“Because The Nanny Diaries is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Scarlett Johansson‘s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor. With her heavy-lidded eyes and plump lips, Johansson may smolder invitingly in certain roles, but The Nanny Diaries is the latest in a string of films that suggest that this somnolent actress confuses sullen attitudinizing with acting.” — from Stephen Holden‘s 8.24 N.Y. Times review.

Critics who’ve seen Joe Wright‘s Atonement (Focus Features, 12.7) have reacted with breathless superlatives,” according to the Daily Telegraph‘s amiable and usually accommodating David Gritten, “and its showing at the Venice Film Festival and subsequent release will almost certainly catapult Wright into the ranks of world-class film directors.”

Keira Knightley, James McAvoy in Atonement

Oh, yeah? I’ve heard some reactions also and no one’s said anything about viewers doing cartwheels in the lobby. What I’ve heard is “pretty good,” “not at all bad” and “has at least one really good extended tracking shot.”

One also has to consider the unfortunate fact that the two romantic leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, are not only limited talents but have physical traits and tics that can arouse huge irritation at the drop of a hat.

I had trouble with McAvoy in The Last King of Scotland because of his pathetic hunger and eagerness to charm (i.e., that Hugh Grant thing) and his unfortunately large bee-stung nose. I wrote McAvoy off for dead after seeing him in last year’s Starter for 10, a dreadfully cloying and unseductive film. However good Wright’s new film may turn out to be, McAvoy is more or less “over” — he had his fifteen minutes in ’06, and the world has moved on.

I wrote Knightley off two years ago as an overpraised and under-talented actress who has that flirty thing down but lacks an essential inner aliveness, that river-of- feeling quality that all good actresses have.

What is the deal with Hollywood Wiretap? The front-page layout has been whacked for two days now, and when you write editor Tom Tapp to ask what’s up the e-mail bounces right back. HE has gone through brief shutdowns and weirdnesses over the last three years, but never for two days straight….c’mon. Update: Hollywood Wiretap was finally up and looking like its old self as of 10:30 pm this evening.

“I think this will resonate,” Resurrecting The Champ director- writer Rod Lurie has told the Pasadena Weekly‘s Carl Kozlowski. “I think the movie is about a group of people, journalists, who police themselves like no other profession. No other group is as vigilant about maintaining its honor and that’s what I like. Journalists do mea culpas all the time.”

Lurie “thinks” his film is about self-policing journalists? What happened here is that sometimes people say “I think” when they really mean “this is how it is.” The prob- lem came with the editing of the article. Any journalist or editor who knows about making quotes and subjects sound right would have removed that second “think.” I think the Pasadena Weekly should have thought this one through.

It’s still a toss-up between The Nannie Dairies (67, 30, 12) and War (56, 39 and 8) for the #1 newbie slot this weekend. Mr. Bean’s Holiday (72,27, 7)…modest, under$10 million. Rod Lurie ‘s Resurrecting the Champ is at 67, 25 and 2. The overall winner will be Superbad with a three-day tally of somewhere north of $20 million.

I asked a Focus Features publicist earlier today to explain exactly what had prompted the MPAA’s ratings board to give Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution an NC-17 rating. The official statement blamed “some explicit sexuality” but what was the actual depicted offense or offenses? The publicist declined to be specific but used terms like “hot,” “fucking sexy,” “aggressively sexual” and the like. He also sent over a statement from Focus honcho and Lust, Caution co-writer James Schamus that said Focus Features “accepts the MPAA’s NC-17 rating without protest.”

Described in certain circles as “an erotic espionage drama,” Lust, Caution will open in NYC on 9.28 and in L.A. in on 10.5. It’s a Notorious-like drama, based on a short story by Eileen Change, about a young Chinese woman (Tang Wei) — who begins an affair an older Chinese collaborator (Tony Leung) in order to pass along his secrets to authorities so they can bust him.

In the film’s production notes, says Variety, Schamus has “likened the lead femme character to Maria Schneider‘s role in Last Tango in Paris, another sexually explicit pic that received an X rating for its 1973 release and was subsequently rated NC-17 for a homevideo reissue.”

Oh, I get it. The NC-17 rating is about something “to stick in your weah, my deah.” What other Tango parallel could Schamus be alluding to? Savoring the eating of a dead rat’s asshole because it tastes good with mayonnaise?

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein managed to dig up a quite from a Focus Features rep that alluded to the MPAA having had problems with numerous “pelvic thrusts.”

I’ve already expressed my concerns and suspicions about The Heartbreak Kid (Dreamamount, 10.5), the Ben Stiller-Farrelly brothers comedy that appears to have had problems (i.e., issues of estrangement, respectful disagreements) with Elaine May‘s 1972 original and thereby gone its own way.

Whoooo…gloomy Toronto, darkness and shadows, such long faces, etc. What does it say about our times and our culture that a big-deal film festival is in such a downer mood? One of the most despairing movies being screened at Toronto is a real drink-from-the-dregs, life-can- definitely-suck story about post-traumatic stress syndrome, currents of futility and rage in young people, middle-aged alcoholism, a guy walking around with hooks instead of hands, economic hurt, infidelity, etc. Why can’t there be more in the way of positive portraits?

The fall and rise of Tom Cruise over the past two years, as recalled by N.Y. Daily News reporter John Clark. This article is basically saying that the let-him-have-it media pile-on that made Cruise into a target beginning with Oprah-couch in May ’05 pretty much peaked last summer and is now on the wane.

I’ve made a preliminary list of 55 films worth seeing at the Toronto Film Festival (9.6 to 9.15). I’ve relied upon the usual criteria — (a) decent, good or strong advance buzz/reviews or (b) a film having been directed by a someone whose past work I respect (and who isn’t considered to be somewhat over the hill), or at least by someone whose output can be called “interesting” enough so that you can’t blow off his/her latest without feeling a bit guilty.

I’ve have seen 11 of these prior to the festival. The rest I’ve only heard or read about (or read the scripts for). If you’re attending the festival as a civilian, you can’t go too wrong if you focus on these (although if you ignore everything else you’re sure to miss the four or five out-of-the-blue surprises that always pop through). I’ve underlined the ones I’ve seen and totally swear by, or have heard only the very best things about. They’re listed in five groups of ten and one of five.

I’m going to wind up seeing maybe, at the very most, 25 or 30 of these. I’ve been begging L.A. publicists to show see whatever they can in advance, but most of them aren’t coming through. The parenthetical numbers at the end of each graph refer to films I’ve ever seen or expect to have seen by the time the festival begins.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Christian Mungiu), Across the Universe (Julie Taymor), Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who (Paul Crowder, Murray Lerner), Angel (Francois Ozon), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik), Atonement (Joe Wright), The Babysitters (David Ross), The Band’s Visit (Bikur Hatizmoret, .Eran Kolirin), Battle for Haditha> (Nick Broomfield), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet). (1)

The Brave One (Neil Jordan), Captain Mike Across America (Michael Moore), Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen), Control (Anton Corbijn), Death Defying Acts (Gillian Armstrong), Le Deuxieme Souffle (Alain Corneau), Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur), Emotional Arithmetic (Paolo Barzman), George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero). (2)

The Girl in the Park (David Auburn), Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (Scott Hicks), Heavy Metal in Baghdad (Eddy Moretti, Suroosh Alvi), I’m Not There (Todd Haynes), I’ve Never Had Sex… (Robert Kennedy), In Bloom (Vadim Perelman), In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis), Into the Wild (Sean Penn), Joy Division (Grant Gee), Juno (Jason Reitman). (2)

Lou Reed’s Berlin (Julian Schnabel), Lust, Caution (Ang Lee), Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach), Married Life (Ira Sachs), Man from Plains (Jonathan Demme), Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient (Todd McCarthy), No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen), Nothing Is Private (Alan Ball), The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona), Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case (Andrei Nekrasov). (3)

Redacted (Brian De Palma), Religulous: A Conversation with Bill Maher and Larry Charles (panel), Rendition (Gavin Hood), Reservation Road (Terry George), Run, Fat Boy, Run (David Schwimmer), The Savages (Tamara Jenkins), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel), The Shock Doctrine (Alfonso Cuaron, Jonas Cuaron, Naomi Klein), Sleuth (Kenneth Branagh), Terror’s Advocate (Barbet Schroeder). (4)

Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings), Trumbo (David Askin), The Walker (Paul Schrader), Weirdsville (Allan Moyle), Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy). (1)

With 11 under my belt by the time Toronto happens, I’ll have 44 to choose from. I’ll almost certainly miss seeing 15 of this group if not more, so now I have to decide which among the chosen are doubtful or expendable. Not fun. Not enjoyable. I’d rather just see them all.

If this story about Martin Scorsese abandoning plans to direct Frankie Machine turns out to be true, my heart will survive the disappointment. The Paramount project, based on Don Winslow‘s “The Winter of Frankie Machine,” is about an aging hit man (to have been played by Robert De Niro) who’s hounded out of a respectable retirement as the target of a hit himself.

As I wrote last June 22nd, “I really can’t stand the idea of watching another movie about another hit man. I’m hit-manned out, although this one sounds more like a meditation on old age and the end of the road. The real problem is that De Niro is looking way too bulky and roly-poly these days. It’s good that Scorsese will be doing another mob movie, but he needs to summon the courage to tell De Niro that he’s over the hill and has lost his mojo. He’s eaten too many plates of rich food and gotten too soft and jowly….he looks like an old Russian wheat farmer.”

I spoke yesterday with Jeff Garlin, the director, writer and star of I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (IFC First Take), which finally opens limited on 9.5.07. “Finally” because fans of this film — an agreeably witty and poignant character comedy in the general vein of Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty — have been waiting to see it in theatres since it played and scored at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, about 16 months ago.

After catching it a couple of months later at at the L.A. Film Festival I called Garlins’ film “a Big Fat Greek Wedding for witty fat guys, only without the wedding or the slobbery cattle-yard relatives.”

It’s a sharply written (here and there genius-level) comedy-drama about a witty, likably humble Chicago comedian named James (Garlin) who lives with his mom but badly wants a soulmate girlfriend. Vaguely fortyish, James is saddled with a yen for slurping down junk food late at night (which costs him in the romantic department), and he’s pretty good at getting shot down or turned down or fired.

But as gloomy as James sometimes gets (and for good reason), he’s tenacious in a shuffling, good-natured, comme ci comme ca way, and you can’t help but feel for the guy and want him to succeed.

Director-producer-writer Garlin — best known for his ongoing role as Larry David’s manager in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm — and his fellow performers (Bonnie Hunt, Sarah Silverman and a team of Chicago-based actor pals) are all top-notch. And in an unassuming little-movie way with the emphasis on spirit and tone and quirky-hip humor, Cheese works.

One thing: The fact that there’s no Cheese website doesn’t exactly help matters. IFC and Weinstein almost never pay for websites, but Garlin does pretty well and lives a fairly flush life, so he could obviously afford to pay for it himself….but he hasn’t. He could get a decent site designed and launched for less than $10 grand. If you the reader had a good little film you’d made and nourished and brought along step by step, wouldn’t you make sure it had a website one way or another? I sure as shit would.