“The presence of Kristin Scott Thomas in Philippe Claudel‘s I’ve Loved You So Long is so powerfully distinctive,” the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw notes, “that it’s as if Claudel has not merely written the lead role for her, but extrapolated his film’s entire narrative structure from Scott Thomas’s personality.

Elsa Zylberstein, Kristin Scott-Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long

“Her formidable bilingual presence, her beauty — elegant and drawn in early middle age — her air of hypersensitive awareness of all the tiny absurdities and indignities with which she is surrounded, coupled with a drolly lenient reticence: it all creates an intelligent, observant drama about dislocation, fragility and the inner pain of unshakeable memories. Scott Thomas is on screen for almost every minute of the film, often in close-up and her face is at once eloquent and deeply withdrawn.”

I’ve decided to double-post the Oscar Balloon — it’s on the main page (ten items down from the top) as well as on its own page. Somehow it got un-designed as a result of the server switchover so it has no tint or flair or anything — it looks awful right now. (But it’ll be fixed this weekend. I hope.)
I’ve tried to prune out the stragglers and the good-but-not-good-enoughers. Josh Brolin‘s lead performance in W. is the the latest surge in the Best Actor category. Unless reports come in to the contrary, experience has taught me that anything to do with Ed Zwick (such as Defiance) is a non-starter. I think Angelina Jolie is looking good for Best Actress in Changeling, but I’m not so sure about the film or director Clint Eastwood in their respective categories. I obviously have some work to do on the Best Foreign Feature front.
Any and all suggestions are welcome.

L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas has posted a frank, perceptive, and typically well written profile of Mickey Rourke, star of Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight, 12.19), an almost-certain Best Actor nominee and by general consensus the Comeback Kid of 2008.

The timing of Foundas’s article is a little unusual — a few weeks after The Wrestler was hailed at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, and nearly three months before it’ll open commercially. Obviously Foundas is foresaking the usual considerations to say to the industry, the press and the cognoscenti at large, “This is a major return-to-form performance by an actor who deserves not only respect but accolades — a man who has suffered and wandered in the wilderness for his sins, and has returned with a performance that not only delivers in terms of great chops and emotionality, but which has unmistakable real-life echoes.”
“‘I hated the ’90s…the ’90s fuckin’ sucked,’ says professional wrestler Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson early on in The Wrestler — and he should know,” Foundas begins. “Over the hill and past his prime — his steroidal body a palimpsest of battle scars, his graying hair dyed a Nordic blond — Robinson hasn’t seen the inside of a major arena for the better part of 20 years. Nowadays, he gets top billing by scraping bottom, trading blows with other used-to-be’s and might-have-beens in school gymnasiums and banquet halls, earning a cut of the door that’s barely enough to cover his trailer-park rent.
“As it happens, the ’90s weren’t much kinder to the actor playing Robinson: Mickey Rourke. By the end of that misbegotten decade, the one-time Hollywood A-lister was living in a $500-a-month studio apartment and subsisting on a meager income generated by the sale of his motorcycle collection plus whatever acting jobs he could scrounge up from the few producers in town who weren’t afraid to hire him.

“His flirtation with a boxing career had come to an end. His tabloid-catnip marriage to model Carre Otis had hit the skids. There were reports of arrests and of plastic surgeries gone awry. It was said he had walked off the set of one movie after a producer refused to allow Rourke’s pet chihuahua to appear with him in a scene.
“‘The thing is that I am the one to blame for all that,’ Rourke says as he lights a cigarette in what I’m pretty sure is a nonsmoking suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, the day after The Wrestler‘s North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. His chihuahua, Loki, issues a bark from a nearby cushion. ‘I used to blame other people, but I’ve got nobody else to blame except for Mickey Rourke.’
“That’s more or less the same thing Rourke told director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) when they first met to discuss The Wrestler. Or rather, it was what Aronofsky told him.
“‘He sits down and, for the first five minutes, he tells me how I fucked up my whole career for 15 years behaving like this, and I’m agreeing with everything,’ Rourke recalls. ‘Yes, I did. That’s why I haven’t worked for 15 years, and I’ve been working real hard not to make those mistakes.’ After that, Aronofsky pointed his finger at the actor — something, Rourke says, that not so long ago would have prompted him to say, ‘Don’t do that, okay, buddy?’ — and laid out the ground rules.
“‘He goes, ‘You have to listen to everything I say. You have to do everything I tell you. You can never disrespect me. And you can’t be hanging out at the clubs all night long. And I can’t pay you.’ And I’m thinking, ‘This fucker must be talented, because he’s got a lot of nerve to say that.'”
“Then Aronofsky told Rourke that if he did all of those things, he would get the actor an Oscar nomination. ‘The moment he said that, I believed him,’ says Rourke. ‘The first day of work, I believed him more. The second day of work, I believed him even more.’ As for the finger-pointing, ‘I’m from New York — we point a lot,’ Aronofsky tells me later. ‘Like any good marriage, you want to be as up-front as possible about what the issues are.'”
Sidenote: I’m expecting to see The Wrestler before too long. I got shut out of the big Toronto press screening at 3 pm, and the next day I decided to blow off another Wrestler screening — a public one — so as not to miss a 12 noon press screening Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker. The Toronto Film Festival is full of unfortunate do-or-don’t decisions like this.

Thanks to Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner for passing this along…

“David Letterman is no Walter Cronkite. He’s not even Ed Sullivan. But he is the face that millions of Americans see before turning in for the night. For years, John McCain has appeared on his show, even announcing his intention to run for president on the program. And to have the affable Letterman visibly boil and go on the offensive showed that, perhaps, McCain, whose campaign has stumbled since the beginning of this economic crisis, is in bigger trouble than one would think.
“Perhaps McCain won’t say, ‘If I’ve lost Letterman, I’ve lost middle America.’ Does Letterman even say his audience is ‘middle America?’
“But one wouldn’t be surprised if the Republican candidate began to smell a strong odor seeping into the vents of the Straight Talk Express.” — Sridhar Pappu writing in today’s (9.25) edition of The Washington Express.

I work pretty hard all day, extreme concentration and tension and furrowed brow, and all these guys do is sleep and do this all day.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

“If Barack Obama doesn’t become the next President of the United States, I’m going to blame the Jews. I am. And I know you’re saying, like, oh my god Sarah, I can’t believe you’re saying this! Jews are the most liberal, scrappy, Civil Rightsy people there are. Right, that’s true…but you’re forgetting a large group of Jews who are not that way. And they go by several aliases.”

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo

Variety‘s Anne Thompson, one of those who declared last May that Steven Soderbergh‘s Che was a problem movie because it lacked story tension and movie moments, has written about how the forthcoming New York Film Festival showings may “provide a fresh opportunity for an iconic Argentine revolutionary to find new life on American shores.” The two-part epic, which I saw and loved for the second time in Toronto, is now twelve minutes shorter than the version that played in Cannes.

I love hearing the dirt or reading about it in the checkout line, but I’ve always thought it slimey and wrong to dredge up the private lives of political candidates. The press corps was right not to pester JFK for his randiness. Jimmy Carter shouldn’t have taken heat for admitting to “lust in his heart.” Beating up on Bill Clinton for Monica Lewinsky was absurd — his absolute refusal to talk plainly or honestly to Ken Starr‘s inquisitors was one of the moral high points of his administration.
Granted, John Edwards was an absolute fool and a scumbag to have run for the Presidency when he knew his affair with Rielle Hunter would come out sooner or later. If he had won the nomination and then the scandal has broken, John McCain would almost certainly be the next President. But in most cases sex should be private and left alone. It’ll never happen, but Americans would do well to think and act like the French.
So as much as I despise and fear Sarah Palin, I don’t think people should go after her for an extra-marital affair that she apparently had twelve years ago. With a guy named Brad Hanson. Whatever. The tabs won’t drop it, of course, but this kind of material should be off-limits in a campaign. In this respect she just succumbed to a normal impulse or need or weakness.
The reasons to not vote for Palin-McCain are ample. The focus should be on her primitive attitudes, her ignorance, her myopia and general unsuitability for the job of Vice-President. It should stop there.

In a laundry-list story about upcoming Disney projects, Variety‘s Marc Graser has reported that Johnny Depp has agreed to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean pic and also play Tonto in a bigscreen adaptation of The Lone Ranger, both of which will be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Johnny Depp; Jay Silverheels as Tonto in the ’50s TV series The Lone Ranger

Whoa, whoa. I think we need to repeat this. Johnny Depp is going to play Tonto in a big-budget Lone Ranger movie. Meaning that it’s going to be a jape? How could Depp’s Tonto be performed with any sincerity? How can it not be satiric-ironic-moronic?
Depp will also star as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland pic.
Disney distrib chief Dick Cook has called the upcoming pics for the rest of this year and 2009 “the most creative slate of films in Disney history,” Graser reports. These films will include High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Bedtime Stories, Race to Witch Mountain, Hannah Montana: The Movie, Old Dogs, The Princess and the Frog, Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol and Pixar’s Up.
The most creative slate of films in Disney history? Not in the view of Ain’t It Cool‘s Mr. Beaks.
Kimosabe means “trusty scout” or “trusty friend.”

The day before yesterday L.A. Times guy Josh Friedman reported that Fireproof, a Christian drama with Kirk Cameron as a firefighter struggling to save his marriage, “has been No. 1 in advance sales on movie ticketing site Fandango.com with 31% of this week’s business, albeit in a slow marketplace — even outpacing sales for the big-budget popcorn thriller Eagle Eye, starring heartthrob Shia LaBeouf.”

The Fandango numbers, he reported, are due to “grass-roots support and bulk purchases from churchgoers.
“Nobody expects Fireproof, which Samuel Goldwyn Films will open Friday at 800-plus theaters, to replicate the phenomenon of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which jolted the movie industry by grossing $83.8 million during its first weekend in 2004. Nor will it challenge DreamWorks/Paramount’s Eagle Eye, which is widely expected to be this weekend’s top grossing movie. Indeed, the micro-budget Fireproof production might have a hard time even cracking the top 10 at the box office this weekend.
Basically, Friedman said, it might do business along the lines of Facing the Giants and Omega Code.

The opening four and a half minutes of Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light, which I didn’t see in Cannes or Toronto because I’ve learned to say “later” with this guy. I seem to lack the depth and the patience to get through a Reygadas film without leaning forward in my seat and covering my face with my fingers. But watch this clip and tell me it’s not beautiful, primal and faintly haunting. In the vein of the opening moments of Mike Nichols‘ Catch 22, only much slower.

HE reader Christian Hamaker said this morning that “certain film sites are abuzz with the news that Silent Light will finally will have its American theatrical debut this Friday in New York. I’m not sure why this exhibition is considered an official ‘release’ — maybe I’ve got my terms wrong. I’d like to know if the film has an actual distributor, and whether it will be playing in other cities.”
I can’t even locate the Manhattan theatre it’s supposedly playing in this weekend, and that’s always a no-brainer.
Silent Light has an 81% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating from the creme de la cremes. N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis swooned, saying that it “provokes awe not just for its sheer beauty but for the astounding leaps in seriousness and maturity that Reygadas has made since Battle in Heaven.” Lesson of Darkness critic Nick Schager has called it “the near-epitome of art-cinema pretentiousness.” Slant‘s Ed Gonzalez, whom I almost never agree with, called Reygadas “a wonky impressionistic filmmaker, prioritizes aesthetics above social inquiry throughout the film, presenting the lives of his reclusive Mennonite community as something out of the imagination of Grant Wood.”