Leaving aside OTX’s suggestion that Hollywood distributors need to cough up for a more specific and intensive marketing survey system, there’s a bothersome sentence in Michael Cieply‘s 10.28 N.Y. Times piece about Hollywood’s flooded market for serious prestige dramas.

Cieply writes that “you can’t blame a potential customer who can’t see the difference between In the Valley of Elah from Warner Independent Pictures and Grace Is Gone from the Weinstein Company. Both are about dead Iraq veterans.” Correction: knuckle-draggers who haven’t yet mastered the art of going online and reading about upcoming films might be confused, but I don’t see how this would be a problem for others.

I don’t care that much about baseball, but if I wanted to know about a particular team or player, I could and would find out everything within a matter of four or five minutes, no prob. We’re talking minimal effort for anyone with a junior high school education.

Is Ciepley saying that the United States become a nation of dumb beasts, grazing on a sloping hillside and going “baaah”? Is it really that difficult to investigate the differences and similarities between the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway? Is it that much of a hassle to do a Google search on Grace is Gone and then go a Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic search on In The Valley of Elah?

The Film Experience/Naked Gold Man blogger Nathan R. says there’s an apparent shortage of potential Best Supporting Actress candidates. I don’t see what he’s talking about — there are at least seven strong candidates right now.

Nathan is figuring Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone (likely), Jennifer Jason Leigh in Margot at the Wedding (doubtful), Jennifer Connelly in Reservation Road (forget it), Leslie Mann in Knocked Up (a reach), Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (definitely) Kelly Macdonald in No Country For Old Men (a good suggestion — McDonald has a small role but she wrings exceptional feleing and presence), Cate Blanchett‘s “Bob Dylan” perf in I’m Not There (without question), and Saorsie Ronan in Atonement (absolutely).

To these I would add Vanessa Redgrave in Atonement and In The Valley of Elah‘s Susan Sarandon.

Redgrave, Sarandon, Blanchett, Ronan, Tomei, McDonald and Ryan make seven. What other serious contenders should be added to the list?

Having seen about a half hour’s worth of New Line’s The Golden Compass, Fox 411’s Roger Friedman said today “it will be the big holiday smash hit for which Hollywood is so desperate, without a doubt. It’s full of fantastic animals, all busy shape-shifting, talking and clawing their way to the front of the screen. From what I’ve seen, not only kids but adults too will want to go back and see The Golden Compass a second time for the menagerie alone.”

Is Friedman saying that even special-effects-hating, CG-animal-despising movie columnists who felt tortured by the Lord of the Rings series will want to go back and see it a second time, etc.? Having liked The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I’m hoping this atheist-minded CG children’s epic will be as good, but let’s take a couple of steps backward and remind ourselves that no one can tell anything about a movie from watching a half hour’s worth….nothing.

Anyone hip to marketing tricks knows that 30-minute product reels can be the equivalent of fool’s gold for early-word-spreading journalists. Product reels for Gangs of New York and World Trade Center hoodwinked several Cannes journalists into thinking the full-length films would be better than what they eventually turned out to be. I was once shown a 30-minute portion of Charles Shyer‘s The Affair of the Necklace and came out thinking, “Wow…could be Barry Lyndon-level!”

The most likely reason that J.J. Abrams doesn’t want William Shatner in the new Star Trek movie (despite having hired Leonard Nimoy to make an appearance as Spock) isn’t hard to figure. Ever since playing an amusingly wackjob version of himself in Robert Burnett‘s Free Enterprise nine years ago, Shatner has basically been a self-satirizing comic figure — the older eccentric actor who doesn’t realize (and wouldn’t care if he did realize) that he’s completely insane. This persona has paid off for Shatner in numerous ways, but one of the offshoots of the nutter persona has been the surrendering of the authority and heroic gravitas that he once had when his name and face were synonymous with Cpt. James Kirk.

After quoting ex-CIA Valerie Plame‘s thoughts about who might portray her in a film based on her book “Fair Game” (i.e., “I just hope it’s someone with intelligence and good skills…that’s a lot to ask in Hollywood”), New York‘s “Vulture” column quips that Plame apparently “hasn’t yet heard that Kate Beckinsale will play her in a movie.”

They’re referring to Rod Lurie‘s currently-lensing Nothing But The Truth, except Beckinsdale plays a Judith Miller-type character — a younger Miller who’s marred with kids. The Plame character is played by Vera Farmiga.

Update: Having read this item earlier this afternoon, Lurie sent along the following: “It seems that every press report I have read about my new film Nothing But The Truth refer to it alternately as Judith Miller or Valerie Plame-inspired. It would be coy not to fess up that the Miller incarceration provided the seed for my film, but, really, the movie has its own story.

“The real dynamic of the film is what would happen if the reporter and the screwed-over subject of an article she wrote, had young children that went to school together. I’m not going to get into the specifics of the story here or anywhere, but anybody looking for a recounting of the Wilson-Plame affair should go see the film version of Fair Game once it is shot. (I’ll be one of them). By the way, there are many great actresses to play both Judy and Valerie when that film comes to fruition. Judy could be portrayed by Sigourney Weaver or Judy Davis and Plame (I am basing this on the resemblance) by Naomi Watts or Robin Wright Penn.”

New York magazine’s Mark Jacobson referees a fascinating phone conversation between former Harlem heroin dealer Frank Lucas and Lucas’s onetime rival Nicky Barnes. Denzel Washington plays Lucas as a flamboyant but tightly disciplined businessman in American Gangster, and Cuba Gooding plays Barnes as a full-of-himself superfly.

Jacobson: “Which one of you guys had the best dope?” Lucas: “Mark, here you go! Stirring shit up. Man, I had the best dope in the world. I had 98 to 100 percent pure.” Barnes: “Frank had a nice package, no doubt. I had to get a pen and a pad and mediate my stuff. But when you took the mix out, my thing was close to his. Close enough for somebody not to wait on one when they could get the other. Frank, you were mostly on 116th Street, right?” Lucas: “Yeah.” Barnes: “Well, I had powder in all five boroughs. Not just uptown.” Lucas: “You were big, Nick, all over.”

Denzel Washington as Lucas; Cuba Gooding

I was talking with a friend yesterday about scenes in movies that aren’t intended to be funny, but which some of us laugh at anyway. Because we have a perverse sense of humor, if not an out-and-out cruel one at times. I’ve repeated this observation often since I began writing this column in October ’98, but the cruelest jokes are always the funniest. (Mort Sahl said it.) In any event, two of my personal faves came to mind yesterday.

One, the crow attack upon the school children in Hitchcock’s The Birds. I only started to see the humor after my kids started laughing at it, which first happened when they were 12 or 13. These kids are so fake in every which way that none of us are laughing at actual children being terrified by predatory birds — we’re laughing at bad child actors being pecked and scratched to death by CGI birds…there’s a difference. Okay, I don’t exactly “laugh” when I see this scene. I smile and chuckle and say to myself, “Get ’em!”

Two, the moment when the lights go out on Charles Bronson in The Great Escape, when he’s on the little wheelcart in the escape tunnel. His character, Danny the “tunnel king,” has been grappling with claustrophobia all through the film, so it’s not surprising when he’s alone in the tunnel and suddenly everything goes black that he freaks out and goes “whuhhnn!!” I’ve had this reaction for decades because I don’t believe it. It’s too sudden of an emotional shift for the character — Bronson’s moans are too broad. I only know I’ve been getting a good cackle out of this for years.

There’s another moment in The Great Escape that I don’t find “funny,” but gives me great satisfaction all the same. It’s the moment when “Ives” (Angus Lennie) finally loses it and is shot to death by the Germans as he tries to scale the barbed-wire fence.

Staring at poor little Ives as he hangs lifelessly from the barbed wire fence.

I despise the broad and very calculated theatrical manner in which Lennie performs — the over-sold Scottish accent, always trying to angle everything the cute Scottish way (i.e., the inflection he gives to the line, “Are you there, Hilz?”), that little lopsided smile, the fact that he stands about 4′ 10″, etc. My feelings are such that I don’t distinguish between Lennie’s acting style and the character. I only know that when Ives takes several machine-gun bullets in his back, I always feel the urge to stand up in my living room, raise my fist in the air and go “yes!”

Will the retooled, slightly shorter version of Richard Kelly‘s Southland Tales, which is opening on 11.14 via Samuel Goldwyn, pass muster as a satisfying surreal experience? Will it at least end up as a favorite in the cult movie section at Blockbuster?

The reason I tend to mistrust and sometimes avoid trippy, off-the-planet movies is that it’s a very tall order to create an alternate universe that hangs together on its own terms.

Movies with a deconstructionist attitude that invest in oddball imaginings for their own sake (as Terry Gilliam‘s films tend to do) can feel like a drag after 15 minutes if they haven’t been fortified with serious thought. You need a scalpel-like brain, a furious belief system and a unified vision, and sometimes a bent sense of humor thrown in to give it that extra schwing. That diseased-but-refined quality that guys like David Cronenberg, Luis Bunuel, David Lynch, Alex Cox and Ken Russell have dispensed in the past. My favorite all-time trippy movies include Repo Man, Mulholland Drive, Naked Lunch, Mahler, Lost Highway and Scanners.

The second half of the version of Southland Tales that bombed in Cannes 17 months ago was, I felt, pretty remarkable. It was the first half and especially the first 20 or 30 minutes or so that threw most people off. Like Kelly’s Donnie Darko, the recut Tales will probably play better with the under-35s. Every person I saw get up and walk out of that calamitous early-morning screening in Cannes was, I distinctly recall, gray-haired.

The Southland Tales press conference at the Cannes Film Festival — Sunday, 5.21.06.

I called it “a very long throw of a surreal wackazoid football — a stab at a great, sprawling GenX apocalyptic nightmare about an Orwellian police state running things a couple of years from now.

“I liked portions of Kelly’s film here and there (especially the musical numbers and the wild fantasy stuff that kicks in toward the end), but mostly it felt like a struggle and a muddle. I’m sorry to say this because I think Kelly is one of the best younger filmmakers around, but this is the kind of difficult film that only an audacious visionary could make.”

In an interview with N.Y. Times contributor Dennis Lim, Kelly reveals that “the most significant change in the new cut is a brisk prologue that charts the major developments in the film’s post-nuclear America. Kelly [also] added special effects ($1 million worth) and reordered and tightened scenes (it now runs 2 hours 24 minutes, 19 minutes shorter than the Cannes version).

“The major casualty, lopped off at the studio’s urging, was a subplot with Janeane Garofalo as a general,” Lim writes. Kelly also rerecorded costar Justin Timberlake‘s voice-over so it would sound less sarcastic and more like Martin Sheen‘s narration in Apocalypse Now.

“Kelly’s new cut may be easier to follow,” Lim writes, “but he has not altered the movie’s kaleidoscopic structure or diluted its psychedelic nature. In other words, it’s still far from commercial.”

As I wrote a year and a half ago, “Reservations aside, this is one of those films you have to see just to see how much you can get on the first take. I’m definitely going to take Kelly’s advice and see it a second time.” I’m seeing the new cut this evening, in fact.

“[Last] Friday it became clear to us that management’s plan is to stall the talks until the final hours and divide us with a low-ball eleventh hour offer. This sort of brinkmanship will likely be met by fear, confusion, and even acrimony. All that is natural and expected. Therefore, we must be strong and steadfast in our convictions so that we convey the proper message to our employers, to our allies in the entertainment community, to the industry at large, and to each other: That, as much as we don’t want a strike, we want a bad contract even less.” — from 10.28 letter to general WGA membership from WGA West President Patric Verrone.

Writing about the Wes-and-Owen chat video that went up on Friday night, ABC News columnist Sheila Marikar is calling it a regrettable new form of celebrity spin. Regrettable, in part, because celebrity-controlled internet chats have the potential to diminish the drawing power of the big networks and news stations.

“It used to be that controversy-saddled celebrities sidled up to big-name reporters when they were ready to tell their tales, revamp their public image and revive their careers,” she writes. “Gary Condit came clean to Connie Chung, Monica Lewinsky cried to Barbara Walters, Britney Spears sobbed to Matt Lauer and Paris Hilton pledged philanthropy to Larry King.

But “now that internet video has come into its own, thanks to the popularity of YouTube and the advent of highly produced shows on sites like MySpace, fallen stars have a far more appealing option: Cut the pesky journalist out of the mix and tell all, on their own terms, on the Internet. It’s the ultimate form of image control.”

Right off the top, within the first ten seconds of the trailer for Awake (Weinstein Co., 11.30), Terrence Howard (a doctor) is standing next to Hayden Christensen (a rich guy) and saying to him as they look out at New York harbor, “You’re saving jobs, you’re creating companies …you own half of this city.” Anakin Skywalker (“I need haahlllp!”) owns half of Manhattan? At age 26?

That’s it — I’m out the door. I don’t support movies that depend upon exposition dialogue that’s written as crudely as this. If Howard had said Christensen owns 20% of the city, fine. If he’d said Christensen would own half the city by the time he’s 40, fine. (A stretch, but I’d buy it.) But no — the film has to go for the brass ring with that “own half of this city” line. And because director-writer Joby Harold was foolish and intemperate, he must pay the price.

Awards Daily has taken note of trade ads pushing Robert Zemeckis‘ Beowulf (Paramount, 11.16) for Best Picture as a safety measure should the Academy decide to rule that Beowulf doesn’t qualify for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. I won’t see the completed film until Friday, but I’ve seen a reel and as far as I’m concerned Beowulf not only qualifies as an animated film, but it deserves an industry-wide salute for expanding the definition of “animated” in a truly brilliant and innovative fashion.

The short list of eligible animated films will be announced on Monday, 11.5, so we’ll know soon enough if the Academy reactionaries and fuddy-duds have succeeded in keep in Beowulf out of this category.

Image technologies have been blurring the line between live-action and animation more and more in recent years. Technically, Beowulf is digitally enhanced live-action film, but it’s so richly and imaginatively composed that it seems absurd not to call it animated. Animation tools are obviously computerized today — the industry has come a long, long way from the days of Disney animators painting cells for Bambi — and it seems that the liberal view would have to be that Beowulf is not live action — it’s been “painted” on a bit-by-bit, frame-by-frame basis.

The foundation of the objection to Beowulf‘s being considered for the Best Animated Feature Oscar has been the Academy’s “Rule Seven” which states that (a) “movement and characters’ performances [in an animated film] must be created using a frame-by-frame technique,” and (b) that “a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the pictures running time.”

Don’t kid yourself: Rule Seven is a blocking move by old-line Academy types in order to protect the entrenched old-fogey animators from encroachment by the digital crowd.

A senior Paramount marketer told me three days ago that Pixar chief John Lasseter “is firmly against motion-capture being eligible for the animation”, and yet John Bloom, the head of the Academy’s animation committee, which numbers about 100 people, “fully supports Beowulf and live action.

“Remember when old-line animators complained that Toy Story wasn’t real animation?,” the Paramount guy reminded. “Remember that kerfuffle? People at AMPAS who are not animation specialists are confused that the characters look like the actors playing them, but that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. The Beowulf character doesn’t look like Ray Winstone, although he’s got Ray’s voice and acting style.”

In any enterprise of any kind, be it business or creative, the old-schoolers will always try to protect their turf by blocking the innovators. Everyone knows that trying to hold back the tide is futile, except for those who try to do it anyway.