I never could see Crispin Glover inside the “Grendel” in Robert Zemeckis‘s Beowulf. But I can foresee some people out there in ticket-buying land seeing…uhm, experiencing a little flashback ping in the coming days. Maybe. That’s all I’m going to say.

Does anyone remember that scene in At Close Range when Sean Penn and his gang are getting ready to rob a truck, and Penn tells Crispin Glover to stand watch and tell them when he sees it coming down the road? Glover eventually spots it, but he can’t just spit out the words “here it comes.” Because he’s “Crispin Glover”, he gets all spazzy and tongue-tied as he says in that half-nerdy, half-girly voice with one of his hands patting the back of his head, “Uhhmm….haaaeeeyyy? ….here comes the truck!”

“You were dead-on about needing to see There Will Be Blood twice. The first time I saw it I was extremely frustrated by it, especially the sudden and shocking ending, but the second time it went down like a milkshake. I was wondering why you would board a plane to San Fran to see it a second time, but now I understand why.” — HE reader Adam Graham, received this morning.

Picturehouse threw a party last night at Il Ceilo for Marion Cotillard, the favored Best Actress contender for her performance in Olivier Dahan‘s La Vie en Rose. The usual press contingent attended, and so did Colin Farrell (who gives his best performance in years in Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream), The Lives of Others director-writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and producer Mark Johnson (The Notebook, The Rookie).

La Vie en Rose star and Best Actress contender Marion Cotillard — Thursday, 1.10.07, 8:25 pm

Producer Mark Johnson, Picturehouse chief Bob Berney, Variety columnist Anne Thompson, Variety feature writer Sharon Swart at last night’s Picturehouse soiree — Thursday, 1.10.06, 8:55 pm

The Lives of Others director-writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Bob Berney — Thursday, 1.10.07, 7:05 pm

In yesterday’s N.Y. Times Pew Research Center president Andrew Kohut wrote that a “possible explanation” for the perplexing difference between the Barack Obama poll numbers just before the New Hampshire primary (way ahead of Hillary Clinton by at least 7 or 8 points) and his actual vote tally (which resulted in a loss to Clinton by three points) “cannot be ignored.”

He was referring to “the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor. Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.”
Kohut has to state his case carefully, this being the N.Y. Times and all, but he’s obviously doing a very careful dance.
Let’s try some plain language. If Will Rogers was still around and was trying to say the same thing, it might come out like this: “The common folk aren’t stupid. They know how things work, so when some fella calls ’em on the phone and asks how they’re votin’, they’re gonna play it like anybody else. But it’s a different story when it comes to the privacy of a voting booth.'”
Mel Brooks said it this way about 40 years ago. The fact that people laughed at this scene — jokes aren’t funny unless they connnect to something real that Average Joes instantly recognize — tells you almost the same thing that Kohut is saying.
I’ve been saying it all along — go outside the cities, the affluent suburbs and the college towns, and America is a nation of enlightened color-blind humanists. Or, as Gene Wilder says to Cleavon Little…

I’ve just gotten clearance to post a Cloverfield review, but I’m at a Starbucks on West Pico and have to be back at my home in 25 minutes in order to let a plumber in, so I’m just going to post what I’ve written about it in a letter to a friend. I’ll add to this later this morning:

Cloverfield is a monster film unlike any other — a complete original, but no less of a rock’ em-sock ’em for that.
It’s amazing in that it’s so short (by my watch about 74 minutes without credits), and yet so fierce. If Allen Ginsberg didn’t already own the title I would suggest that they call it Howl. This is not your father’s Ray Harryhausen rampaging- monster flick. Those movies, comparatively, were parlor dramas for the tame of heart. This movie is REM madness. It is Guillermo del Toro on a tab of brown acid with a little crack thrown in.
Cloverfield is a post-9.11 fever dream. As if a person who’s been through 9.11 in lower Manhattan has gone to bed traumatized and shaking with dread, and this is the dream they have. Illogical, ferocious, madball, all-engulfing….but very much of our world. Not It Came From Beneath The Sea but It Came From Someplace Deep in the National Psyche.
I don’t want to draw overly literal parallels here, but you can’t tell me this thing isn’t 9.11-inspired. You can say it isn’t and that’s fine, but I’m not buying it. Nobody will. The travelling dust cloud threatening to engulf everyone, the crowds walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, the earthquake-like impact that everyone feels at the very beginning, the molten explosion and the flying projectiles (like the scrap metal and wheels of the jets sailing down into the streets after the second plane hit)….gimme a break.
It has the illogic and surrealness of a Luis Bunuel nightmare because (and this is the genius of it) the beast doesn’t make “sense” in the way that ’50s monster films did. Explanations are entirely up to you, the viewer, because the Cloverfield victims don’t have clue #1.
In the watching of monster movies, we’ve all been trained to expect permutations of prehistoric beasts or enlarged versions of real-life animals (like King Kong). This guy…I don’t know what he is but he’s winning. (Kidding.) He’s a nightmare that “means” nothing but says everything. He’s a vision out of a Grimm Brothers fable, but one written by a deranged Matt Damon or Heath Ledger while locked in a 19th Century mental ward. He’s a fiend that a heroin addict might see in his sleep during his first night in rehab.

“The movie is a landmark genre film. A true milestone in film. It is, all at once art, commercial and grotesquely gleefully gargantuan.”
How nice that Harry Knowles put his Cloverfield review up yesterday. I could have done the same if I’d pushed it, but there was no discussion and therefore no green light. Harry Knowles doesn’t need a green light. He just watches a film, goes home and unloads…yaw-hawww!
Unlike me. I’m one of those guys who has learned to raise his hand in class and go “Teacher? Teacher? May I have permission?” Because this is a system that works.
The difference is that Harry Knowles has creamed over so many movies with such unbridled effusion that you don’t know what to think when you read a rave. You think, “Okay…yeah, maybe.” But you also think, “I’ll take this under advisement.”
“There’s no score, there’s no rules [in Cloverfield],” Knowles writes. “There feels like there’s no script and no movie. It feels ‘found’, but it is so huge that you can’t ever really believe that. Handheld film just has never had a story of something this fantastical or huge happen.
“This frankly launches two giant film careers at once. As of this second, I will see and eagerly anticipate every film that J.J. Abrams produces. This sort of stepping back from a genre convention and reinvention is exactly what needs to be done.
“It isn’t simply going, ‘Oh, I can make a better Godzilla movie,’ but the audacity of saying ‘I’m going to tell that story from one of the most loathed film approaches — i.e.,found footage — and simply make the most fucking amazing found tape ever. It won’t just be what it is, but the characters and the story and the emotion and the scope and the journey that the tape takes us on. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
“Then there’s Matt Reeves, I don’t know this guy. But I’ll tell you what. You’re gonna mark his name after this. He just came out with a film about as Sundance as you could imagine. This is like an indie film that you’d dream Spielberg would make.”

Every now and then a director comes along who is presumed to have directed a film “in name only” with the producer believed to be the real creative maestro. Like poor Cloverfield director Matt Reeves, who barely exists as far as most of the journalists I know are concerned. (True powerhouse: JJ Abrams.) As well as poor Greg Mottola, whom almost no one would credit for having directed Superbad. (True powerhouse: Judd Apatow.) Not to mention poor Victor Fleming, who merely “directed” — traffic-managed — Gone With The Wind. (True powerhouse: David O’Selznick.) Is there a book in this?

Poor Matt Reeves, director of Cloverfield

Another steal from New York‘s “Vulture” team, posted earlier today:

“Zodiac‘s real protagonist is the hive-mind of obsession blanketing the Bay Area. By and large, the human characters in this tale aren’t given your standard (and often cliched) screenwriting tools of backstory or personal quirks or fleshed-out lives. These actors have to fend for themselves, living off the scraps James Vanderbilt‘s screenplay throws at them.

“This is precisely the kind of situation in which Robert Downey thrives. He brings to Paul Avery‘s early scenes a kind of swaggering, wisecracking aura, shot through with vulnerability — which pays dividends as the film’s relentless trajectory brings these characters down.
“Compulsion and self-destruction are nothing new to Downey, whether he’s acting them out in fiction or in real life. And in its portrait of a society coming out of the 60s and plunging headlong into (and out of) the 70s, Zodiac becomes a film about those very things.
“Even though he gets significantly less screen time than nominal lead Jake Gyllenhaal, Downey becomes the film’s chief human connect — the embodiment of nobility and charm, boozing and snorting his way into oblivion as the society he knows crumbles around him. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, and it is absolutely one of the best performances of the year.” — from a 1.10.08 Bilge Ebiri piece, posted by New York‘s “Vulture” column.

In the Cloverfield press notes, the concept for the monster — affectionately known in-house simply as “Clover” — is explained by producer JJ Abrams: “He’s a baby. He’s brand-new. He’s confused, disoriented and irritable. And he’s been down there in the water for thousands and thousands of years.” The notes also reveal that the beast is 25 stories tall.

A video of JJ Abrams schpieling in front of an audiences last March — not spilling anything about Cloverfield, talking about the concept of the “Mystery Box,” the democratization of movie-making and special effects, Tom Cruise using his own hand to drill himself in the nose in MI:3, etc.

With a Scripter nomination and now a WGA nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, Zodiac is at least getting a little institutional love. And without a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, Atonement has taken still another hit. Poor, poor Atonement…an extremely well-made (and quite moving) film that went looking for love and has come up empty at every well.
The WGA’s original screenplay nominations went to Fox Searchlight’s Juno (writer: Diablo Cody), Michael Clayton (writer: Tony Gilroy), Fox Searchlight’s The Savages (writer:Tamara Jenkins), Universal’s Knocked Up (writer: Judd Apatow) and MGM’s Lars and the Real Girl (writer: Nancy Oliver).
Adapted nominations went to James Vanderbilt‘s Zodiac, Ethan and Joel Coen‘s No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood, Ronald Harwood‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Sean Penn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Into the Wild.
The WGA winners will be announced on February 9th at simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York.