I drove to Santa Monica around noon today for a half-hour interview (a relative luxury these days) with Control star Sam Riley, who happens to be a very gifted and shrewd actor. His undeniably penetrating performance as Joy Division singer- songwriter Ian Curtis, who hanged himself in 1980 at age 23, has made him a bona fide Best Actor candidate whether certain handicappers want to acknowledge this or not.

Control star Sam Riley inside One Pico, the awkwardly named Shutters restaurant — Monday, 10.22.07, 12:45 pm; another shot

We sat next to a large window inside the beach-facing restaurant at Shutters. The bright sun and sand, the placid dark blue ocean and a perfect cloudless sky made for a picturesque view, although the grayish tan smoke from the Malibu fire was visible in the distance.

Riley, 27, had flown into Los Angeles yesterday for a few press chats and to attend tonight’s Variety-sponsored “10 Actors to Watch” event at the Beverly Hilton. He’s a bright, candid and settled fellow — a former playwright and musician who lucked out big-time when Anton Corbijn chose him to portray Curtis, and who now stands at the brink of possibly amazing things.

We’d met before in Toronto but hadn’t really spoken. Removed from Control‘s monochrome kitchen-sink atmosphere and the gloom-head Curtis vibe, Riley’s natural attributes — his lean movie-star looks and raspy English voice — come through all the more. Not to mention his relative ease and self-confidence. He talks in clean forthright sentences and seems to never avert his eyes. That mournful, edge-of-depression look he wears in Control is nowhere in sight.

The musician side of him is very much alive, though. You can sense he’s been through it and then some (his band was called 10,000 Things), and that he’s tasted his share of disappointment.

Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara

He seemed a bit shagged and fagged from the long plane ride from London, where he’s in the middle of shooting Franklyn, a four-character piece with Ryan Phillipe, Eva Green and Bernard Hill.

Riley and Control costar Alexandra Maria Lara, who plays Anik, the Belgian journalist who becomes Curtis’s extra-marital girlfriend, live together in Berlin. (She has a supporting role in Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth, is currently shooting a German-language film called Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, and has a role also in Spike Lee‘s Tuscany World War II film.)

Riley isn’t a huge fan of London, calling it too crowded and costly. Berlin offers spacious digs and good food, he says, and much more affordably. This has been his first-ever trip to Los Angeles, although if he were to park it in the U.S. I suspect it would be somewhere in Manhattan or Brooklyn. He’s that kind of guy.

Amazingly (or at least curiously), Riley has no American-based agent. He should probably have someone with a 310 phone talking things up and fielding offers, etc.

Even more surprisingly, he says that Vanity Fair hasn’t yet contacted him about posing for their annual Hollywood issue, which usually shoots in November and December. They always photograph the up-and-comers for that issue. Maybe they’re just getting their act together now.

It’s eight months old, yes — probably old news to most of the HE wiseacres — and I remember seeing something like this a while ago…but not this precise one.

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26) will begin a series of journo and industry screenings in mid November, but for those who can’t wait (i.e., persons like myself) it’s getting a special sneak preview at San Francisco’s Castro on Monday, November 5th. Thanks to HE reader Randy Matthews for sending all the info.

Castro theatre marquee, snapped yesterday by Randy Matthews.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw is absolutely correct in his interpretation of this Lion King clip. The lioness Nala “is settling back in a very languorous and inviting manner” as she looks up at Simba, “and then we cut to a close-up on Nala’s face, and that…minxy facial expression of a Disney character who clearly and explicitly wants something that I can’t remember a Disney character wanting before or since: vigorous and protracted penetrative sex.” This is apparently the only animated sex scene in the 80-year history of Disney studios.

For the second time in two days, Hollywood Elsewhere is raising a glass and offering a hearty pat on the back to Ryan Gosling — first for delivering a supple and layered-enough performance in Lars and the Real Girl to persuade Huffington Post guy Nick Antosca that Gosling’s Lars may be a serial killer in sheep’s clothing, and secondly for exiting the set of Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones one day before the start of principal photography over “creative differences.”

Ryan Gosling; Peter Jackson

The story obviously won’t be complete until somebody divulges the particulars, but anyone who tells the notoriously unrestrained and full-of-himself Jackson to go fly a kite gets a thumbs-up from this corner on general principle.

Mark Wahlberg has replaced Gosling; shooting starts today in Pennsylvania.

Slate‘s Kim Masters is reporting that the Gosling walk-off “may lead to litigation, though it’s still unclear what the fight was about.” She also speculates that the incident may be “worrisome” for Gosling, what with ticking off Jackson and DreamWorks honcho Steven Spielberg simultaneously. Ryan, you have earned the loyalty and respect of untold multitudes by telling Jackson where to shove it, including, I’m sure, many people in the industry. Good fellow!

In the view of Huffington Post contributor Nick Antosca, Lars and the Real Girl is “the newest entry in a small subgenre of recent movies: the Endearing Potential Serial Killer Comedy.

“The only other entry in this subgenre is The 40 Year Old Virgin. I laughed about one and a half times when I watched [that film]… the jokes seemed lame and forced and the writing was amateurish, but the big problem was that Steve Carell‘s character just seemed so fucking creepy. That weird, strained stare…that rabbity way of speaking… those little dolls all over his room. I had the distinct feeling that if he got pushed just far enough, he’d snap and put someone in a crawlspace.

Same with Ryan Gosling‘s moustachioed, vaguely greasy lead character in Lars and the Real Girl. “So Lars is so uncomfortable with human contact that he buys a life-size sex doll made of silicon and weighing as much as a real human to be his girlfriend? Okay. And he brings it to dinner and props it up at the table and calmly talks to it as if it’s talking back, to the alarm of the other dinner guests? Okay. And everyone in the small town decides to pretend that the doll is a real person, because they love Lars so much and humoring his delusion is therapeutic?

“The movie treats Lars if he’s just a little shy, but the hilarious thing is that he’s clearly insane and dangerous. If you’re unhinged enough to believe that a mannequin is actually a human, then you’re probably unhinged enough to convince yourself that a human is actually a mannequin. And then what would be the problem with, say, chopping its head off?

Lars is “the more extreme version of the suspension-of-disbelief problem, already written about pretty much everywhere, that plagues a lot of recent comedies,” Antosca writes. “Catherine Keener and Carell in The 40 Year Old Virgin? Dimly plausible…but a stretch. Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up? Good movie, but no way. Emma Stone and the obese, sociopathic Jonah Hill character in Superbad? Never.

“Judd Apatow…please, no more.”

A voice is telling me Antosca is onto something here. Could this be the beginning of the “Make Lars into a Serial Killer” online movement? Look at that face…look at that moustache. The guy’s a sick deranged fiend. Satan in a flannel shirt! Give him an axe and set him loose upon the town.

If anyone wants to Photoshop any horror film posters with Ryan Gosling front and center, I guarantee I will post them with full credit acknowledgement.

Speaking of ’60s zeitgeist-reflecting movies, here’s the single best moment in one of the most famous and justifiably admired of all the British- produced films of that decade.

Variety‘s Joe Leydon is calling Peter Hedges‘ Dan in Real Life, which had a nationwide sneak preview last night, “gracefully understated and thoroughly engaging…a pleasant surprise.”

With Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche playing 40ish types who who fall inconveniently in love, pic “deftly interlaces heart and humor in a witty, warm and well-observed comedy about the unexpected and inconvenient blooming of romance at the weekend gathering of an extended family.

The film “more than fulfills the promise evidenced in Hedges’ Pieces of April. From a B.O. perspective, his follow-up has the potential to delight a demographically diverse audience, and generate enough favorable word of mouth to register as one of the fall’s true sleepers.

“It’s intended as high praise to note that, in sharp contrast to most other recent American-made laffers, there’s a decidedly European air to Hedges’ effort. Indeed, it’s not at all difficult to imagine, say, Daniel Auteuil in the lead role winningly played here by Carell.”

Last month British director Beeban Kidron (Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason) began shooting Hippie Hippie Shake, about the adventures of Richard Neville, the publisher/editor of a famed counter-culture magazine called Oz that caught the airy-fairy mood and merriment of late ’60s London. (It actually published from ’67 to ’73.) Universal will probably open it sometime in the fall of ’08.

Sienna Miller, Cillian Murphy among anti-war protestors in Beeban Kidron’s Hippie Hippie Shake

Written by Lee Hall and William Nicholson and based on Neville’s same-titled 1996 memoir, the film will focus on (a) the magazine’s general ups and downs, (b) an obscenity trail that resulted from Neville (Cillian Murphy) and colleagues distributing a certain sexually explicit issue, and (c) the relationship between Neville and girlfriend Louise Ferrier (Sienna Murphy).

I’d love to see this Tim Bevan-Eric Fellner production do it right, but haven’t hippie films always been a problem? Isn’t there some kind of curse upon any film trying to reenact or reconstitute that old love beads-slash-Bhagavad Gita-slash- Moody Blues vibe? Isn’t there something immensely difficult if not impossible in trying to make that incense-and-peppermints chemistry seem palatable by the standards of 21st Century culture?

Julie Taymor‘s Across the Universe, Robert Zemeckis‘ Forrest Gump, Oliver Stone‘s The Doors…what other films over the last 15 or 20 years have gone back there? Has any ’60s-era film felt half as authentic as Control does in its recreation of early to late ’70s England?

The potential for hippie-film awfulness is huge. I guess I’m thinking of stinkers like Ernest Thompson‘s 1969 and Rob Cohen‘s A Small Circle fo Friends, and Larry Kasdan‘s decision to chop off the flashback sequence in The Big Chill because (according to legend) everyone looked vaguely silly in their hippie haircuts and tie-dyed T-shirts.

Miller during Hippie Hippie Shake shooting last month

The most in-the-pocket depiction of ’60s vibes and attitudes came from five films — Blow Up, Easy Rider, M.A.S.H. (set in early 1952 Korea but totally informed by Los Angeles hipster attitudes of 15 years hence), Who’ll Stop The Rain? and Platoon.

Note: In the above protest-march photo, three darker-skinned women of an apparent Middle Eastern heritage are visible. This in itself makes Kidron’s film seem slightly inauthentic. People of Middle Eastern ancestry (Indian, Pakistani, Iranian) are quite numerous in greater London today, but their numbers were smaller in the late ’60s plus the strictness of their family and neighborhood culture has always discouraged outside fraternization and cross-fertilization, particularly with those of an anti-traditional counter-culture bent, and particularly among women.

“Most directors do not go on to make one of their best films after receiving their lifetime achievement Oscars,” Dennis Lim‘s 10.21 N.Y. Times piece begins. “But then, most directors do not have the near-legendary stamina and efficiency of Sidney Lumet, who accepted his honorary Academy Award two years ago, turned 83 in June and now has made 44 features in 50 years. His latest, a bracingly bleak crime melodrama called Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (opening Friday in NY and LA), has been upstaging filmmakers less than half his age on the festival circuit this fall.”

Time‘s Lev Grossman orchestrated and presumably edited a q & a discussion between Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel of No Country for Old Men, and director-writers Joel and Ethan Coen, who made the immaculate film version, but he wasn’t allowed to participate verbally. Because McCarthy is extremely press shy, Grossman had to sit on the couch and just listen.

What resulted is an okay thing, but it might have been better with a pushy journalist asking intrusive questions from time to time. An extra pair of editor eyes would have helped as far as the photo caption is concerned. On Sunday afternoon, it identified the filmmakers as Joel and Ethan “Cohen.”

In the same issue, Richard Corliss reviews the 11.9 Miramax release and says “it’s a shame” it doesn’t open until after Halloween “since it has a villain crazier, scarier and more implacable than any horror ghoul.

“As incarnated by the great Javier Bardem, Anton Chigurh is a killer from hell who likes to play mind games with his victims before he makes them play dead. How could an ordinary fellow like Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) hope to elude this monster, when Moss has $2 million that Chigurh plans to get back without saying please?

“Even when Joel and Ethan Coen are writing originals, their movies often have the texture and density of novels. For their first official adaptation from a prime American author, they have stayed remarkably faithful to the Cormac McCarthy story, including a detour at the end that will baffle some viewers.

“But the rest is tough, tangy and thrilling — perfect scenes of rising tension, wily escapes, fatal face-offs. There’s one moment (it’s just a phone ringing downstairs) that will churn your blood and turn it cold, and plenty other frissons that could make this the biggest hit of the Coens’ sly career.”