I wrote a note this morning to the other journos (Kim Voynar, James Rocchi, Jen Yamato) who will also be visiting the Oxford Film Festival this weekend. “Sometime between Thursday and Sunday, I’m going to rent an Enterprise car and drive 40 miles to Tupelo, Elvis Presley‘s birthplace and the presumed geographical inspiration for Van Morrison‘s ‘Tupelo Honey.’

“Does anybody want to split the rent/gas expense and come along? Can’t be much. There’s also a Rent-a-Wreck in Oxford.

“I also want to visit Rowan Oak, the William Faulkner homestead in Oxford. Tupelo and Rowan Oak together should take maybe four or five hours, I’m guessing.

“I briefly considered driving all the way the fuck down to Philadelphia, the town where the Mississippi Burning civil-rights murders happened in ’64, but 150 miles down and back again would eat up the whole day so I guess not.

“I’d like to have breakfast or lunch in a really out-of-the-way mom ‘n’ pop diner somewhere between Oxford and Tupelo. Someplace really small and run-down with good food. Like the little joint Clint Eastwood was sitting in at the end of Million Dollar Baby. An HE reader wrote me yesterday and said to have a meal of fried catfish at the Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Mississippi which is about 5 miles south of Oxford. “Look for Jimmy Buffett‘s autograph scrawled on the wall there,” he wrote.

“How times have I visited rural Mississippi in my life? Donut. How many more times am I likely to visit rural Mississippi, given my profession and tendencies?

“And one way or another I want to work in a visit to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. King was killed. And what about visiting the legendary Sun Records? I think we need to make it a three-fer in Memphis on Thursday before driving down to Oxford — Graceland, Sun Records and the Lorraine motel. It’ll probably take two or three hours. Okay, three. So we arrive in Oxford a little later than expected…big deal. You only live once.

“If the Oxford Film Fest driver doesn’t want to do the Memphis trifecta, maybe it would make sense to rent a car in Memphis airport and keep it for the three and a half days (and obviously work in the Tupelo thing in the bargain).

“I realize you can’t do everything so I’m foregoing a visit to the Memphis locations used in Sydney Pollack‘s The Firm, specifically the Mud Island footbridge and monorail and the Peabody hotel at 149 Union Avenue.”

A Connecticut lady once told me a story once about judging a guy’s character. She’d just met this fellow on a train in Europe somewhere (Switzerland, I think) and at the end of a day, having become friendly, they decided to share a hotel room. There was a bit of a romantic vibe between them but she didn’t want to go there right away. At the same time she wasn’t sure how things would unfold once they were in the room. She started to wonder if she’d done the smart thing by sharing with this dude.

Anyway, it got really late and was time for dousing the lights and turning in. Would the guy try anything? The lady wasn’t sure. Then the guy went into the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the sink faucet before using the toilet. As soon as the lady heard the water running, she relaxed. Any guy who would try to aurally camouflage the sound of his urinating, she decided, could be controlled and wouldn’t be a problem. That’s what she told me. A word to the wise.

“The problem with [all Oscar] formulations, and the reason they tend to stumble over themselves almost as soon as they emerge from a would-be-Oscar analyst’s cortex, begins with the phrase ‘the Academy’, and its implicit assumption that each year’s nominations represent an act of coherent collective will that is designed to reflect a particular set of truths.

“In fact, the Academy is, much like its home country, a hydra-headed agglomeration of different constituencies, often in fierce conflict, and the electoral decisions it makes can in different years reflect fearfulness, defensiveness and retreat, or a kind of split decision that denotes a compromise between the past and the future, or, on certain delightful occasions, an unexpected surge of thoughtfulness, good taste and high aspiration.” — from Mark Harris‘s impressively well-written assessment of the ‘098 Oscar race that appeared in Sunday’s Observer.

Hats off to RevoLucian, the guy who threw this techno-vid together so quickly and so well. (Thanks to In Contention‘s Kris Tapley for alerting.)

“After [last] Saturday’s Mickey Rourke tribute, at which he received the American Riviera award, Academy voters woke up Sunday morning to a big color photo of the star and a front-page headline in the Santa Barbara News-Press blaring ‘The Comeback King.’ Can it influence their thinking at crunch time? Studio consultants must think so, or they wouldn’t keep coming back year after year with major contenders.” — from Pete Hammond‘s 2.2.09 Envelope column about his Santa Barbara adventures.

Mickey Rourke, Pete Hammond.

A big-city film critic friend told me tonight why he doesn’t do South by Southwest any more:

1. “No press screenings, or none that I recall from when I was there from 2003-07, or maybe just a handful. They think it’s more ‘democratic’ to have the press line up with the public for almost every movie, which can take literally hours for popular screenings.

2. “The movies mostly suck. We started doing SXSW because we figured it was the new Sundance — and it was, like the way Sundance was 20 years ago (or so I’ve been told). But most movies SXSW takes have been tossed into the delete bin by Toronto and/or Sundance. The few good ones it runs tend to be Sundance hits making their next festival stop. There is rarely a premiere of note — Knocked Up in 2007 was the only SXSW premiere I recall that made any kind of impact out of that fest.

3. “The press office is a joke. Beyond a joke. Nobody knows anything, the pass they give you is almost useless, and they will kick you out of the press office once the much bigger SXSW Music Festival starts — which it does smack-dab in the middle of the film festival, thus turning the film festival into a complete waste of time. Oh, and the film press office won’t help you if you want to check out a couple of the music events. You’re on your own, and on your own dime.

“Have I succeeded in changing your mind?”

The big outdoor Doubt scene between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis is now viewable at the N.Y. Times site.

What’s with Summit refusing to announce a theatrical opening date for Kathryn Bigelow ‘s The Hurt Locker ? They’ve had this landmark war thriller since the acquisition was announced almost five months ago but they’ve steadfastly refused to say when. Pussyfooting on a theatrical release date is odd enough six months out, but it’s bizarre when the film in question is this good.

I realize that Lionsgate’s rumored purchase of Summit may have some bearing, but it still feels weird that Summit never announced a date. It suggests that they believe they’ve got a hot potato on their hands. Which of course it isn’t — it’s brilliant.

A couple of just-announced festival dates suggests the release date has to be in late March or early April. The Hurt Locker, I’ve learned, will have a special screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on 3.5. It’s also been announced that it’ll show as a premiere attraction at South by Southwest, which runs from 3.13 to 3.22. Whenever a film with a solid distributor makes the rounds at festivals and high-profile screening series, an opening is never far off. All I got from Summit publicity chief Vivian Mayer is that an announced date “isn’t far off.”

The only possible monkey wrench I can imagine is the Lionsgate acquisition deal. But if things were truly up in the air the two afore-mentioned bookings wouldn’t have been made.

“In Serbis politics isn’t a matter of slogans but of real bodies, which perhaps accounts for why it paradoxically unwinds in a movie theater,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote last Friday. “The heavenly bodies that populate our films bring their own pleasures, of course, alighting on screen as if from a dream. The bodies in this movie are not heaven sent, but neither are they puppets in a cinematically contrived nightmare.

“Rather, they lust, sweat, desire and struggle with ferocious truth. In one scene a young man lances a boil on his rear with an empty bottle, a grotesquely funny affirmation of real life and real bodies at their most humble and humanly poignant. You might gag, but you definitely won’t forget it.”

Cheers to Defamer‘s Kyle Buchanan for posting an interview clip earlier this afternoon of Talkshow‘s Spike Feresten grilling At The Movies critic Ben Lyons over the many similarities between The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Forrest Gump. That “Funny or Die” clip that pointed out the same parallels has been taken down, but Feresten’s site has it.

This Christian Bale screaming tape from the set of Terminator Salvation (Warner Bros., 5.22.09), which was broken this afternoon by Gawker, is pretty damn good. It’s the best on-set screaming since that David O. Russell YouTube clip from the set of I Heart Huckabees. Here’s a longer TMZ version of same.

Moises Chiullan‘s summary of the most intriguing ’09 South by Southwest titles has me actually thinking about trying to attend this year. I’m particularly interested in catching Gerald Peary‘s For the Love of Movies, a doc about the history of American film criticism that has taken some seven years to put together. Here’s a 12.07 riff on Peary’s film by Filmmaker‘s Rob Nelson .

My only concern is Nelson’s observation that the film “scarcely if ever acknowledges [the] mounting threats to the profession.” This can’t be. Peary and producer Amy Geller must have changed their film to reflect the times in the 14 months since Nelson wrote this.