CHUD’s Devin Faraci is reporting there were re-shoots done on I Am Legend “as late as last week.” I can only shrug if this is true. I didn’t care about a devastated, post-apocylaptic urban future with mutants running around when it was a Charlton Heston movie, and I don’t care at all about a post-apocalyptic Manhattan with mutants running around with Will Smith manning the fort. Does anyone? And does anyone find the prospect of being asked to believe that Smith could be a brilliant scientist a little challenging? In film after film Smith plays nice guys who are smart, amiable and resourceful. “Brilliant” means conveying a lot of things that are beyond his range…sorry.

Two major-leaguers and an ambitious scrambler at the legendary post-premiere party for One From The Heart that followed a Radio City Music Hall gala premiere in February 1982. I found this in my Norman Mailer folder last weekend. I was speaking with Coppola first (having recently done a long phone interview with him) when Mailer walked up. I stepped to the side and listened. I remember Mailer calling Coppola’s film “photo-realism” and saying at the end of their chat, “I salute you.”

A new Cloverfield trailer will run in theatres with Beowulf beginning tomorrow morning. (Reason in itself to buy a ticket?) In the meantime, atrocious camera-phone video footage of the trailer has gone up at zshare — clip #1, clip #2, and clip #3 — and been linked to by New York‘s “Vulture” column.

The new December Esquire came out yesterday (or the day before), with six actors being celebrated on the cover for having given the mag’s choices for “Performances of the Year.” Denzel Washington in American Gangster, Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Robert Downey in Zodiac, Emile Hirsch in Into The Wild and Jake Gyllenhaal in…Rendition?

December 2007 cover of Esquire featuring choices for the Best Movie Performances of the Year

It’s not that Gyllenhaal plays his Egypt-based CIA guy badly or ineffectively, but that Egypt-based CIA guy is written as such a revoltingly passive wuss. As Esquire‘s Mike D’Angelo points out, Gyllenhaal “spends much of Rendition standing in the corner of a dark room, watching as some poor soul gets beaten, doused and fried…it’s a near-silent performance.”

For me, Gyllenhaal’s inactivity is infuriating. He’s not just a guy doing nothing, but an emblem of do-nothing types the world over. Two thirds of the way through a screening of Rendition at the Toronto Film Festival I leaned over to a friend sitting next to me and said, motioning at Gyllenhaal, “Is he going to do anything or what?”

Gyllenhaal’s guy finally makes a move at the very end, yes, but it comes way, way too late.

I realize that tens of millions of law-abiding citizens out there go through life immobilized by fear, uncertainty and or obedience to authority, but characters like this are not worthy of anyone’s attention on a movie screen. A principal character has to do something in a drama. And if you can’t do something (due to fear, uncertainty or unstoppable obedience to authority), you have to at least let it out in some way.

Kyle Smith‘s review of Beowulf on Kyle Smith Online is, I’m sorry, quite hilarious. Sorry because I don’t feel that derision is the right way to go, but your funny bone had its own mindset. For what it’s worth, Beowulf producer and co-writer Roger Avary said it made him laugh also. The gist of the joke is that Beowulf has much erotic (and homoerotic) undercurrent going on, and is so intense that some (like Smith) feel the need to alleviate this with humor.

“With long, straight blond hair and a headband, Beowulf seems like Bjornborgowulf, but this is one Scandinavian who isn’t content to have a killer forehand. ‘I’m Beowulf,’ he declares. ‘I’m here to kill your monster.’ And quaff your drink and swive your wenches, please.

“The queen (Robin Wright Penn) frostily notifies Beowulf that ‘there have been many brave men who have come to taste my lord’s mead,’ at which point the newcomer must be wondering if he has stumbled into Ye Olde Gay Scene.

“Undeterred, Beowulf promptly strips naked in front of the queen, promising her that after he slays Grendel he’ll be happy to do some naked co-ed jousting with her, and then things get really strange. Grendel attacks again while Beowulf is nude, and while motion-capture Ray Winstone certainly has the carved physique nature denied the pillowy Ray Winstone we know from The Departed and Sexy Beast, you’d think he’d want to throw on some chain mail or at least pick up a codpiece before engaging in battle fierce with the slime-dripping beast.

“Instead, Beowulf, uh, rides the creature around the room. I mean, he mounts the monster bareback and bends it to his will. I mean, he squeezes the vicious demon between his rippling thighs and thrusts away with his fist. Never mind.”

For what it’s also worth, a friend saw Beowulf with a somewhat older industry crowd last night and reports that some of them were “howling” at some of the lines. Urgent, intense eros = hah-hah steam valve escape.

They’ve stuck it to The Band’s Visit again! Following an unfortunate AMPAS precedent, the HFPA Golden Globe committee in charge of foreign pix has announced that this small, heartfelt Israeli comedy is ineligible for the best foreign film prize because it has too much English in it. I’ve seen The Band’s Visit and know for a fact this is an ignorant and deeply unfair way to categorize this tender, at times Chaplinesque little film. Bah humbug! to the HFPA and anyone else who doesn’t get that English is the worldwide second language for all cultures today, and that everyone speaks it when they don’t understand each other’s tongue. It doesn’t invalidate anything for characters in an Israeli or Pakinstani or Taiwanese or Hungarian film to speak English when they have no recourse. Meaningless!

In her 11.14 L.A. Times/Envelope piece called “So Bad, They’re Good,” Lisa Rosen notes that “a lot of good actors went bad this year. Real bad. Surly, mean, reprehensible, criminal, unforgivable and pretty much irresistible.

“Critics and audiences alike have been enjoying the nasty performances of the likes of Denzel Washington in American Gangster, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Russell Crowe and Ben Foster in 3:10 to Yuma.”

The fact that Rosen waits until the very end of the piece to mention the year’s ultimate bad-ass performance, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, looks like a show of rank xenophobia to me. Rosen and her editors decided to list only name-value American thesps in the opening graph, apparently on the presumption that L.A. Times readers don’t want to know from gifted Spanish-speaking actors. And yet no bad-guy performance is more likely to see awards attention this year than Bardem’s.

L.A. Times “Big Picture” columnist Patrick Goldstein “spent much of last week talking to studio executives, eager to hear a good explanation for months of one-sided negotiations, where the studios essentially presented a series of rollback offers and then bashed the writers for not embracing them. None of the studio chiefs would talk on the record, but if I were to sum up their views, I’d put it this way: The future is too uncertain for us to give anything away.”

Goldstein explains that Hollywood “has always been a land of fear and anxiety. It’s why the town’s most-repeated maxims involve the slippery grip on the pole of success — why just root against your enemies, for example, when you can root for your friends to fail too. Everyone in this nasty labor dispute has profound insecurity about the future, an attitude deeply rooted in industry history.”

You Tube addendum: Jason Ross, one of the Daily Show‘s 14 writers, explains things from his perspective in this video dated 11.13.07, or yesterday.

Hillary Clinton‘s performance in the 10.30 debate made her seem vulnerable for the first time. And now Robert Novak is reporting that “an 11.6 Zogby poll of 502 likely Iowa caucus-goers showed Clinton’s lead had shrunk to three points — within the survey’s 4.5% margin of error. The narrowing, however, is mostly due to an Obama surge, from 19 percent in Zogby’s August poll to 25 percent.”

A N.Y. Times assessment, based on a Times/CBS News poll, finds the Democratic contest “essentially tied in Iowa” between Clinton, Obama and Edwards. The mind-blower is that a strong majority of respondents said that Obama and Edwards are more likely than Clinton to say what they believe, rather than what they think voters want to hear. And yet Clinton, respondents feel, is “the best prepared and most electable Democrat in the field.”

Silly me thinking all this time that likability — how high a candidate ranks according to Dating Game criteria — was a deciding factor among most voters.

The dream scenario is that Clinton comes in second to Obama in Iowa, and Obama takes this momentum with him to New Hampshire and South Carolina. Of course, the only way to really take her down is for Edwards to bail so everyone can rally around one Hillary-alternative candidate instead of two.

Margot at the Wedding “isn’t a story of neurotics struggling to be loved” but an example of director-writer Noah Baumbach “struggling to validate middlebrow narcissism,” writes N.Y. Press critic Armond White. White can be oddly hilarious when he goes after someone, and in this case he outdoes himself by comparing Baumbach to a rodent. [Note #1: Running this item shouldn’t and doesn’t indicate agreement with White about the analogy, but I chuckled at it.]

Margot at the Wedding director-writer Noah Baumbach (l.)

Baumbach “perverts lessons in humanity taught by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and even Wes Anderson, the great visionaries of American family and class warfare,” White goes on. “He domesticates bigotry. The kitchen confrontation between Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s Pauline and Jack Black‘s Malcolm is not an ethical, emotional trade-off; each cowardly egotist talks at cross purposes through Baumbach’s smug dialog. He’s always looking for malice and humiliation, as when a rat is discovered at the bottom of the family swimming pool.

“Nicole Kidman tries making Margot pitiable, but she remains a cold actress. Brave Leigh, the finest film actress of the ’90s, gets disgraced. Baumbach not only turns Leigh’s fearlessness into Isabelle Huppert-style masochism, he offends her person with a scene where Pauline shits her panties. And we see it. Baumbach can’t guide us through troubled emotions like O’Neill, Williams and Anderson; he leads us into the shallow end of arrogance, conceit and ugliness. The rat at the bottom of the pool is Baumbach himself.”

[Note #2: Baumbach actually shows us a small dead mouse, not a rat. If I’m wrong, it’s one of the smallest dead rats I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. A real dead rat is the size of the one Marlon Brando holds by the tail in Last Tango in Paris.]

In an 11.12 Commentary piece, Kyle Smith straddles the line between praise and derision in this short essay about Cate Blanchett‘s already-legendary Bob Dylan performance in Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There. When Blanchett “pops up it is immediately clear” — and as was the case with her appearance as Kate Hepburn in The Aviator — “that this is an Oscar role,” Smith says.

Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There

What he means is that it’s one of those “look at me!” performances, and is more about Blanchett wanting attention for being adventurous in playing a guy than her finding the soul of the Dylan character and making it come newly alive. Smith is saying, in short, that Blanchett is faintly obnoxious on some level. He couldn’t be more wrong. She’s intoxicating. But more to the point, you can see into the angst and weariness of the Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan. (I’ve always loved that line “my weariness amazes me.”)

Has there ever been an Oscar-contending performance that hasn’t been at least partly about “look at me!”? Does Smith think Laurence Olivier wasn’t doing this in his 1948 Hamlet? How is wanting audiences to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to an particular actor’s energy or technique a bad thing? As long as these aspects don’t overcome the soul of a performance, where’s the harm?

“Though Blanchett is strenuously coiffed and made up to look like Dylan, [her] wisp of a figure and porcelain cheekbones make it impossible to forget this is a drag performance. In a scene in which her Dylan chases an Edie Sedgwick-like object of obsession around a park, she doesn’t seem remotely masculine. She gives off no sexual hunger, no sense of need.”

ditto, with David Cross and Allen Ginsberg.

Exactly! She’s playing Dylan chasing a girl but also Blanchett-the-temporary-lesbian chasing a girl, which gives it a whosis-whatsis dimension. Nothing is totally straight and sincere in I’m Not There. Everything you see and hear is a kind of mind game. I loved this aspect. It’s so trippy and experimental that it almost leaves you with a kind of pot contact high.

“In the end,” Smith conclude, “all Blanchett ever needs in any film is our rapt attention.”

And she’s gotten it from me and just about everyone I else I’ve spoken to. She’s dead certain to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and you have to figure she’ll prevail with this and that critics group also.

Here, again, is a like to Kyle Smith online, and to his Blanchett Commentary piece.

After listening to Tom O’Neil talk about the No Country for Old Men situation with Pete Hammond this morning, I called Hammond and asked if he’d mind discussing the same stuff with me also, and he said fine.