“It’s really important to tell people to go out and see W. so they can talk about it and have an opinion about it and this freedom of speech, of course, that allows us to go and talk about a film about a current sitting president.” — Ben Lyons speaking on Sneak Previews, according to Erik Childress‘s efilmcritc.com. The quote results in Childress calling Lyons “the Sarah Palin of film criticism.”

A Daily Beast article by Paul Alexander claims that while Barack Obama is sending out signals that things are going well and that success looms, the behind the scenes mentality is fraught with concern about voter suppression as well as the Bradley Effect.

“The Obama leadership believes there is a systematic campaign,” a source tells Alexander, “by the White House and the Justice Department to suppress voter turnout across the country.” Hence, Obama-Biden campaign chiefs are “amassing lawyers and gearing up to counter dirty tactics on election day.

Team Obama has “one of the largest legal teams ever assembled by a presidential campaign,” Alexander writes. “The main goal of the legal team, almost all of them volunteers, is to guarantee ballot security.

“‘The Obama campaign has learned the lessons of 2000 and 2004,’ a source claims. ‘On Election Day, lawyers will be everywhere — all the way down to the county level.’

“In Texas and other states, Obama officials are [also] preparing for the possibility that polls may be wildly off because of the so-called Bradley effect.

“‘The Obama officials are very cautious,’ says a source. ‘They want comfortable margins in place just in case. They are looking at three to six percentage points as a possible Bradley effect. Before they consider a state comfortable, they want it outside the polling margins. They think the Bradley effect could be as large as six — maybe even seven — percentage points, but they don’t really know.'”

Richard Dreyfuss told the ladies on The View that he played Dick Cheney in W. for “money.” Well, partly. The four things actors kick around before doing a film are (a) how many of the scenes are mainly about my character?, (b) how many lines and possible close-ups do I have?, (c) how much will I get paid? and (d) how good is the overall script and/or the director?

The question isn’t why Dreyfuss said that W. is “six-eighths of a great film.” The question is, why didn’t he say “three-quarters”?

Drefyuss also said that Oliver Stone is a little bit like Sean Hannity, explaining that “you can be a fascist, even when you’re on the left.” Show me a director who doesn’t believe that he/she is boss and that all opinions must finally be subjugated to his/her creative judgment, and I will show you a namby-pamby. John Ford once said that all strong directors are, to some extent, bastards.

If I had a Blu-ray player and a 50″ LCD or plasma flat-screen, I would be very, very cranked about the 1.27.09 Blu-ray release of the 162-minute director’s cut of David Fincher‘s Zodiac. I’ve never been so floored as I was by seeing a tip-top digital projection of this film at the big Paramount theatre on the lot. It’s basically a 1970s Gordon Willis film made for 21st Century gear-heads.

A group of New York press saw Milk last night,” a guy I know writes. “You could hear people tearing up in the end so I suppose Oscar season has officially begun. [It has] some great Gus Van Sant creative camerawork from the pre-Good Will Hunting days. An excellent cast. Josh Brolin and James Franco are quite good, the latter especially since he doesn’t have a lot to say or do but leaves his mark regardless. And yet no one really outshines Sean Penn‘s performance as Harvey Milk.”

Film Journal editor Kevin Lally has posted a report about last night’s appearance by Liv Ullmann at Manhattan’s Paley Center for Media. The legendary Norweigan actress, now 69, was there to bring attention to a rare screening of Richard Kaplan‘s 1977 documentary A Look at Liv. The doc (which I’ve never seen) includes “highlights from her career, interviews with Ullmann’s longtime director, friend and ally Ingmar Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, scenes of Ullman at premieres, book signings and relaxing with her young daughter, and candid conversations,” Lally describes.

“Kaplan, director of the Oscar-winning documentary The Eleanor Roosevelt Story, introduced the film, and then joined Ullmann, still radiant at the age of 69, on stage after the screening. Ullmann immediately disarmed the audience by telling them how embarrassing it was to watch all this footage of herself from 30 years ago, admitting that the woman on screen seemed like a different person.” 30 years ago? How about 48 years ago, which is when she co-starred in her first major film, Ung Flukt (a.k.a., The Wayward Girl)?

“In the film, Bergman — the father of her daughter Lin, now an acclaimed novelist — talks about how their romantic relationship evolved into something even more valuable to him, an enduring friendship. Ullmann, in turn, agreed that as one ages, friends are essential — and paid emotional tribute to a longtime close friend sitting in the front row, her Persona co-star Bibi Andersson.”

I love snow scenes, as a general rule. Anything showing snow-covered grounds, snow storms, blizzards, gently falling snow…any variation as long as it doesn’t involve howling winds. Especially period snow, like Coppola uses in The Godfather, Part II. Pine trees covered with the stuff. Galoshes, show shovels, chains on tires, ear muffs, scarves, knitted snow hats with little white reindeers. Eisenhower-era Fords, Studebakers, Chevys, Cadillacs, Edsels and Ramblers parked on the roads and just blanketed with it.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil also reported this morning that Doubt costars Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman won’t be attending the film’s first public showing at the AFI Fest’s opener on Thursday night here in L.A. Director-writer John Patrick Shanley and costar Amy Adams will, however.

Today will end early due to the first media-elite screening of Gus Van Sant‘s Milk (concurrent with tonight’s benefit premiere in San Francisco at the Castro) at 3:30 this afternoon in Beverly Hills, followed by a 7 pm showing of Ron Howard‘s Frost/Nixon in West L.A. It’s cool to write about the latter but the Focus guys aren’t looking for Milk reactions just yet. There’s plenty of time.

The basic idea behind the well-attended, star-studded Hollywood Film Festival Awards, which have been an annual event now for 12 years and which took place last night at the Beverly Hilton, is to put names out there — i.e., to get people thinking about this or that contender as a major contender or even a possible front-runner when the real awards action starts happening later this year — the critics, Golden Globes, Academy noms, etc.

Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood at last night’s 12th Annual Hollywood Film Festival Awards ceremony at the Beverly Hilton — Monday, 10.27.08, 9:10 pm. Eastwood was given the HFF Director of the Year award.

More than a few of the films honored last night haven’t been seen, as their makers pointed out again and again, which obviously underlined the spitball element. HFF founders Carlos de Abreu and Janice Pennington were in effect offering guesses and hunches about which films and filmmakers may be in play, and the filmmakers, by showing up and taking bows, were saying, “We appreciate the hunch, and…whatever, who knows, maybe it’ll lead to something else.”

And so Clint Eastwood was named HFF Director of the Year, which lends a certain heft to the fortunes of the forthcoming Gran Torino (and to the just-opened Changeling). And Dustin Hoffman, whose performance in Overture’s Last Chance Harvey is the most affecting and appealing thing he’s done since he played Bob Evans in Wag The Dog 11 years ago, as well as his first stand-alone lead role since Mad City.

And Kristin Scott Thomas graciously accepted the HFF’s stamp of approval for her devastating performance in I’ve Loved You So Long, and Josh Brolin received a mild boost for his Best Actor prospects off his performance in W. And Ben Stiller, whose remarks about the speculative nature of the HFF Awards were easily the evening’s funniest, was put into a position for a Golden Globe nomination and perhaps a win for his direction of Tropic Thunder.

Hollywood Film Festival after-party surrounding Beverly Hilton outdoor pool — Monday, 10.27.08, 10:10 pm

Josh Brolin, honored last night as the HFF Actor of the Year.

The other honorees included James Franco, whose Pineapple Express and Milk roles led to being handed the HFF Hollywood Breakthrough Actor Award; Marisa Tomei, recipient of the HFF Supporting Actress of the Year award for her work in The Wrestler; Dark Knight producers Christopher Nolan, Charles Roven and Emma Thomas for Producers of the Year.

Plus Happy Go Lucky‘s Sally Hawkins, HFF Breakthrough Actress of the Year; Doubt director-writer John Patrick Shanley, HFF Screenwriter of the Year Award; WALL*E’s Andrew Stanton, Animation of the Year, Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, HFF Breakthrough Screenwriter of the Year; Danny Elfman, HFF Composer of the Year Award, and so on.

Here are some mp3 files of some of the accepting speeches — Stiller‘s again, Eastwood‘s, Hoffman‘s and Brolin‘s.

Monday, 10.27.08, 9:14 pm

Twilight star Robert Pattinson accepted the New Hollywood Award. He sounded the same tone as Stiller, saying in effect “why am I here accepting an award for a film nobody’s seen?” He did say this, however: “It’s all hype.”

Before the event started I went up to Frost/Nixon director Ron Howard to congratulate him on that pro-Obama political spot that appeared last week, which I love (and I’m not alone).