On her daily blog, Jane Fonda describes the play she’s now performing in — 33 Variations — which I’ll be seeing this afternoon with Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling, who’s in town for a few days.

Bobby Zarem, casting director Bonnie Timmerman, Jane Fonda and “screenwriter Scott” following a performance of 33 Variations

“I play a musicologist of today who is obsessed with figuring out why Beethoven, at the height of his powers, spent 3 years writing 33 variations on a mediocre waltz written by a music publisher in 1819,” she writes. “My character is passionate in her quest for understanding, [in part or largely because] it’s a race against time for her to get a paper written on the topic and delivered to a conference because she’s sick. Beethoven, who’s also a character in the play, is also obsessed with finishing the variations because he is becoming deaf.

“Obsession, passion — these are things I love in life. The fact that people can grow old and become sick and yet their passions remain undimmed. Some of the greatest artistic works and achievements throughout the ages, have been done by people late in life — Monet, Cezanne, Degas, Matisse, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Albert Schweitzer and many others.

“Age and infirmities are as important as we allow them to be. No question that things change as we age. There are the aches and pains. Like jalopies, hub caps fall off, fenders get bent, and we keep on, making a life inspite of it…a life that, as Beethoven and others showed us, can be enriched by these corporal challenges. This play I’m entering touches on this.

“I’ll be doing this play for five months. I could be real scared. I mean, 8 shows a week after 45 years [away from the stage]! But I’m choosing to think of it as an adventure, a challenge. A friend of mine who’s 76 says that at this age you’re supposed to be retired, not looking for new adventures and that I and my friends are unusual. I don’t agree.”

One of my all-time favorite title sequences. Because it visually conveys — gently, economically, erotically — not just what Humbert Humbert (James Mason) will be feeling about Lolita (Sue Lyon) starting around the 10-minute mark, but the essence of the fuel that will drive the dramatic engine. An amazing feat. (Still sequence stolen from Art of the Title.)

Main title sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962)

“The grim previews of the 81st Academy Awards show on Feb. 22 at the Kodak Theatre, designed by David Rockwell — the modern-day Rube Goldberg responsible for the Mohegan Sun Indian casino, the ugly sets for Hairspray and the Jet Blue terminal at J.F.K. — are already being described as ‘community theater on steroids,'” writes N.Y. Observer critic Rex Reed in a piece that went up last night at 8 pm.

“[They] include a curtain made of 92,000 crystals, a thrust stage requiring an orthopedic surgeon in residence for presenters in stiletto heels, 20 monumental Art Deco arches, the removal of the traditional orchestra pit, lights filtered through silver-rope curtains and strands of silver-leaf balls, 19 screens flying through space and fluted chandeliers floating above the audience, all dominated by the color blue. It sounds like a vulgar stage show in Atlantic City starring Siegfried and Roy, designed to turn passionate movie lovers into dyspeptic movie critics — only a handful of whom will still be awake by the time the five final (and only important) prizes of the night are announced.”

This is funny stuff, but at least Oscar show producers Bill Condon and Larry Mark are trying to re-think things and operate out of the box.

MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz and his team have put together another Oscar montage in which he shares some mock-challenging emotional moments with the big acting nominees (Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, etc.). You know, like Billy Crystal used to do when he was hosting the big show in the mid ’90s? Amusing and technically together; ends nicely with a couple of Oscar kids making actual appearances.

Hollywood Elsewhere strongly endorses the notion of Cenk Uygur, the liberal, blunt-spoken, sometimes combative host of Young Turks, being given the up-for-grabs 10 pm slot on MSNBC. The guy is in the same general bright-nervy-mouthy ballpark as Chris Matthews, only younger. (No offense but I don’t know the other big candidate, Air America’s Sam Seder.) MSNBC needs a young smart-ass GenXer on the team. Somebody to counter-balance the attitude and presence of David Gregory, a.k.a. “monkey mouth.”

“There are press embargoes on many, many films, ” writes Tom Shaw in response to Matt Selman‘s “My Own Private Watchmen” piece, which went up yesterday afternoon. “Usually because the studio thinks that any early reviews would hurt attendance. Just like they would here.

“Sure, we all hold Watchmen dear in our hearts, but consider [the view of] someone who has never read it before.

1. “Far from the ‘all action, all the time!’ previews, the actual movie itself has only a handful of fight scenes, none of which are fair. A young dude beats up an old dude, God beats up the Vietnamese, two people wail on near-incapacitated law officers doing their job, etc.

2. “The setting confuses everyone. What’s Nixon doing being president in the 1980s? I thought the Soviets weren’t a threat and drank themselves into irrelevance? Who are all these ridiculous gang members….extras out of Death Wish?”

3. “The ending: Not really ‘everyone lives happily ever after.'”

4. “And the worst thing: The movie is best described as artistic. Which was the kiss of death to the last two artistic comic movies (i..e, Hulk, Superman Returns).

“So no, if I was Warner Bros. I wouldn’t have early reviews either. Of course, my issue is with the 5% Moore didn’t write. I just don’t see how that 5%, which is (a) all over the internet, and (b) in the last trailer logically ties in with the 95% they did keep.”

Now, that gets our blood going — CG footage of a centuries-old French building in Paris being blown to pieces. But honestly? The footage of that slowly sinking aircraft carrier and the jets alongside got me. It shows imagination. Otherwise it’s obviously a good thing that Steven Spielberg has his executive producing hooks into this film because it ensures he’ll make a lot of money, and if there’s one thing that Spielberg needs in his life right now…

Taking Chance is “austerely nonpolitical,” writes Hollywood & Fine’s Marshall Fine. “It’s [a movie] about honoring one man’s sacrifice, without getting into polemics of any sort. It’s about the shared humanity of everyone Chance Phelps’ encounters on his last ride home and its impact on his escort, played with understated anguish and strength by Kevin Bacon. I haven’t been this moved by a film in a long, long time.”

The fact that Fine, a very shrewd critic, swallowed the bait and wound up calling Taking Chance “nonpolitical” shows you how sly and tricky Ross Katz‘s film really is. It may be one of the most inspired con jobs of all time in the way it walks, talks and acts apolitical…and yet deep down, it’s a film that will warm the cockles of Dick Cheney‘s heart. Taking Chance is about simple sadness and dignity in the same way that Scientologists offering free stress tests are just trying to make your day go a little smoother.

Ross Katz‘s Taking Chance, a somber, well-made drama about youth, grief and terrible finality, is an infuriating film because it’s also, for me, a sneaky Iraq War sell-job in sheep’s clothing. It will have its premiere on HBO this Saturday, 2.21, at 8pm. So it seems time to re-run some of my original 1.17.09 review that I wrote at the Sundance Film Festival.

Kevin Bacon in Ross Katz’s Taking Chance

Taking Chance “moves you with understated eloquence about the profound and lasting sadness of a young man dying in a war (any war) with so many decades of potentially rich life taken from the soldier and his loved ones and his unborn children. But the movie does something else. It sells the honor and glory of combat death in a ‘sensitive’ way that is not only cloying but borders on the hucksterish. Which I feel is a kind of obscenity.

“One result of this sell job is that it lends an aura of dignity and nobility to a conflict that was launched upon lies and neocon arrogance and idiocy, and that war simply doesn’t deserve the respectful salute that Taking Chance obliquely extends.

“I’m not objecting to this film offering a modest and moving tribute to our fallen dead. I was in fact moved by this. But Katz knows full well that Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Wolfowitz will cream in their pants when they see this thing. Is he proud of this? Because I think Taking Chance is catering, in a roundabout way, to not just the red-state sentiments that have prolonged the Iraq War (and which certainly prolonged the Vietnam War) but the kneejerk neocon thinking that has also kept us in that terrible situation.

“The fundamental objection I have to Katz and the film is the underlying spin behind the general honoring of brave young men suffering ghastly death and mutilation under the wind-whipped stars and stripes.

“James Garner‘s Americanization of Emily speech [see above] talks about the obscenity of selling the valor of war death — the tributes, statues and Memorial Day parades that praise and worship the act of being killed in combat — because it perpetrates the carnage through decades and generations and centuries.

“We shall never end wars,” Garner says, “as long as we make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. The fact is that we perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifice. It may be ministers and generals and politicians who blunder us into war, but the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution.”

I’m ready to rock and rumble with anyone who’s caught an advance screener and doesn’t agree, or who intends to see it this weekend and wants to get into it then.

Last night Variety‘s Michael Fleming posted a story about an entertaining movie-to-be called Pride and Predator, a Jane Austen jack-off about aliens landing on earth and butchering 19th century men and women of quality. Elton John‘s Rocket Pictures will produce.

Director Will Clark, who made a moderately amusing short called The Amazing Trousers, wrote the Pride and Predator script with Andrew Kemble and John Pape.

Rocket producer David Furnish told Fleming that “it felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect.”