Here I am late as usual in posting stuff, but Todd McCarthy‘s Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema — an affectionate tribute to one of the craftiest and most unapologetically fierce-minded cineastes in motion picture history — is playing at the AFI Film Fest three hours from now (at 6:30 pm). Then comes John Landis‘ Mr. Warmth, a “pretty great” documentary about Don Rickles. On top of which these guys could be separated-at-birth twins. A fairly spirited double bill with in-between time for some fast food.

With its 94% rating, No Country for Old Men is Metacritic’s second-best reviewed film of ’07 (Ratatouille being the slightly higher-rated with a 96% score) as well as the tenth-best reviewed film in the site’s entire database.

I’ve been trying to get it up for a Lions for Lambs review for several days now, and it just wouldn’t happen. The truth is that I don’t like three second-tier things about Robert Redford‘s new film — the photography, the Aghanistan mountain-range combat sequence, and the use of generic title cards — and I was trying to articulate what I feel about the first-tier aspects so as not to seem trivial. But sometimes the trivial things aren’t trivial but proverbial “blades of grass.”

The truth is that I admire Redford’s audacity in having made such a starkly didactic film. You can’t not call it ballsy, although it’s hard not to call Lions for Lambs generally underwhelming. This is a film, after all, that is shorn of tension and visual fluidity in the service of educational “talk”. It is marginally involving, but never once alarming. much less gripping. Everyone had to know that the chances of such a film dropping dead on its opening weekend were pretty high, even with Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep topping the cast.

BEWARE: A PLOT SPOILER AWAITS FOUR GRAPHS HENCE.

The subject, as Redford’s college professor character puts it, is that “Rome is burning.” For 88 minutes the film cuts back and forth between three illustrations of this situation. One, journalists not rigorously questioning the right-wing propaganda about the manifest destiny that is driving the war on terrorism. Two, college kids not giving a shit about the enveloping tragedy of that conflict. And three, the certainty that soldiers trying to fight it out in Afghanistan are going to die in order to validate some vague neocon dream of victory.

I certainly don’t disagree with what it’s saying, and I didn’t hate watching it. But I was irritated by three things.

One, Philippe Rousselot‘s photography is so flat, drab and lacking in visual intrigue during the scene between Redford and Andrew Garfield that it borders on irritating. It’s so lacking in invention that it becomes hard to concentrate on what’s being said. If I were Redford I would have either made Lions for Lambs super-attractive by shooting it the way Vittorio Storaro shot Reds or The Sheltering Sky (which would obviously remove the visual irritation factor, which would allow the viewer to pay closer attention) or I would have taken the super-raw, no-frills approach that Oleg Mutu chose for 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.

The Sheltering Sky

Two (and here comes the SLIGHT SPOILER! ), it’s hard to believe that a solder could fall from a helicopter onto rocky, snow-covered terrain on top of a mountain and just get slightly banged up. (Production designer Anton Furst killed himself by jumping off the top of a five-story parking structure.) It’s harder to believe that the fallen soldier’s best friend in the chopper, having seen him tumble out, would simply jump out of the chopper himself and hope for the best. The only way we could buy this would be if Redford showed us that the chopper is hovering, say, 20 or 30 feet above the mountain peak, but he doesn’t. On top of which enemy Afghan soldiers are shown approaching the position of these two soldiers from less than a hundred feet away, and for no discernable reason they take an awfully long time — a good half-hour — to attack.

Three, white titles explaining anything are bad enough, but there is no reason to call the university where Redford’s professor teaches a generic “California university” — it matters to absolutely no one if the school is in California or Rhode Island or Oregon or Wisconsin. And we certainly don’t care if we know the name of Redford’s character. It sounds like a small-ass thing to gripe about, but the second those titles flashed on-screen I tuned out and stayed that way for two or three minutes…until tuning out again because of Rousselot’s photography. Why create road blocks that do nothing except get in the way?

All that said, here’s a rave review from the New York Press‘s Armond White.

When a truly exceptional film comes along, it sometimes inspires critics to do their best writing. N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick is expected to keep his prose plain, unadorned and borough- friendly, which means he can’t do an A.O. Scott, an Armond White or a Lisa Schwarzbaum. But his No Country for Old Men review has exceptional conviction and a pure-of-heart quality.

NCFOM “is the first movie I’ve seen in a very long while that deserves to be called a masterpiece,” he begins. “It’s such a stunning achievement in storytelling that, when the DVD comes out, I’d wager you could even turn off the sound and hardly miss a thing. This really isn’t a movie to watch on DVD, though.

“You need as big a screen as possible to savor Roger Deakins‘ sweeping cinematography, which is as integral to the movie’s triumph as the edge-of-the-seat direction by Joel and Ethan Coen, or a trio of unforgettable performances by Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones.

“Adapting (and, if you ask me, surpassing) a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy into their best-ever movie and their first Best Picture contender since Fargo, the Coens deliver a classic, neo-noir Western of innocence lost set in 1980 Texas.

“Jones, who gets top billing but has notably less screen time than his co-stars, has never been better or a more commanding presence. Just watch when he pours himself a glass of milk from a bottle that Chigurh has left out after visiting Llewelyn’s house.

“Bardem delivers by far his most effective English-language performance as the enigmatic, deep-voiced Anton Chigurh, who plays with potential victims in memorable ways (notably a sequence at a gas station).

“The breakthrough here is Brolin, whose Llewelyn starts out as a greedy comic bumbler not unlike William H. Macy‘s Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo, but turns into a character worthy of a Greek tragedy.” Another Greek reference!

“Even in one of Hollywood’s best seasons in years, No Country for Old Menworks as high art and a rousing genre entertainment.”

That said, this passage from Armond White’s review is especially strong: “This is the Coens’ first crime movie since they began to master the medium, and the way No Country morphs from noir into contemporary-western moral struggle makes it deeper, funnier and even stranger than Fargo, their 1996 hit.

“You know what national cataclysm happened since then, so it should be no surprise that the Coens have made a crime movie that seems quietly aghast at the likelihood of death and menace occurring on American soil. Unlike American Gangster‘s sensationalized crap, this is a crime movie/western exercise that contemporizes the miasma of a world at war.”

I should have posted this early yesterday evening, but many thanks to Anne Thompson for the kind words.

“The studio executives are not going to suffer. The union leaders are not going to suffer. The writers on strike are not going to suffer. These are people that have money. The electricians, the grips [and] the set designers are the people suffering because they will not get paid now and they are out of work.” — California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as quoted by KFSN-TV. Schwarzenegger has said “he will get involved in contract talks if asked.”

“One of the subversive conceits of No Country for Old Men is that for all the experience and skill” tucked under the belt of Tommy Lee Jones‘ Sherill Bell, “he is more of a passive character than an active one, functioning as a kind of Greek chorus who comments on and contextualizes the action rather than being at the heart of it.” Thank you, Kenneth Turan, for specifically agreeing with HE on this point.

Today’s east coast and midwest attendance figures for No Country for Old Men are in, and it’s looking very strong. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s masterpiece is playing in 28 situations with a minimum expectation of $25,000 a print, although the Miramax release could end up with a per-screen average above $30 thousand, which will translate to $700,000 for the weekend.

Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley believes that The Great Debaters, Juno, The Kite Runner and Once may have an Academy edge this year because their feel-good currents are more instinctually appealing than the rampant downerism of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, In the Valley of Elah, Into the Wild, Margot at the Wedding, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Beowulf, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, Zodiac, etc.

I can sympathize with anyone who felt bothered or brought down by Margot‘s relentless neuroticism, but the other dark-toned dramas listed by Tapley are — hello? — major uppers for anyone with any appreciation at all for the rudiments of bright, impassioned, sharply crafted filmmaking.

These efforts by Sean Penn, Sidney Lumet, Susanne Bier, David Fincher, Joel and Ethan Coen, Tony Gilroy, Paul Thomas Anderson, Robert Zemeckis and Paul Haggis are, before anything else, thrilling to sit through. They don’t bore, they don’t twaddle around, and they constantly engage, disturb and provoke. Even Margot at the Wedding has its virtues in this regard. Any industry person who doesn’t understand this needs to find a job making refrigerators or selling cars.

There is no such thing as a very good or great movie that brings people down, regardless of subject matter. “Sad” or “solemnly moving” is not the same thing as “depressing.” There is nothing lower in the movie-watching universe than the kind of person who sits through Au Hasard Balthazar and comes out saying “whoa, bummer…the donkey died.” The only truly depressing movie experience is when you’re watching something gross, tacky, incompetent or ineffective.

There’s one film I’ve seen that will, I believe, benefit from a general hunger out there for positivism and bliss vibes, and that’s Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner. It’s the one Middle Eastern-based film that creates a sense of intimacy, kinship and bonding with Middle Eastern (i.e., Afghan) characters, which is something that I suspect most viewers want to experience, even if they don’t know it yet.

And I’m including in this equation the “leave us alone”-ers (i.e., the donkeys who are refusing to see any film tethered to the current Middle-East situation). Because The Kite Runner is a soother, not an agitator. It’s about guilt and looking for atonement, but it finally offers peace and comfort.

All the other “sand” movies are treating Middle-Easterners as threatening or faceless figures enmeshed in terrible tragedy, which makes them seem almost like banshees, swirling around our diminished sense of morality and taunting us for our wrongheadedness in going to Iraq in the first place. But The Kite Runner invites us to share universal feelings — guilt over past misdeeds, the longing to put things right — through the experience of an Afganistan-born writer (Khalid Abdalla), and therefore builds bridges by reminding us that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin.

I saw The Kite Runner with a small group of Academy members four or five weeks ago, and I felt this glowing vibe in the room as the lights came up. I don’t happen to feel that The Kite Runner is as good a film as many of the dark dramas listed in the above item. I respect it and admire it as far as it goes, but it’s more of a 7.5 or an 8 out of 10. But feeling is believing, and that “glow” vibe often leads to good buzz and Oscar noms and all the rest of it.

The Valkyrie trailer is up and running on Yahoo. Tom Cruise talks like Tom Cruise — no European inflection or accent of any kind, and no attempt at even a mid-Atlantic accent in order to sound like he’s from the same rarified heritage as the British-accented Kenneth Branagh, Terrence Stamp, Bill Nighy, etc.

And that’s fine. Movie stars don’t do accents. If Kevin Costner had just spoken like his Bull Durham self in the Robin Hood film, he wouldn’t have been the butt of all those jokes. Nobody would have said anything. He would have been in the clear.

In response to yesterday’s Beowulf piece that said (a) Ratatouille‘s producer John Lasseter has been against the idea of Beowulf being classified as animated, and (b) there is no sensible explanation for anyone taking this position (i.e., the fact that it began with actors emoting in front of green screens is only one component in a very sophisticated visual scheme), Beowulf producer and co-screenwriter Roger Avary has sent along a statement. And as much as I defer to Roger’s authority, I can’t say I’m with him 100%.

“The thing about Beowulf is that it’s a hybrid,” he begins. “It’s both live action and animation, and we’re going to be seeing much more blurring between the mediums in the future. Any mixed signals that Lasseter may be receiving are a direct result of his and the Academy’s inability to categorize the direction in which Zemeckis is taking the form.

“There is certainly puppeteering involved in much of Beowulf, but the nuances of performance and motion of the characters entirely belong to the talent. When Hrothgar lifts his head, moves his eyes, and twitches his lips — it’s Anthony Hopkins making those choices.

“Lasseter, who is a master filmmaker, shouldn’t allow himself to feel threatened by the future. Perhaps he’s insecure and feels that his films can’t hold their own against live action films in a single, merged ‘Best Film’ category that is inclusive of all movies, regardless of the techniques involved in bringing their stories to life. As an Academy member, this is what I’d like to see.

“To segregate animation in this day and age to its own separate award category is to ghettoize it. But then, maybe that’s what Lasseter wants. Maybe he feels that a smaller field will increase his potential to reach a goal. We’re not intimidated like that.”

Avary is 100% correct in calling Beowulf a hybrid, but it is certainly much, much closer to animation that it is to realism. It presents a computer-composed magical realm (demons, monsters and flying dragons galore) from start to finish except for the live-actor performance element. The eye tells you over and over in a thousand different ways that Beowulf is presenting a lavishly reconstructed realm with today’s animation tools.

It is therefore not naturalism, and never will be. Which means it can never, ever be considered in the same light as Four Months, Three Weeks & 2 Days or No Country for Old Men or any other film that uses stark, unadorned, relatively untreated images to portray an aspect of life that most of recognize as the way it is out there when you go for groceries or drop by 24 Hour Fitness or pick up caulking at Home Depot — ghost-free, faun-free, dragon-free. Beowulf is animated, animated, animated.

Maybe the Academy should split the Best Animated Feature Oscar — giving one each year to hybird marvels like Beowulf that use human actors and one to old-school gems like Ratatouille? In the old days they used to hand out separate Best Cinematography Oscars — one for color, one for black-and-white. (The final black-and-white Oscar went to Haskell Wexler for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in ’66.) Why not a Best Hybrid Animated Feature Oscar along with the traditional one? Where would be the harm?