Less than two months hence (on April 8th), Paramount Home Video will release There Will Be Blood on DVD (in single and double-disc versions). Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film will also go out on the throughly dead HD-DVD format. PHV will almost certainly put it out on Blu-ray as well, although that’s speculative. The DVD will include (a) additional Scenes, (b) “The Story of Petroleum” featurette, (c) “Dailies Gone Wild” featurette, and (d) trailers. (Thanks to Rope of Silicon for the tipoff.)

“No chick flick worth its collagen treatments is complete without (a) a yoga-class scene (possible alternative: the jogging-in- the-park meet-cute); (b) the triumphant sing-along where a row of white chicks lip-synch to a Motown song ; (c) the pre-wedding-jitters weepy meltdown, sometimes accompanied by a throw-up; (d) a scene set at a catering service or floral shop; (e) a snowball fight; (f) a cathartic having-it-out-with-Mom grievance-shoveling showdown (“It was always about you, it was never about me!”); (g) a Thanksgiving turkey that ends up on the floor, squirting around like a loose football; and, (h) most emblematically, the slapstick pratfall that sends the heroine splaying.”

Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones Diary.

— from James Wolcott‘s “The Right Fluff: A Guy’s Guide To Chick Flicks” in the March issue of Vanity Fair.

Before I respond to Stu Van Airsdale‘s Vanity Fair “In Memoriam” questionaire (who will be emphasized, omitted, specially honored with audio or video clips?), let’s take a moment to remember once more the revolting failure three years ago of Oscar show producers Gil Cates and Lou Horvitz to offer a special tribute to the great Marlon Brando, going instead with a special trumpet blast for the departed Johnny Carson. This was the single most shameful oversight in Oscar telecast history.

Will They Make It? (Choose One): Norman Mailer (+5)…of course Mailer wiil make it! He directed several movies, anticipated the flip sardonic trash-talk of the Tarantino crime film with ’87’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and his books were adapted into bad films (The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream). Merv Griffin is doubtful, ditto Charles Nelson Reilly, forget Anna Nicole Smith.
Will Open the Montage: No opinion about whether the late Delbert Mann (+10), Jane Wyman (+10), Suzanne Pleshette (+15) or Michel Serrault (+20) will lead off.
Will End the Montage: Heath Ledger is my guess — the most recent, saddest & most tragic. Also-rans: Jack Valenti (+10). Roy Scheider (+15), Deborah Kerr (+20)
Will Get Montage’s First Video Clip: Ledger again. Also-rans: Deborah Kerr (+5), Laszlo Kovacs (+10), Peter Zinner (+15), Jack Valenti (+20)
Will Get Montage’s First Sound Clip: Roy Scheider (“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”). Also-rans: Betty Hutton (+5), Deborah Kerr (+10), Brad Renfro (+15) Roy Scheider (+20).
First Actor/Actress Named: The great Lives of Others star Ulrich Muhe (+10) should be the first one out of the gate, but who knows? Also-rans: Michel Serrault (+10), Jane Wyman (+15), Brad Renfro (+20)
First American Director Named: Delbert Mann (+15) because he was local. Also-rans: Stuart Rosenberg (+5), Norman Mailer (+10).
First International Auteur Named: Ingmar Bergman first, I suspect, then Michelangelo Antonioni — really a toss-up. Also-rans: Ousmane Sembene (+5), Kon Ichikawa (+10)
Oldest Selection: William J. Tuttle, age 95 (+10). Also-Rans: Michelangelo Antonioni, age 94 (+15), Jane Wyman, age 90 (+20)
Will Get His Own Montage Elsewhere in Oscarcast: Both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni should share this honor. Heath Ledger (+20) may prevail as a sop to the under-30 audience, but let’s remember again that a tree didn’t fall on him and that actions have consequences.
Here, by the way, is a mock memoriam tribute video put together by Vanity Fair contributor Nell Scovell, film editor Stuart Bass and composer Gary Stockdale.

“With No Country, the moral underpinning of the story spoke to me in a big way, yet you could also see it as an exciting chase movie. The underpinning was always there, but I hate movies that speak about their morals. It works better when you have a piece of material where the moral questions are buried — otherwise the film feels too medicinal. I look for a voice.

The Coen brothers “have an enormous moral force in their movies, but they also have the kind of bravura razzle-dazzle that worked for this story. A lot of people see their films as naturalistic, but to me, it’s high style. They’re very showman-like filmmakers.” — No Country producer (and There Will be Blood exec producer Scott Rudin to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in a 2.19 piece called “For Scott Rudin, There Will Be Quality.”

“As you drill backward into Oscar history you keep finding things — Hollywood classics, in some cases — that could only be made now as independent films. I’m pretty confident that nobody in Hollywood would see much sex or sizzle potential in Hope and Glory(a 1987 Best Picture nominee) or Gandhi (1982) or Deliverance(1972). And they’d be right — none of those movies made much money.

“For that matter, try to imagine pitching such vintage Oscar fodder as Annie Hall or The Graduate or To Kill a Mockingbird to a contemporary Hollywood executive. Well, okay, maybe The Graduate — if you made it wackier and made Mrs. Robinson, like, 29 and insanely hot.” — from Andrew O’Hehir‘s 2.18 Salon piece about how the Academy “has turned its back on the multiplex moneymakers and wrapped smaller indie films in its warm, glittery embrace,” etc.

Mark Harris‘ Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (Penguin, on sale now) is about how a fresher, nervier, less formal kind of filmmaking found its stride in 1967 when The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde — stories about misfits saying no to the man in their own peculiar madcap way, and unmistakable metaphors about the social rumblings of the time — were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.

Charlie Bubbles, If…

The other three nominees were the more traditional-minded Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In The Heat of the Night and Dr. Doolittle, and it wasn’t too surprising when In The Heat of The Night finally won, given the industry’s tendency to ratify middlebrow. But the official respect paid to The Graduate and Bonne and Clyde was historic. It meant that the square, hold-your-horses mindsets of old-school Hollywood were being pushed aside by the industry’s younger players, many of whom were in their late 20s, 30s and early 40s. Hence Harris’s use of the word “revolution.”
But the following year everything kind of rolled back. The Best Picture nominees of 1968 all felt traditional, soft or somehow confined — the heavy-handed Oliver!, the passionate but stodgy Funny Girl, the sharply written and wonderfully acted but talky-theatrical The Lion In Winter, Paul Newman‘s indie-flavored character portrait Rachel, Rachel, and Franco Zeffirelli‘s Romeo and Juliet. These were not the best films of the year — they were films that seemed to most comfortably fit some kind of lazy Best Picture “definition” that probably calmed on some level. Traumatic political events had rocked the country that year, and a lot of people wanted to settle down and chill.
By today’s reckonings, a list of the best films of 1968 would have to include Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Peter Yates‘ Bullitt, Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon a Time in the West, Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby, Francois Truffaut‘s Stolen Kisses, Richard Lester’s Petulia, Lindsay Anderson‘s If…, Ingmar Bergman‘s Shame, Claude Chabrol‘s Les Biches, John Cassavetes‘ Faces, Claude Berri’s The Two of Us, Trufffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, Luis Bunuel‘s Belle du Jour, Milos Forman‘s The Fireman’s Ball, Don Siegel‘s Madigan and Coogan’s Bluff, George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, Jean Luc Godard‘s La Chinoise, George Dunning‘s Yellow Submarine and Albert Finney‘s Charlie Bubbles.
What am I missing? Don’t say The Thomas Crown Affair because it hasn’t aged well.
If I’d been the emperor of Hollywood the five Best Picture nominees of 1968 would have been 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, If…, The Lion in Winter and Petulia. But the Kubrick would have won.

How is everyone having sampled “fired up and ready to go” (Obama first, then Clinton and McCain) different than Obama sampling Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick‘s “just words” riff? There’s nothing to get into here. It’s small. The desperation of the Clinton team is sad. Obama and Clinton are now in a statistical dead heat in Texas and they’re scared.
What I’m about to say I say as an effete white guy who’s owned exactly two hip-hop albums in his life (Dr. Dre‘s The Chronic and Wu Tang Clan Forever), but there’s a reason that sampling — the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an element of a new recording — became a common music industry practice in the ’90s without this or that performer freaking out and yelling “plagiarism!” like Hillary spokesperson Howard Wolfson did yesterday.
Obama wasn’t stealing from Gov. Patrick by taking his words — he was reusing them as an element in an Obama speech. (He said the words a bit differently than Patrick, employing that special Obama pizazz.) You can’t expect the Hillary whitebreads to understand this, but this is basically why Obama said earlier today it’s “no big deal.” I also think he could have observed the rules and attributed the quote to Patrick, but to have done so would have interfered with the rhythm, and for a gifted orator rhythm is more than half the game. So that was another factor.

Is there anyone who doesn’t suspect that Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, 4.25) will somehow play fast and loose, water down or otherwise make light of that deplorable situation? I don’t know the plot or the shot, but if you saw the first film you know the director-writers (Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg) and their basic attitudes and instincts. That said, it’s probably better to have made some kind of comedy with a Gitmo backdrop than not. Better to have it out there than pushed aside, I mean.

Kal Penn, John Cho

Legendary photographer Bert Stern has re-shot his 1962 Marilyn Monroe nude photo session with Lindsay Lohan substituting. The shots appear in the current (2.18) issue of New York. Intriguing shots — okay, alluring — but why did the session happen? Obviously because Lohan is trying to get back into it somehow. She’s trying to launch a new impression of herself that might sink in and shift attitudes.

Her career was considered all but finished after the last drunk-driving incident. The box-office disappointment of Georgia Rules and the total wipeout of I Know Who Killed Me seemed to destroy the myth of her box-office heat, if she ever had any. The last thing she did of any note was get randy with three guys while she attended the Capri Film Festival. What else is there to do except resuscitate the ghost of Marilyn Monroe and similar ploys?

Israeli blogger Yair Raveh has uploaded his annual “Guess the Oscars” online ballot. The URL for his English-language site is here. Raveh will be posting his final Oscar predictions on Thursday. He’s confiding that he sees The Diving Bell and the Butterfly upsetting No Country for Old Men in at least one category (either director, script or cinematography).

The idea of Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law co-performing or additionally playing Heath Ledger‘s character in Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a noble gesture on the part of the actors. Admirable, compassionate. It’s going to result in a slightly confusing narrative, but Gilliam’s films unfold that way regardless so no harm done.

Ledger’s footage was shot in London (i.e., mainly exteriors) — the other three will perform green-screen scenes. The common character, “Tony,” is “transported into three separate dimensions [that] Ledger accesses via a paranormal mirror, and which will “now be inhabitated by Depp, Law, and Farrell,” an Variety/AICN story informed.

The squishy, endlessly dithering John Edwards needs to go into full wuss mode and endorse Hillary Clinton to demonstrate to the world how meaningless his endorsement is and what a shapeless and gelatinous life form he truly is deep down.