as if reviews could have anything to do with anything.

I can’t see Four Christmases until it opens because of my ridiculous Warner Bros. problem, which has now been in effect for fourteen months. But I’d probably be thinking twice about seeing it even if I’d been invited. Honestly. Reese Witherspoon in a drama? Fine. In a comedy? Not so much.

And why is Vaughn, a very hip and live-wire actor with aggressive pizazz all his own, starring in another shallow, super-glossy Warner Bros. holiday comedy (following last year’s Fred Claus)? Is he actively trying to dilute the respectable after-vibe of The Wedding Crashers and The Breakup? Nothing kills fan loyalty faster than appearing in a straight-paycheck studio package or two.

The fact is that over the last two weeks, which is when I arrived and pitched my tent in New York, it’s become clear that elite Los Angeles journos have been or will be seeing some of the hot end-of-the-year films — Revolutionary Road, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Gran Torino — before their counterparts in New York. It rankles in particular that the L.A. gang saw Button today (and would have seen it two days ago if that technical projection snafu hadn’t occured) and that some of them are having fluttering whipped-cream orgasms as they write about it, and me and my New Yorker pallies won’t see it until Monday. Not the end of the world, but it would be a tad nicer if both coasts could see each and every Oscar-baiter at more or less the same time, just to keep things even-steven.

“This is a film that works on every level,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote earlier today about Benjamin Button. “It is an authentic bit of writing, straight from the heart of Eric Roth, who admitted during the q & a that he lost his parents while writing the script. That kind of sentiment and heartbreak cannot be faked. That kind of inspiration is rare. Unfortunately for him it came at a great cost. Perhaps this is why the truth here, bare as it is, cuts as deeply.

“Combine Roth’s emotional output with David Fincher‘s exactitude and you have something nearly perfect. With so many limbs, emotions and ideas the film shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it does. Much credit is due to Brad Pitt, whose Benjamin Button is a soul-shattering creation, and Cate Blanchett, who bursts forth like her own hurricane. Taraji P. Hensen‘s Queenie is the heart of the film.”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley attended Saturday afternoon’s industry screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and his three main responses are (a) “The verdict is a big thumbs-up“; (b) “I can’t imagine less than 10 nominations — Best Picture, Director, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Original Score, Cinematography, Film Editing, Makeup and Visual Effects are virtually assured”; and (c) “Cate Blanchett is suddenly a threat to win the lead actress Oscar walking away…it might be her best work to date.”

And yet he also says that “one of the odd reactions I took away from the film, however, was that the work felt strangely cold. I wasn’t sure whether I meant that in a good way or a bad way, and surely, people were crying their eyes out over this thing, so I might be in a minority. Perhaps it’s my youthful cynicism, who knows, but I thought Fincher brought an arm’s-length approach to the emotions in the film.”

Screenwriter Eric Roth’s reply to this” “[David] Fincher is the kind of director that brings you right up to the point of sentiment and then brings it back. There’s something to be said for that, I think.”

Brad Pitt, says Tapley, “does not blow the role of Benjamin Button out of the water and perhaps he underplays it a bit too much. But it is great to see him happy to get out from underneath his star persona, and with the right level of support, his [Best Actor] nomination could make it 14 in total.” Button, he says, is “the year’s tech giant.”

Here‘s an mp3 of today’s q & a with Fincher, Roth and the tech crew, moderated by The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond.

The Criterion people think they’re being cute by dropping unsubtle hints about their upcoming Friends of Eddie Coyle DVD, which was a done deal months ago. The drawing obviously alludes to the masks worn by Alex Rocco‘s gang in the opening North Shore robbery. The CC guys felt obliged to add the word “Beantown” to the caption. Quit screwing around and release the DVD already.