This 12.23 N.Y. Times piece by Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann, called “Holiday on Thin Ice,” is a pseudo-transcription of an argument Apatow and his actress-wife have every year. Their discussion has two themes: (a) Apatow is a mildly inconsiderate, passively selfish gift-giver and (b) Mann can be testy and grasping when she puts her mind to it.
And as long as we’re talking back-and-forth dialogue, it goes without saying that “Holiday on Thin Ice” doesn’t begin to compare to “Dont Have a Cow, Man,” that famous exchange of e-mails between Apatow and Mark Brazill, the creator of That ’70s Show, over Brazill’s belief that Apatow stole an idea he had for a TV comedy series called “The Grungies,” about a Seattle grunge band shot in the light-hearted slapstick mode of “The Monkees.” (It helps to know that Topher Grace was one of the stars of That ’70s Show.)

Stephen Sondheim‘s Sweeney Todd numbers “are more like art songs than show tunes, attempts at Brechtian insight and scale, which I presume is Sondheim’s design: Anyone looking for hummable toe-tappers of the ‘chicks and geese and ducks better scurry’ variety should go play elsewhere. Only a shallow person would expect an actual melody to accompany lyrics of such nihilist significance as ‘There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it’s filled with people who are filled with shit/ And the vermin of the world inhabit it.’ This is complex, important music, people! Not for simple, cheerful folk by any means.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Salon review.

Over my decades of watching and loving movies, I’ve had a big problem with one and only one cinematographer — Janusz Kaminski. He’s obviously a widely-admired pro, but I’ve never liked and never will like those bleachy, sunny flood-lit shots that he’s put into so many Steven Spielberg films. When I hear he’s the dp I think right away, “Uh-oh, here we go with the milky desaturated colors again.” It’s just hit me that he’s a side reason that I’m not as big a fan of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as I could be. That said, I love his work on Jerry Maguire.

14 cities (including Boston!) are being treated to a special midnight sneak of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood on Saturday, 12.29. PTA put together this special “haircut” video for fans to announce the sneaks. The Paramount Vantage release opens in NY & LA on Wednesday, 12.26.

The updated Movie City News list of journo/critic picks: No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Once. Is anyone taking this in? Two films that have long been considered dead in terms of potential Best Picture consideration — Zodiac and Once — are, in the view of dozens of top-dog writers whose lives are devoted to evaluating movies as best they can, among the top five of the year. Hats off to the Zeligs, go-alongers and Academy fuddy-duds who turned their backs months ago.

Two Huffington Post-ings about the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy situation, one from tabloid editor Bonnie Fuller (yes, Bonnie Fuller) full of moral outrage, another from New York comedian Andy Borowitz.

HE reader James Kent just wrote the following: “With the whole WGA strike going on, what impact do you think that could have on Best Picture nominations this year? As the entire academy nominates Best Picture, I’m wondering if there might be enough bad blood among SAG, WGA and DGA members that they might steer away from a big studio production in favor of the little guy?”
In other words, if it comes down to a choice between nominating a deserving big-budgeter like Sweeney Todd or American Gangster and a deserving mid-level or low-budgeter, will the rank-and-file vote against the expensive movie as a way of saying eff-you to the big studios and the producers they’re in league with? Sounds too sweeping and simplistic to me. If this turns out to be any kind of factor (which I’m doubtful of), then yes, Atonement, American Gangster and Sweeney Todd could conceivably lose votes. But which prospective Best Picture nominees are truly independent and unsullied by big-studio lucre?

“This is one of the few years where it is easy to imagine the DGA nominations being off of Oscar’s Top 5 by at least two directors,” David Poland wrote in his most recent “20 Weeks to Oscar” column. I’ve read this sentence five times and the sucker won’t ring true. Let’s try it this way: “This is one of the few years in which it’s easy to imagine the DGA’s Best Director nominees being, in at least two instances, different than the directors of the five most likely Best Picture nominees.”
Cut to the chase and Poland is more or less saying that while Jason Reitman‘s Juno and Joe Wright‘s Atonement‘s are likely Best Picture nominees, Reitman and Wright haven’t quite shown the chops and passion one associates with a sturdy and unassailable Best Director Oscar nominee.
Rewriting Poland again, he says the following: “Due respect, but if you have (a) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s work in There Will Be Blood, (b) Julian Schnabel‘s work in The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, (c) a living legend like Sidney Lumet delivering, at age 83, a vibrant, rough film in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, (d) Todd Haynes bending time and personality in I’m Not There, and (e) Ridley Scott delivering the highest caliber of commercial cinema in American Gangster, is the DGA really going to go for a Joe Wright or a Jason Reitman?
“Moreoever, will they embrace a first-timer like Tony Gilroy? Can anyone miss the stride that Sean Penn, who has always been a very serious director, however you feel about the output, has made with Into The Wild?”
The thing about Penn and Into The Wild is this: having made a personal best (which he unquestionably has) doesn’t necessarily mean that Into The Wild, spirited and reaching as it may be, is finally a classic, world-class, power-punch achievement. The bottom line is that I don’t believe Penn gave me the whole-hog truth about Chris McCandless. The movie gave me his view of the guy and that’s fine…but it didn’t feel like enough.
McCandless could have lived and thrived and had a life that was about more than just saying “no” to his parents’ values, but he pissed it away because he was too arrogant to own a decent map of the area where his rusty bus was located — a map he could have used to save himself when he wanted to get back to civilization. And I don’t have any respect for a guy who refuses to write or call his parents for as long as McCandless did. He was brave and strong in some respects, but in others he was an asshole. And that’s fine. Everyone’s tangled up in this way or that. But at the end of the day this portrait of McCandless left me feeling a little distant.

“Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a truly fascinating column. The thrust of her 12.23 entry is that Bill Clinton, for the strangest and most tangled-up of reasons, may be subconsciously sabotaging Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign.
The seed of this suspicion is a friend of the Clintons having told Dowd that “for the first time since the Marc Rich pardon, Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.”
“Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help?,” Dowd wonders. “Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?
“When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics?
“Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well. ‘They’re not Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who had jealousy as the lifeblood of their marriage,’ said one writer who has studied the pair. ‘The lifeblood of their marriage is crisis, coming to each other’s rescue.'”
Exploding cigars! Reverse blueprints! Sturm und drang! Terrific stuff.

“There is also a growing tension between critics — who take film seriously as art and are increasingly scornful of the vituperative blog culture — and Oscar pundits, who with their wacky statistical analysis come off more like breathless racetrack tipsters than film admirers. The root of all this evil, of course, is that everyone writes entirely too much about the Oscars (my newspaper included). With all those special issues and Oscar blogs to fill, the occasional astute observations are drowned out by the 24/7 blather.” — from a 12.18 Patrick Goldstein “Big Picture” column that I should have acknowledged earlier.

Sweeney Todd is not only consumed by vengeance but goes mad with it, finally destroying himself and taking others down with him. In a way the visual signature of his derangement is his white shock of skunk hair. It’s interesting to note that the last movie character who had the same skunk ‘do was also obsessed by vengeance, so lost in rage that he’s prepared to sacrifice his life, the lives of his crew members and even his ship to find and destroy his nemesis.

Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd; Gregory Peck as Captian Ahab in John Huston’s Moby Dick

On top of which both men raged and obsessed sometime in the early to mid 19th Century. Has anyone ever tried to make a musical out of Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick?
There’s one more parallel. Both Sweeney Todd and John Huston‘s Moby Dick (1956) both have monochromatic color palettes. In Moby Dick, in fact, Huston and cinematographer Oswald Morris made the first color film with a subdued drained hue, an effect that was achieved in the printing process by blending the color negative with a “grey” (black and white) negative. The idea was to emulate the Currier and Ives etchings of the period.
I only wish I could find a decent color closeup of Peck and his Ahab skunk hair.

I clicked, I saw, I chortled…a little lame but not too bad…”you, sir!”