Curious as it may sound, I have to take care of some things that require leaving the bunker. Irksome but necessary. Back on the case by 4:30 pm eastern.

L.A. Times writer Rachel Abramowitz recently did a dual interview with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman about The Bucket List (Warner Bros., 12.25) and various notions related to the film’s subject, which is nominally death but primarily the things that give life value. In so doing she got three good Nicholson quotes about (in this order) life, religion and smoking.

Quote #1: “Because of living a checkered life, I have a lot of different…views about it. Really, what you’d better know is, you’re in the laps of the gods about it all. I’m not an adventurer and a traveler like [Freeman] is…I am kind of a home person that way, and I traveled a lot earlier on in my life, but still there’s plenty of places I want to go to. There are endless things you want to do, books you wanted to read, corners you wanted to clean, this you wanted to get right, that thing you wanted to put right with, it is endless.”

Quote #2: “I’m not anti-religious in any way, but I like ‘The End of Faith’ [by Sam Harris] because they just took Galileo off the heretics list. There are certain areas where I’m not going to challenge anyone’s sense of mystery, but I don’t want reason to be held back by someone’s idea of fundamentalism, and that happens….you can’t go on behaving as though the world is flat.”

Quote #3: “Look, nobody should smoke. It is not so much that you fear that moment when somebody comes in and says, ‘That’s it. You’re dead. You smoked too much.’ Well, that’s not the real fear. The real fear is going through now the process and thinking, ‘I’m dying of stupidity.’ This is the self-recrimination about it.”

“As for There Will Be Blood, about which you will be reading much more in the pages of the L.A. Weekly over the coming weeks, I will say only this: There are great films (like No Country For Old Men) and then there are films that send shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake a claim on a place in the canon.

“Often, such vanguard works fail to be fully understood or appreciated at the moment they first appear, as some of the initial reviews that greeted Psycho, 2001 and Bonnie and Clyde attest. There Will Be Blood belongs in their company, and I consider myself fortunate to belong to a group with the foresight to recognize it in its own moment.” — from L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas‘s 12.9 rant against certain interpretations voiced by myself, Variety‘s Anne Thompson and Kris Tapley and The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil about last Sunday’s Los Angeles Film Critic Association voting.

Hey, how come Foundas didn’t rap David Poland‘s knuckles also? Variety critic Robert Koehler complained last Monday that the MCN know-it-all wrote a LAFCA-voting interpretation that was along the same lines as what Thompson and I had penned.

There Will Be Blood is certainly a seismic piece of work that’s been generating temblors and aftershocks, but it’s also something of a sick puppy. It embodies “diseased greatness” (and yes, I realize this is the third or fourth time I’m used this term since coining it last month), but surely Foundas and Koehler understand there are groundwater reasons why a critic like Time‘s Richard Corliss would call it an “audience punisher.” A woman friend wrote the other day to confess that she “hated it and felt trapped in my seat…I just wanted to leave immediately after and never sit through it again. Which I guess translates into Best Film of 2007…lol!”

I’m not calling this “odd,” but it’s certainly worth noting that two Warner Bros. releases opening within three weeks of each other — Kirsten Sheridan‘s August Rush (11.21) and Francis Lawrence ‘s I Am Legend (12.14) — appear to have used the exact same colonial-era or 19th Century townhouse building on Washington Square Park north (a building or two east of Fifth Avenue and a stone’s throw from the Washington Square arch) for a key location in their respective films.

Either the brick building on the lower right or the one right next to it. (I think.)

If not, they used two buildings adjoining each other or certainly no more than two buildings apart. And both very close to the Arch with shots in both films capturing the exact same neighborhood perspective.

A fair portion of the action in I Am Legend happens inside the brick-facade, three-story townhouse in which Will Smith‘s “Robert Neville” character lives, with the camera catching sight of the nearby Arch at least a couple of times. In August Rush, Jonathan Rhys Meyer and Keri Russell‘s characters meet at a party in either the same building or one very close. They go up to the roof and talk and eventually make love (which results in Russell getting pregnant with a kid who is played later in the film by Freddie Highmore).

I don’t know when I Am Legend and August Rush were shot in Manhattan, but it can be presumed either late ’06 or winter-spring ’07. If their schedules touched, one imagines that the location scouts for the higher-budgeted I Am Legend tipped the indie-level August Rush team about sharing the building. Maybe some kind of deal was finagled in which the Rush guys were able to come in and use the location for a day or two just before (or just after) Legend used it. If no such arrangement was made, fine…but it’s a hell of a coincidence.

I would make calls about this, but I’ve got enough aggravation. I know how it works when you try to get info from below-the-liners, who are always terrified about talking to the press. It can sometimes take a couple of days before anyone will call you back, much less level with you…and for what? I know what I know. If anyone knows anything beyond the visually obvious, please get in touch. Thank you.

Indiana Jones fans have been scrutinizing the bridge of the nose on the skull in the poster for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Dreamamount, 5.22.08). Look closely and you’ll see what appears to be an “alien face.” (Think “Puck” in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) Pretty damn bald of the marketing guys, no? This is naturally triggering talk that outer-space guys factor into the plot as an “extra kick” on top of the bad-guy Russians (one of whom is played by Cate Blanchett).

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull/alien crop from official release poster

The 2007 Critics Choice Award nominees from the Broadcast Film Critics Association. Due respect but no comment. Wait, here’s one: If the BFCA finds the courage to not give their Best Supporting Actress award to Amy Ryan but to I’m Not There‘s Cate Blanchett instead, they’ll be at least partially redeemed in my eyes.

Not that the BFCA needs to care one iota about my judgments in this matter. I’m just saying that the Amy Ryan thing has become a slight issue (critics groups falling over like synchronized bowling pins, one after another), and the BFCA has a real chance to show that it’s about more than just shameless kowtowing.

“Possibly the most striking thing about The Kite Runner, opening Friday, is that the film’s lead characters are all Muslims, but not one of them is a terrorist, convenience store owner, cab driver or woman wearing an all-enclosing burqa.” — from a 12.12.07 Newsday article by Lewis Beale.

A “Lunch with David” interview with Control‘s Sam Riley, posted on 12.10, was live today but went dead this evening. Let’s forget it, shall we?

There Will Be Blood “becomes an increasingly violent (and comical) struggle in which each man humiliates the other, leading to the murderous final scene, which gushes as far over the top as one of Daniel [Plainview]’s wells. The scene is a mistake, but I think I know why it happened.

“[Paul Thomas] Anderson started out as an independent filmmaker, with Hard Eight (’96) and Boogie Nights (’97). In Blood, he has taken on central American themes and established a style of prodigious grandeur. Yet some part of him must have rebelled against canonization. The last scene is a blast of defiance — or perhaps of despair. But, like almost everything else in the movie, it’s astonishing.” — from David Denby‘s review in teh 12.17 New Yorker.

After the fifth or sixth Best Supporting Actress critics award for Amy Ryan came in, I began to shake my head. Then I threw up my hands. Scratch a critics awards group and they’ll all feign ignorance or indifference about the choices of the other groups, but c’mon…every last critic in the U.S. of A. group is in love with a vivid but broad caricature of a reprehensible low-life? AmyRyanAmyRyanAmyRyanAmyRyan, etc.

Congratulations to the San Francisco Film Critics Circle for having the character and conviction to name Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as their Best Picture of 2007. As opposed to, for example, the divided Chicago Film Critics who put up Zodiac‘s David Fincher as a Best Director contender but lacked the intestinal fortitude to nominate Zodiac — a film that deserves to be honored as much if not more than any other ’07 film — for Best Picture.