“When he read Sheriff Bell’s final monologue in No Country for Old Men, producer Scott Rudin was reminded of Nicolas Cage‘s film-closing fantasy of the future in Raising Arizona. “They’re so incredibly similar,” he says. “[Cormac McCarthy‘s book] is fundamentally a lament for a different time that has disappeared.”

It was not only Joel and Ethan Coen‘s signature voice, often tinged with a Texas twang, that made Rudin think of the duo, he says, “but the way their films’ believably explode into action. They’re the filmmaking equivalent of what McCarthy does in his books. The philosophical ideas in the book dealt with the fate and destiny of the characters, these Melville-like themes that the Coens had dealt with in their films.”

“‘You get this synergy of a great filmmaking team and a great novelist coming together in something bigger than both of them,’ says Rudin.” — from Anne Thompson‘s 12.6 Variety profile of the prolific producer.

The Boston Society of Film Critics awards are deciding their awards on Sunday, 12.9 (according to their website), and not today, as Kris Tapley (going on info from And The Winner Is blogger/columnist Scott Feinberg) reported yesterday.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association meets Sunday also, followed on Monday by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Then come the big easy-virtue orgs and the Windy City dingle-danglers. The Broadcast Film Critics Association nominations (how many Best Picture nominations this year, guys? 12? 15?) will be announced on Tuesday, 12.11. The Chicago Film Critics Association nominations (why don’t they just announce the winners?) will be announced on Wednesday, 12.12. The next day — Thursday, 12.13 — the Golden Globe/HFPA nominations will be announced.

I don’t know as of this writing (6:21 am Boston time) when the National Society of Film Critics will decide, and there’s nobody awake that I can call. I only know that they’ll hand out their awards in early January. If they have a website it is unknown to the Google organization.

An understandably frustrated reader named Franco Aray, addressing HE talk-backers, sent this note yesterday: “Did you people even see Control? Sam Riley and Samantha Morton should be near the top of the heap! They were both amazing! Way better than most of the actors on those lists this year!”

Alexandra Maria Lara and Sam Riley at a Toronto Film Festival screening of Control.

A modest but growing fraternity feels the same way. Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley reported yesterday that a SAG Nominating Committee group waited 30 minutes following a Thursday night Control screening for Riley’s arrival, which had been delayed due to a late-arriving flight.

“They love this guy,” Tapley wrote. “Riley is eminently likable with a superb sense of humor. I’ve done a lot of these [events], and it’s pretty special for a crowd to wait this long to hear an actor — an unknown, at that — speak about his or her performance in a film. We didn’t wrap up until at least an hour after the film’s credits had rolled, and that’s unusual to say the least.”

There’s another Control screening and after-party tonight at MGM’s headquarters in Century City. Roman Coppola is hosting. Obviously a fan, although the connection to Riley is by way of Sam’s girlfriend, Alexandra Maria Lara, starring in Francis Coppola‘s film Youth Without Youth.

This columnist is interested in gandering the following Black List titles, if anyone cares to send them along on PDF: Farragut North by Beau Willimon, Passengers by Jon Spaihts, Infiltrator by Josh Zetumer, Selma by Paul Webb, Curveball by Steve Knight, I Want to Fuck Your Sister by Melissa Stack, The Road by Joe Penhall, The Way Back by Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, This Side of the Truth by Matt Robinson, Dubai by Adam Cozad, The Human Factor by Anthony Peckham, Adventureland by Greg Mottola, Kamikaze Love by Chad Damiani & JP Levin, Lion Man of Tuscany by Nathan Skulnik, Never Let Me Go by Alex Garland, Untitled Bill Carter Project by Jordan Roberts, The Art of Making Money by Frank Baldwin, Untitled Michael Mann/John Logan Project by John Logan and The Wolf of Wall Street by Terence Winter.

“Under no circumstances will we knowingly participate in the destruction of this business.” — 12.7.07 statement from studios and networks upon quitting strike negotiations, as reported yesterday by Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke.

“The biggest argument against No Country is that it’s peaking too soon. Second, there’s a group of people [who] take serious contention with its ending. Combined with it’s violent content following a year when The Departed won, it seems more sensible to begin purchasing stock in Atonement or The Kite Runner” — N.Y. Times reader Nick Butler, responding to a David Carr/”Bagger” post.

HE comment: Behind the curve, Nick! The “problem with the ending” began evaporating two, three weeks ago. Glenn Kenny‘s Premiere piece killed it off. Now the NCFOM ending is a badge of esoteric-artistic honor. If you say you don’t get it you lack depth…you can’t think too well…you’re slow on the pickup. Atonement might pop through, but right now it’s on the ropes. The Kite Runner? Maybe, but it’s a bit soft. It’s a compromise choice — a movie that stands for healing and cultural bridge-building.

12.7.07 Update: This 12.8 N.Y. Times story by David Halbfinger about the current “Black List,” a roster of highly regarded scripts that won’t be seen on screens until late ’08 or ’09 (or perhaps not at all), has a link that that didn’t work at first, but — as of Saturday — does. Update: Here’s my own link to the PDF file with the full rundown.

Callie Khouri‘s Mad Money (Overture, 1.18) is being sold as a Nine to Five-ish female empowerment larceny comedy. Aging divorcee Diane Keaton, struggling mom Queen Latifah and single whatever-girl Katie Holmes decide to grab some U.S. Treasury money that’s about to be burned. A typical start-the-year throwaway programmer…could be fun, might be bad, who knows?

I’d be cool with this as far as it goes (you have to be willing to laugh — you have to say to yourself “I will laugh if it’s funny…I won’t scowl or sneer but laugh…if it’s funny”), but I’ve just announced a lifetime decree/commitment to avoid all Queen Latifah movies unless…that’s the question. Unless she’s in a supporting role (i.e., the film isn’t built around her preening movie-star attitude) and subordinate to something other than her sassy African-American butch-boss personality.

“The filmmaking is so good and so well-polished that it crowds out the humanity….there’s no air…and the Vanessa Redgrave thing at the end is the writer-giving you a kind of [‘this is what it all meant’ wrap-up] thing that you feel you ought to have as a moviegoer. ..it’s kind of condescending, in a way, and I didn’t like that at all.” — Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris on Joe Wright‘s Atonement.

There’s no getting around the fact that a certain “hmmm” factor is clouding Atonement‘s Best Picture prospects. The British romantic period drama is one of my definite ’07 favorites and a very likely Best Picture nominee, but four times today I’ve read or listened to naysaying opinion — a pan from A.O. Scott‘s pan in today’s N.Y. Times, another one from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, a mezzo-mezzo video report from the Boston Globe‘s Morris and Ty Burr, and a report from a friend who attended last night’s L.A. Atonement premiere and says some viewers felt it didn’t quite nail it or ring the bell that it should have.

“Really?” I replied when I heard the post-screening report this morning. “That was a fairly consistent view, you’d say?” Yeah, that’s what I was hearing from some people, my friend said.

This has brought me to the brink of concluding that Atonement (which looked like a Best Picture front-runner after Toronto but began to do a fade in early November and then came inching back a week or two ago) is starting to look like a limping thoroughbred. Maybe. It’s not Charlie Wilson’s War by a long shot, but at best it’s now even-steven with No Country for Old Men, and it may start to sink even further if at least one critics group doesn’t stand up and give it a Best Picture prize within the next three days.

Atonement getting dinged by this and that critic doesn’t mean that much, but No Country hasn’t gotten dinged at all — the respect is growing and growing among all interest and age groups — and I think that means something. There’s always a vague corollary between critics and Academy/industry opinion when it comes to high-pedigree year-end films. I don’t want be an alarmist, but if Atonement doesn’t get a Best Picture trophy from the L.A. or Boston critics on Sunday or from the New York Film Critics Circle the following day — and particularly if No Country sweeps these three — it’ll be in real trouble.

In other words, the Best Picture race may well be decided by Monday afternoon. Did I just write that? Yes, I did. It may be in that the dye will be cast on a certain level. (Note: I’ve always preferred the metaphor of a spoonful of dye being dropped into a well or a bucket of water than a pair of dice being flung across a craps table.) I’m not saying that the Atonement shortfall (if and when it happens on Sunday and Monday) will decide things absolutely — obviously it won’t — but it will nonetheless cast a certain light and define the situation in a way that will make the pro-Atonement argument a little harder to sell.

On his “Movie Nation” blog, Boston Globe critic Ty Burr responds to my 12.5 rant about the sub-standard sound and projection of Sweeney Todd at the AMC Leows’ Boston Common two days ago. He agrees for the most part and provides some historical perspective on the Boston exhibition scene. My only disagreement is that he felt that Tim Burton‘s “gloomy, diseased color scheme” couldn’t have been affected all that adversely by the weak projector lamp — “what’s the difference between perfect and imperfect murk?” Due respect but no — gloomy images need strong illumination more than any other kind.

Crispin Glover and David Brothers‘ It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE shows today (12.7), tomorrow (12.8) and Monday (12.10) at the American Cinematheque. It’s an intense, hallucinatory, soul-of-madness movie. The one-sheet pretty much says it all. A screaming, middle-aged, moustache-wearing nerd in a wheelchair (inspired by Francis Bacon‘s Pope paintings?), a shadow of guy holding a noose, a nearly naked Vargas girl on her knees. One look and you know that unbalanced people made this film.

Paper‘s Dennis Dermody wrote that “what Diane Arbus was to photography, Glover is swiftly achieving as a filmmaker. Training his sardonic eyes on the strange and afflicted he achieves a mad dark poetry on celluloid.” I’ll concede that. The portion of It Is Fine that I saw at the ’07 Sundance Film Festival is mad, dark and not in the service of naturalism. Due respect, but I threw up my hands. I’m running from film to film, story to story…I haven’t got time for this shit. Obviously others do and some are into this film, and that’s fine. Everyone’s entitled.

But there’s no excuse for the words “it is fine” in a film title. No one except David Mamet has ever said the words “it is fine” in a conversation. When I first read the title I knew that Glover and Brothers and the late Steven C. Stewart (the afflicted guy who wrote the original screenplay) were playing a precious game.