“Experience, like nastiness, may also prove a dead end in the year ahead. In 1960, the experience card was played by all comers against the young upstart senator from Massachusetts. In Iowa, L.B.J. went so far as to tell voters that they should vote for ‘a man with a little gray in his hair.’ But experience, Kennedy would memorably counter, ‘is like taillights on a boat which illuminate where we have been when we should be focusing on where we should be going.'” — from Frank Rich‘s 12.0.07 N.Y. Times column.

Listen to this HE-edited version of a famous scene from John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath. A dirt-poor oakie comes into a diner looking to buy a loaf of bread but he can’t afford to pay more than a dime. Listen to the rest and you’ll be able to follow. The way I’ve cut it, the scene ends where it should — with a truck driver saying “what’s it to ya?”

But listen now to Ford’s version of the scene — the way it actually plays in the film. Ford keeps the camera rolling until the waitress considers the extra-large tip, goes all mushy and says “truck drivers!” Due respect to Ford, but this is my problem with the guy — he’s too sentimental. If Howard Hawks had directed this scene, he would have used the first version.

To hear it from Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason, the projected weekend gross of The Golden Compass is “anemic” — worse than disappointing — with an estimated $9 million earned yesterday and a mere $27 million for the weekend. Those are shattering numbers for a movie that cost a reported $200 million. By comparison, The Chronicles of Narnia made $65.5 million on its opening weekend in December 2005. Obviously no joy in Mudville (i.e., the New Line offices) this weekend.

Mason is also asking if this latest torpedo-in-the-hull spells the end of Nicole Kidman‘s run as a top-dollar actress. Compass, Mason notes, is Kidman’s sixth wipeout or short-faller in a row (if you don’t count the moderately passable business being done by Margot at the Wedding). Birth, The Interpreter, Bewitched, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus and Invasion were all flubs or disappointments.

I’ve been saying this for a long while now. Kidman is a talented actress with mostly excellent taste in projects, but she doesn’t radiate much warmth or empathy and she doesn’t put butts in seats. But she’s had a good run and has a long future ahead of her…just on a lower pay scale. There’s nothing wrong with being Meg Ryan.

47 elite critics have selected their five best films of ’07 for the latest edition of Sight & Sound, and of these Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the top of the heap. Among the runners-up: David Lynch‘s Inland Empire, David Fincher‘s Zodiac, Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light, Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men and David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises.

Boston is subject to changing investments and ownerships like any big town. It nonetheless came as a shock the other day when I walked by the former Ritz Carlton — the Plaza Hotel of Boston, operating since the mid 1920s — and found that it’s been transformed with a name and a design scheme that’s right out of Las Vegas or Cancun.

The Ritz Carlton changed hands late last year and is now called The Taj. Millenium Partners, which bought the old Ritz Carlton in ’99, sold it in November ’06 to Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, a swanky hotel chain based in Mumbai, India. I’m sorry, but Boston is a conservative, Anglo-Saxon, tradition-bound city, and it’s just icky for an old hotel that’s been around for 80 years to have a name that sounds like a Glitter Gulch casino.

Imagine what Mumbai residents would think if a local hotel was re-christened as the Ritz Carlton. It would be seen as an Anglo-Saxon incursion into the Indian economy, or as a metaphorical reminder of British-Anglo colonization of India. It would certainly not be welcome. If a British or American-owned company were to buy a Mumbai hotel, the smart thing would be to give it a name that doesn’t stand apart from (i.e., in contrast to) the local culture.

Likewise, buying an old-school Boston hotel that overlooks the Public Gardens and re-naming it The Taj is the cultural equivalent of pouring gravy on a tablecloth. It’s a metaphor for a changing multicultural economy and the diminishment of the Boston that used to be, obviously, but it’s really about an Indian company wedging its way into a remnant of an old WASP town and saying, “We’re here, we’re from Mumbai and we don’t give a toss for your blue-blood traditions…get used to it.”

I saw Joe Wright‘s Atonement for a second time yesterday, and in view of this and yesterday’s nationwide opening I thought I’d re-run most of my 9.12.07 Toronto Film Festival review with two or three modifications:

Atonement may not finally be the deepest or most resonant film of the year, but it’s still a shatteringly well-made, rich-aroma romance that will go all the way with (almost all) critics, Academy voters and public alike.

Wright has totally pole-vaulted himself past the level of Pride and Prejudice (a well-made Jane Austen-er that I was only okay with) and taken costars Keira Knightley, James McAvoy and especially Vanessa Redgrave (a likely Best Supporting Actress contender) right along with him.

You can add Focus Features and everyone else associated with Atonement (young Irish actress Saoirse Ronanas, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designers Jacqueline Durran and Sarah Greenwood) as well. Everybody wins with this film, the audience first and foremost.

This is one of those bulls-eye period dramas that feels wonderfully sharp and literate and authentic with emotional tone-perfect performances, and yet the profundity of the payoff is in the way it combines cinematography, editing and sound effects (not to mention one of the most enjoyably splendid uncut Steadicam shots in cinema history — a sweeping beach of Dunkirk shot that goes on for several minutes, deserving applause in and of itself) to create a sort of maelstrom effect.

Why, then, don’t I have it ranked higher on my personal best-of-2007 list? Because I’m not sure that Atonement isn’t finally about a young director’s grand effort at trying to knock everyone’s socks off. Wright is resourceful and talented enough to make it play splendidly, but I wasn’t fully convinced that he was truly immersed in the best parts of the ’01 Ian McEwan novel the film is based on.

Boiled down, Atonement is about a British woman writer crushed by guilt over a harmful thing she did as a youth, which was caused by foolishness amplified by sexual panic. And yet the film leaves you with a sense of great regret and sadness. A struck and haunted after-effect that leaves you with something deeper and fuller than what may be suggested by a casual reading of the plotline.

Atonement taps into feelings of regret about all things, about how fleeting and hurtful and unfair life can be when the cards go the wrong way.

It feels wrong to describe Atonement as a film with three acts, although it is that, because it doesn’t feel defined by “acts” as much as the way Wright has cut it all together. It replays or refrains certain scenes and does flash-forwards and flashbacks with impugnity, and never once does it feel gimmicky for doing so. It all fits together and hums like Swiss machinery.

Unless I’m crazy it will almost certainly end up as one of the five Best Picture nominees. And hail to the great Vanessa Redgrave once again. She’s on-screen at the very end for maybe six or seven minutes (perhaps a touch more), and does nothing except talk to an off-screen interviewer, but she hits an absolute grand slam.

It took me days and days to figure Hollywood Elsewhere’s final choices for the 10 Best Films of 2007 in order of personal respect and preference. I knew it had to be Zodiac on top followed by No Country for Old Men, Control, Sweeney Todd and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but after these it was very tough deciding the order.

Why is one deeply intoxicating, richly aromatic and well-crafted film regarded in a slightly better light than another? The final criteria had to do with big reach and rewatchability. The top ten, certainly, have a clear and strong vision or theme that you can process and re-process, and I’ve seen each one at least three or four times. It’s a safe bet that they’ll grab and hold onto DVD watchers in 2020 or 2050.

The other seven (#11 through #17) are also thematically strong, in some cases spirit-lifting, and extremely watchable. But with the exception of Once and American Gangster I’ve only seen the other four once, and that, to me, says something.

1. Zodiac (Paramount, dir: David Fincher, prods: Brad Fischer, Mike Medavoy, James Vanderbilt); 2. No Country for Old Men (Miramax, dirs: Joel and Ethan Coen, producer: Scott Rudin). 3. Control (Weinstein Co., dir: Anton Corbiijn); 4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Dreamamount, dir: Tim Burton, prod: Richard Zanuck); 5. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (ThinkFilm, dir: Sidney Lumet); 6. Four Months, Three Weeks & 2 Days (IFC, dir: Cristian Miungiu; 7. Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamamount, dir: Susanne Bier, prod: Sam Mendes); 8. There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, dir: Paul Thomas Anderson); 9. I’m Not There (Weinstein Co., dir: Todd Haynes);and 10. The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, dir: Paul Greengrass).

HONORABLE MENTIONS: 11. In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, dir: Paul Haggis); 12. American Gangster (Universal, dir: Ridley Scott); 13. Once (Fox Searchlight, dir: John Carney); 14. Atonement (Focus Features, dir: Joe Wright); 15. Into The Wild (Paramount Vantage, dir: Sean Penn); 16. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., dir: Andrew Dominik); and 17. Breach (Universal, dir: Billy Ray).

“No one hires crisis management firms at such huge expense if they’re planning on making a fair deal. A fair deal doesn’t require hundreds of thousands of dollars of spin to sell. A fair deal is its own good PR.” — United Hollywood‘s Laeta Kalogridis commenting on the producers’ decision to hire hardball spinmeisters Fabiani and Lehane, known in political circles as “the Masters of Disaster.”

“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.