“Long movies have always been with us,” observes Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern. “Some have been follies (Heaven’s Gate — 219 minutes) while others have been glories (Abel Gance’s silent classic Napoleon — 330 minutes). Indeed, I was a staunch — some might say dogged — supporter of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which runs 188 minutes, though I admired just as intensely his Punch-Drunk Love, which clocked in at 95 minutes.

“And earlier this month I came down firmly — some might say heedlessly — on the side of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, an ultra-long Western (160 minutes), with an ultra-long title (10 words), that struck me as consistently interesting, thoughtful and entertaining.

“I didn’t expect to fall for it. To the contrary, I showed up at the screening with a heavy cargo of dread, since the production had already provoked well-publicized battles between Warner Bros., who’d wanted it cut to conventional length, and its producer and, yes, co-star, Brad Pitt, who opposed making cuts, and prevailed. But movie going is full of surprises.

“In my own experience, enough is when a film fills its running time with dramatic energy, originality and variety — with the stuff of life — and too much is when it doesn’t. If long movies make us squirm or yawn, it’s not because they aren’t short, but because they aren’t full.”

Sex usually sells, particularly when you’re looking to attract geek fanboys. And it’s especially alluring when you’re talking about a bare-breasted Angelina Jolie slinking around with nothing to keep her warm except a long serpent’s tail, which is what her “Grendel’s mother” character does in the red-band trailer for Robert Zemeckis‘s Beowulf (Paramount, 11.16). And so there are bus-stop ads currently emphasizing this.

Bus stop ad at Santa Monica Blvd. near Fairfax Ave. — snapped Monday, 10.22.07, 10:05 pm

But if you look closely you’ll notice that Jolie is wearing some kind of yellow digital body-suit over her left breast. (With a sharp clean line, as if she’s wearing an Olympic bathing suit.) I realize she’s adorned in some kind of gold body paint in the film, but the image in the red-band trailer is…I don’t know, more anatomically life-like or something. Something to do with that dripping-wet-bod effect.

The yellow breast-covering adheres, obviously, to Paramount’s intention to release the film with a PG-13 rating. But I think it’s odd to send out conflicting messages. Come see Angelina’s exposed boobs, the poster is basically saying, only they’re not really exposed because we need the family trade also. Implies one thing, does another.

So it’s finally been decided that paying audiences will henceforth be shown Wes Anderson‘s Hotel Chevalier short prior to his Darjeeling Limited feature, as it always should have been. Due respect, but I’ve no clear idea what Fox Searchlight marketing chief Nancy Utley means when she says “we thought it would be too challenging to moviegoers to be exposed to the short in theaters right at the beginning of the run…we wanted to make sure The Darjeeling Limited got established first as a movie.”

Variety‘s Derek Elley is no fan of Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs, which he saw at the London Film Festival. Calling it “talky, back-bendingly liberal but also deeply patriotic,” he says it “plays like all the serious footnotes scripter du jour Matthew Michael Carnahan left out of The Kingdom. Redford’s first helming chore in seven years, and his most directly political pic yet, amounts to a giant cry of ‘Americans, get engaged!’ wrapped in a star-heavy discourse that uses a lot of words to say nothing new.”

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.