I stood below the Sunset 5 marquee yesterday evening just before 9 pm, trying to talk myself into seeing Lars and the Real Girl. And once again, for the seventh or eighth time, I said “naaah, later.” A movie journalist repeatedly missing showings of a respected, well-reviewed film like Lars is obviously derelict, but the truth is that I’ve been avoiding it because of my Ryan Gosling problem, which is hard to describe.

Paul Schneider, Emily Mortimer, Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl

I agree that he’s one of our very best actors of any age — some have called him the new Brando — and yet there’s something about Gosling’s look and manner that has always seemed a bit odd in a visitor-from-another-planet sort of way. To me, he’s always seemed distant and self-regarding. There’s no doubting that every performance he gives is some kind of brilliant, but in my delusional-fan way of absorbing things I’ve never wanted to hang out with the guy. It’s not that I find him dislikable as much as lacking a certain chemical component that I would want in my life.

This is compounded by Gosling having put on weight, grown a blue-collar mous- tache and worn flannel shirts — three style choices I have always had major problems with — for his part in Lars and the Real Girl. It’s obviously a neurotic affliction, but I can’t stand to look at, much less wear, flannel shirts. Strange as this sounds, if I see some some dumpy guy in a bar wearing a flannel shirt I will either go to the other side of the room or leave altogether. Especially if he’s wearing a moustache.

These reactions are aggravated when the wearer is also going with the whole unshaven, slightly greasy-looking rural or suburban working-guy fashion trip, lace-up work boots and all. I know about that mode of appearance — I’ve known dozens of guys who look and dress and live like this — and I want as little to do with it as possible when I go to movies. That may not sound “fair” but that’s how it is.

Plus the idea of a doofus who carries a love doll around is repellent to me. Why should I invest two hours of my time in a guy whose emotional state is this far off the planet?

I realize that it doesn’t get any shallower than when you process a film according to obvious subject matter. I rail against people refusing to see films because of some gut disinterest in subject matter, and here I am doing this very thing. I have no excuse, no defense. I will somehow make myself see Lars and the Real Girl soon, but I may as well be honest and admit that it’s been a real struggle.

“Don’t feel too badly about missing Lars and the Real Girl,” a big-city critic writes. “I found it frankly disgusting, and I don’t think of myself as a prude or conservative. I wonder about what’s missing in the lives of critics who see this film as some kind of affirmation of life.

“It’s about a grown man having a romantic relationship with a plastic doll. He’s a very sick individual, yet the movie wants us to think he can be cured if everybody just tolerates his quirk until he sorts things out.

“No way would an entire town put up with this nonsense. If this were the real world, Lars would be committed pronto, or run out on a rail before Aunt Bea had time to bake a batch of brownies.”

“In her acid flashback of a new book, ‘For Love of Politics,’ Sally Bedell Smith describes how First Lady Hillary routinely unmanned Bill and his aides, and engaged in sharp spurts of temper that sparked his temper.

“‘Hillary’s anger was bound up in the intricacies of her marital bargain, which engendered rivalry and resentment along with mutual dependence,’ Ms. Smith writes. Political power was her reward for his marital infidelity.

“When Bill explains why Hillary should be president, his subtext is clear: We owe it to her for all she put up with from me.” — from today’s (10.21) < strong>Maureen Dowd/N.Y. Times column, titled “Cougars, Archers, Snipers.”

La Vie en Rose director-writer Olivier Dahan “wrote the script with me in mind. I never knew why, but then he told journalists, ‘There was something about Marion’s eyes.’ He saw some tragedy in my eyes, something terribly sad that reminded him of [Edith] Piaf.

La Vie en Rose star Marion Cotillard

“And I have to say, I did feel close to her. As an actress, I could understand her behavior. That made me less afraid of playing an icon that so many people love.

“In the end, a role this huge is like the biggest present. So your initial fear becomes a fake fear — just a manifestation of your ego. I didn’t want to waste my time asking myself, Will I be good or not good? I realized I just had to have less ego and do more work.” — Marion Cotillard speaking to N.Y. Times questioner Lynn Hirschberg in today’s (10.21) N.Y. Times (a.k.a. “T”) magazine.

The idea in speaking to Hirschberg (and in posing in an assortment of high-style dresses that accompany the q & a) is to re-launch Cotillard’s Best Actress campaign, which began for many journalists like myself six months ago with early screenings, a 4.17 Los Angeles press junket and an appearance by Cotillard and Dahan at the City of Light/City of Angels Film Festival at the DGA theatre.

La Vie en Rose, I wrote on 4.18, “is essential viewing for one reason and one reason only — Cotillard’s bracingly vivid, wholly convincing, almost mind-blowingly hardcore performance as Piaf.

At L.A.’s City of Light/City of Angels Film Festival last April

“Cotillard so physically resembles the diminutive Piaf — a frail, sparrow-like woman who stood only 4 foot seven inches — and so burrows inside this legendary singer’s aura of hurt in nearly every stage of her life that she blows you away in almost every scene. I’m making it sound like an overbearing performance but it’s not, trust me.

“Matthew Smith‘s prosthetic makeup is certainly part of the effect, but Cotillard’s performance would be nothing without her capturing Piaf’s spiritual essence (or at least, what I’ve always believed that spiritual essence amounted to) . The result is one of those amazing-transformation, De Niro-as-Jake La Motta performances that automatically gets Oscar attention. 2007 isn’t quite one-third gone, but there’s no way in hell Cotillard won’t be Best Actress-nominated.

“It’s not in the least bit significant that Cotillard is 5′ 6 and 1/2 inches, or nearly a full foot taller than Piaf, since almost no one watching this film is likely to know this or be aware of any height discrepancy anyway. But it is significant that everything she says and does as Piaf is a complete immersion, an exceptional revisiting…an absolute knockout.”

This 10.19 Hollywood Reporter story about the title of Woody Allen‘s next film is, I’m sure, a mistake. Allen would never call anything Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Even for a film that described as a “love letter to Barcelona,” it’s just too awful sounding. Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem costar.

Is Toronto Star critic Peter Howell really sure that Quentin Tarantino is actually going to make Inglorious Bastards, a Dirty Dozen-ish World War II flick with Tim Roth and Michael Madsen, much less deliver it sometime in ’08? He’s been talking about making this film for years and years.

What he seems to do, mainly, is talk about (a) what he’s going to do, (b) what he’s done, or (c) what other filmmakers have done. I realize that every three or four years he gets around to making a film, but I don’t trust Tarantino to deliver a movie on any kind of set schedule at all. That said, it would be great to see Inglorious Bastards sometime in ’09 or ’10, which is probably when Tarantino will get around to it.

Dreams never seem as profound the next morning as they do when they’re running the show in your sleep, but I had a lulu of a dream last night that, if listened to and boldly acted upon, might lead to the resurrection of Wes Anderson‘s career with a single mad sweep of the brush and a sudden screech of tires.

DVD frame-capture from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend

What Anderson needs to do more than anything else right now is to blow up “Andersonville,” that specially styled, ultra-hermetic world that his films and characters reside in. Being Wes, he naturally needs to do it with style. And the best way to do this, I’m convinced, is to make an arty black comedy about the world coming to an end on the rural two-lane blacktops, highways and freeways of America. Anderson, in short, needs to reimagine and then remake Jean-Luc Godard‘s Weekend.

The original 1967 film, an allegory about the breakdown of civilization illustrated by traffic jams, random violence and bloody car crashes, is regarded by some as Godard’s finest.

I saw shots from Anderson’s Weekend in the dream, and that carefully choreo- graphed, super-manicured visual quality he brings to each and every scene in his films would, I believe, work perfectly with a vision of death, anarchy and twisted metal on the road. The film was fully completed in the dream (I saw it in a small red screening room in Paris, sitting in a large velvet armchair), and it was great viewing.

As I watched Anderson’s camera track along the highway and gaze at the flaming SUVs and scooters and bodies of Bill Murray, Natalie Portman, Anjelica Huston and Jason Schwartzman lying every which way I knew I was seeing a kind of genius. I was awestruck. Only a madman would have made such a film in the wake of The Darjeeling Limited, and I was filled with respect for Anderson’s artistic courage.

I’m not saying Anderson’s Weekend would be commercial or even critically hailed. But after making such a film, Anderson would be free. He would no longer be the guy with the Dalmatian mice and the pet cobras and the velvet curtains and the characters lugging around specially-designed suitcases with all the Kinks and Rolling Stones and Nico songs on the soundtrack.

It is widely agreed by movie cognescenti that Anderson has allowed his films to be consumed by a deadpan mannerist attitude along with a certain style-and-design mania, which Esquire‘s David Walters believes has devolved from a signature into “schtick.” By making movies about “world-weary fellows” with money “who hurl non-sequiturs and charm with endearing peccadilloes and aberrant behavior” in a world-apart realm, he has painted himself into a corner.

Only a radical new turn can free Wes from his effete parlor passions. If not a Weekend remake then something equally nutso. He has to say to his audience (and himself), “To hell with this world I’ve made for myself. I am no longer the maestro of that tweedle-dee symphony. I am a new man on an untravelled path.”

Because of the failure last year of Terry Press‘s aggressive earlybird Dreamgirls push, “several studios are pulling back on the Oscar hype, according to Variety‘s Anne Thompson.

The late-in-the-game entries, of course, will include There Will Be Blood, Charlie Wilson’s War, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street — Tim Burton doesn’t make Oscar faves — and The Great Debaters. (There are rumors, Thompson reports, that Debaters will “barely finish” in time for viewing).

I didn’t run this earlier, but despite that dug-in player insisting in a 10.8 posting that Wayne Kramer‘s Crossing Over might possibly be platform-released in December, this isn’t going to happen.

Despite Writers Guild members having authorized a strike to begin as early as 11.1, N.Y. Times guy Michael Cieply is reporting that “bargainers for both sides this week felt their way toward something missing from their stalled talks: the kind of unofficial conversations that [have] led to deals in the past.”

Times reporter Brooks Barnes, meanwhile, is re-stating the received wisdom that moviegoers “would not feel any immediate impact” from a strike “because studios work a year or more in advance and have been stockpiling scripts to shoot in case writers walk the picket line.”

There’s even an upside, Barnes reports, in that “some big franchise films, like the Transformers sequel, are likely to be delayed.” Good! Less suffering on my end, I mean. (Selfish as that sounds.) Sitting through the first hour of Transformers last summer was pure unmitigated hell. I was at Laser Blazer three or four days ago and they were showing the Transformers DVD on four or five monitors. The amplified voice of Optimus Prime was literally giving me indigestion.

Barnes add that “fans could suffer [from the strike] later on as films pushed earlier into production surface with poor results in 2009.”

Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth, the legendary director’s first flick since The Rainmaker, showed before the public a few hours ago at the Rome Film Festival to “mixed reactions,” according to an AP/ Herald Tribune story just posted.

Bruno Ganz, Tim Roth in Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth

Variety‘s Jay Weissberg, having posted his review at 11:32 Pacific time, says “not just fans of Francis Ford Coppola will be disappointed by the mishmash plotting and stilted script of Youth Without Youth, the master’s first helming effort in 10 years.

“Overly talky tale spans the mid-20th century, following an elderly professor whose miraculous return to youth offers the chance to complete his magnum opus and rediscover lost love. Attempting to harness multiple genres, pic is brought down by ponderous dialogue (much of it dubbed) and an inability to connect with its characters.”

At the festival’s press screening, Coppola reportedly “asked people to take their time and see it more than once,” the story says.

A 10.20 AP/Fox News story says Bill Maher helped security guys remove a shouter during last night’s taping of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, and that the incident went out live on the east coast and was repeated during the Pacific time zone feed. The tape obviously shows this, but also Maher shouting down two other hecklers. (All three were contending that the 9/11 WTC disaster was a controlled explosion.) Maher said that the experience made him, at that particular moment, want to vote for Rudy Giuliani.

Posted 14 months ago, this is one of the most emotionally satisfying payback scenes I’ve ever witnessed, and that includes the thousands of movies I’ve seen since I was three or four. I kept hoping this brave and valiant Bambi would try to finish the guy off by goring him in the neck with his antlers.

A younger married couple I know slightly used to drive a four-door sedan. Then she got pregnant, the baby came and before you knew it they were suddenly driving a big, black gas-guzzling SUV. They bought this fat humungous tank, of course, to fortify a sense of security for the baby’s sake. But I’ll bet anything it was the wife, the primary nest-tender and security freak in any relationship, who pushed for it.

Some guys will buy SUVs to compensate for having a small penis or to feel like an all-around tough guy, but sales are primarily driven, I believe, by “security moms”. Now when I see young mothers carrying babies around in those organic cotton slings I think, “There goes a global warming advocate, doing her small part to bring about the death of the planet in the name of baby love.”