I think we can all agree that the culture really and truly needs right now another media-related group getting together to hand out year-end awards. Hence, SOAP — the newly-formed Society of Online Awards Prognosticators, the brainchild of And The Winner Is blogmeister Scott Feinberg with members including myself, Sasha Stone and Anne Thompson — has electrically come into being.
The SOAP’s 2007 nominations will post on Sunday, 1.14 — nine days before the Academy noms are announced — with SOAP winners to be announced on Wednesday, 2.21, i.e., four days before the 2.25 Oscar telecast.
The other members: Johnny Alba, The Oscar Igloo; Mark Bakalor, Oscar Central; Carlos Reyes, Oscar Diary; Nathaniel Rogers, The Film Experience; Andy Scott, Everything Oscar; and Giovanni Tagliaferri, The Oscar Jam.

Contrary to Anne Thompson‘s recent Risky Biz blog impression, there is not and never was “an ongoing blog wrangle between Hollywood Elsewhere‘s Jeffrey Wells and Factory Girl director George Hickenlooper having to do with the suggestion that the director may have been pushed off his problem-riddled late-awards-season entry,” etc. The wrangle was between Hickenlooper and a guy who calls himself JWEgo who’d posted some reader replies that I’m not going to get into here. I was a mere bystander.

“For the last two months, no snow has fallen on Central Park, and it probably won’t fall anytime soon, forecasters say. Indeed, not since April 8th has there been even a flurry.
“The National Weather Service said that last month appeared to be the first December without a snowflake here since 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president. Moreover, New York City is not alone. Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, Vienna and Stockholm report little or no snow this season.
“It has been so warm in Yaroslavl, a city about 150 miles northeast of Moscow, that Masha the bear, a resident of the city zoo, woke up last month from his hibernation after only a week.
In Central Park on Saturday, where children were gliding along on roller skates and rumbling around on three-wheelers, Rob Flanagan, 35, a general contractor from Hoboken, N.J., was peeved.
“Global warming!” he said. “Al [Gore] might be right!” The mild weather stinks, he said. “I like the snow!”
Julianne Warren, 40, a conservation biologist visiting New York from Lexington, Va., is concerned. She said she heard a white-throated sparrow in Central Park and saw an azalea blooming.
“Things seem a little…” she said, and then wiggled her outstretched right hand as if it were an airplane in turbulence. “It may mean the flowers don’t bloom at the right time and birds may not know to migrate at the right time.” — from a story by Anthony Ramirez in today’s N.Y. Times.
Observations and comments like these, which one hears often these days, are the reason An Inconvenient Truth is going to win the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary. Partly because doing so will assuage people’s guilt about not really doing anything about an obviously worsening situation, and because giving an award is a lot easier than changing carbon consumption habits.

“I’ve always been a media junkie,” producer Michael London (Sideways) tells L.A. Times writer Rachel Abramowitz in a good piece called “Admit It — We’re All Video Junkies Now.” Digital- media junkies, I think she meant to say.

Fountain, gateway, tethering device

down the rabbit hole,” London continues. “When the rabbit hole has gotten bigger and deeper through the internet, for people like me who multitask, it’s created a real danger. It creates a perfect meltdown scenario to people who are vulnerable to trying to do too much at once.
“You can sit in your office, and you can be having a phone conversation while reading Variety online, and answering your e-mail and having an IM chat with somebody. It sounds crazy, but it’s not an exaggeration.”
“The thing that suffers,” London says, “is your focus and your creativity. It limits the time you have for sitting and watching a movie, or reading a script, or thinking about an idea. The things that suffer and get thrown away are the things that require the most sustained thought.”
“Which is why I’ve trying in my own humble way to disconnect a little bit. You have to force yourself to go cold turkey. I literally tried to listen through an entire album a couple of weeks ago, to try to get back to that space where you listen to things as a whole instead of just sample. We live in a culture where everyone is sampling.”
This columnist lives in the rabbit hole, which is where all focus and creativity that I’m able to harness manifest. There is awareness, of course, of the ground and the grass above, and of the surrounding open-air, blue-sky environment and all the organic tactile things that go with that. Sometimes I even climb up and go out and do things in that environment — eating out, walking, seeing movies in theatres, patrolling the aisles of Koontz hardware or Best Buy, bike-riding, etc.
But I only do these things for four- or five-hour periods — six is pushing it. I used to live in that world but no longer and never again. The rabbit hole is home, hearth, nourishment, a playground, a temple….life itself. Such as it is.
London is right, of course: rabbit-holing does limit the time we have for the things that require the most sustained thought. Which is why I do my best thinking while (a) taking a shower, (b) driving in Los Angeles without the radio on or (c) walking the streets of Manhattan or Brooklyn.
And I’m proud to say, by the way, that unlike a good 30 to 40% of the people I see in Manhattan, I don’t indulge in the most hermetic, anti-life, anti-social rabbit hole thing you can do, which is walking around all the time listening to high- decibel iPod tunes with those little earplug headphones.

Luis Bunuel‘s Belle de Jour (1967) “has a reputation for being one of the sexiest films ever made, simply because Catherine Deneuve behaves throughout like a pre-adolescent girl. Through the prism of the 21st century, the film seems oddly contrived; what is now a cliche — the child who, subjected to the sexual advances of an adult, then becomes a frigid woman who is only turned on by squalor — is coyly exploited as a series of fetishistic images that juxtapose her fantasy life with her actual life.

“As Severine Serizy, Deneuve moves through the imagery of what are meant to be her own fantasies like a sleepwalker. By her own account, Bunuel could not relate to her at all and never told her what he wanted. Unconsciously, she gave him what he wanted, which was as little as possible. The fantasies were his, after all.
“The decision to have her dressed by Yves Saint-Laurent adds a bizarre dimension to the nonexistent plot; we seem to be living within the pages of a glossy magazine, with product placement everywhere. Everywhere Severine goes, she is conspicuous by her catwalk presence, from her shiny patent leather pumps to the helmet that holds in her mane of Barbie-doll hair.
“The sex scenes in the brothel consist of her stripping to the full armour of suspender-belt, knickers, stockings and padded brassiere, and allowing ugly men to kiss her. In one extraordinarily unsexy sequence, she is required to process through the rooms of a ducal chateau dressed in nothing but a cloak of black georgette and a crown of white roses. She trots ahead of the camera like a lamb to the slaughter. She should have used a body double; it is typical of her passive obedience that she didn’t.
“Lauren Bacall would never have done that for anyone, would never have stripped and had them shoot her bare arse from the back as she trotted through take after take. The Hawksian woman would have decked any man who asked her.” — from a thoughtful, somewhat revisionist Guardian piece by Germaine Greer, the subject being the decline of the feisty broad.

The projected holiday weekend numbers have been slightly revised. Night at the Museum is now expected to hit $46,497,000. The Pursuit of Happyness is looking at $25,529,000 by tomorrow night, and Dreamgirls should earn close to $18,284,000. Charlotte’s Web is looking at $14,943, The Good Shepherd $14,517,000, Rocky Balboa $14,265,000, Eragon $10,806,000, We Are Marshall $10411, Happy Feet $9,696,000 and The Holiday $8,526,000.

It’s been almost two years since I ran a review of Alpha Dog out of the ’05 Sundance Film Festival, so I’m figuring it can’t hurt to re-post with the film finally opening on 1.12, or less than two weeks hence:

Shawn Hatosy, Emile Hirsch, Harry Dean Stanton, Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde and Justin Timberlake in Alpha Dog.

Directed and written by Nick Cassevettes, Alpha Dog isn’t a great film but it’s quite provocative and even agitating (in a good way). It’s certainly thought-provoking, and it boasts more than a few live-wire performances, including a serious stand-out one by Justin Timberlake
Dog is more than a cautionary tale about amoral kids gone wild. It’s a condemnation of liberal anything-goes values, of absentee parents, of a society lacking in moral fibre. In short, it’s a film that social conservatives will point to and say, “See? This is what we’re trying to prevent.” And it’ll be hard to argue with them.
The impression is that Dog has fashioned its own particular vibe and attitude, but it will certainly be seen as following in the tradition of Tim Hunter‘s River’s Edge, Jacob Aaron Estes‘ Mean Creek and Larry Clark‘s Bully.
The film also stars Shawn Hatosy, Harry Dean Stanton, a bewigged Bruce Willis, Olivia Wilde, Sharon Stone, Dominique Swain and Ben Foster (another provider of an exceptional performance).

Justin Timberlake

Based on a true story that happened about six years ago, Dog is about a 20 year-old known as Jesse James Hollywood (called Johnny Truelove in the movie, and portrayed by Lords of Dogtown‘s Emile Hirsch), a pot dealer from a well-to-do San Fernando Valley suburb who obviously saw himself as a minor-league Tony Montana.
This plus the general lower-end-of-the-gene-pool idiocy that is not unknown to suburban youth culture led to Jimmy making a fatal error: he and some pals kidnapped the 15 year-old younger brother of a guy who owed him $1200 as a way of applying pressure, and when he later realized he and his cronies would be looking at big-time jail terms he told a flunkie to kill the boy (Nicholas Markowitz in actuality– called Zack Mazursky in the film and played by Anton Yelchin) to keep him from testifying.
When the boy’s body was found Jimmy eventually left the country and, with his father’s help, wound up living incognito in Brazil. But last March he was punched by Interpol agents and brought back to the U.S. to face murder charges.
Universal acquired distribution rights from New Line Cinema, which had originally planned to release it on 2.24.06. New Line bailed over a legal tangle regarding a threatened injunction. The beef was from Hollywood’s attorney James Blatt, who’s saying that prosecuting attorney Rod Zonen was guilty of misconduct by providing inside information about the murder case to Cassevetes during the film’s preparation phase. Blatt’s argument was that the release of this information in a dramatic fashion in Alpha Dog would prejudice matters against his client.

Emile Hirsch

Cassevetes was subpoenaed by Blatt in the summer of ’04 as part of an attempt to have Zonen removed from the case for giving Cassavetes access to nonpublic records. The ploy failed. In late ’04 a judge ordered Cassavetes’s researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book about the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense.
Sundance honcho Geoff Gilmore declared in the ’05 program notes that Cassavetes’ film “captures the driving energy and sordid anomie of contemporary youth culture,” adding that it end “in a tragedy that would be shocking if we weren’t so aware of the kind of world we live in, a place with kids who live without mores, parents who don’t have a clue, and ongoing conflict between the lingering inno- cence of youth and moral disintegration and dissolution.”
A Cassevetes quote in a N.Y. Times piece about absentee-parenting struck home:
“I’m guilty of it — of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what’s going on with them.
“You can check in, and you say, ‘Are you all right?’ But it’s not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there’s always some person that’s got something going on that can get everybody killed.”

I’d say “Happy New Year” to everyone, but…all right, Happy New Year. I have always hated saying those words. Nothing’s “happy”…nobody’s “happy” anywhere. At best, people are content, joyously turned on for the moment, laughing or telling a funny story or a good joke, placated, relaxed, energetic, enthused, full of dreams, generous of heart, intellectually alive…but “happy”? The word itself has always struck me as one that only simple minds would use.

I’m only drinking Monster and Perrier tonight, and I’m not forking over $14 to any bartenders for a drink. Anywhere. I don’t care who I’m with or what anyone thinks of this policy/attitude. I’ll give $14 to a homeless person first. I won’t give my hard-earned money to anyone or anything that rubs me the wrong way tonight. I’ll walk the streets first. I hate everything about New Year’s Eve, especially young guys going “ooowwwooooh! in animal bars as midnight approaches.
There’s always the Sundance Film Festival and whatever good or great films that may show there, and the lovely Santa Barbara Film Festival right after that, and also the eight or nine great or good movies that I know are being released between January and April (like God Grew Tired Of Us, Reign Over Me, The Lives of Others, etc.).
Plus there’s the adventure of finally seeing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which Warner Bros. still doesn’t have a release date for, and the chance of a decent thriller/potboiler like Billy Ray‘s Breach or a rousing, high-style crime film like Joe Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces.
The world is choking up and winding down because too many nouveau riche greed-heads are drunk on their SUV lifestyles — ways of living and spending that they’d rather die or kill for (or see others die) than modify.
We all know the same mistakes are going to be made over the next twelve months, and that the only thing certain is that everything will be more expensive twelve months from now. The only comfort I have is this: the morons who believe global warming is a myth are going to meet each other at parties and get married and have kids and try to teach their children that global warming is a myth, but a significant number of these people are going to fail in this effort because kids always see through their parents’ bullshit.

The Reeler’s Stu VanAirsdale is running some interesting comments from Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro about why, despite its themes and violence, kids should be encouraged to see it.
“Fairy tales, when they were created first, they were not only very disturbing tales, but at the same time they were meant to represent very dire circumstances at the time they were written,” del Toro explains. “Famine. Plague. Not, in general, very nice situations, with kids being orphaned, being abandoned, etcetera. And I think in that sense, the movie is just a continuation of that thread in the genre.
“I feel like the movie is a movie about the responsibility of disobedience and the responsibility of choice. It’s a movie about choice and about how your choices affect your destiny and who you are. It’s a girl that refuses to obey either the magical creatures or the fascist captain. And how she essentially forges her own destiny. Chewing up fairies aside, I think that’s a damn valuable lesson in this world.”

Movie City News has assembled 164 Top Ten lists from 164 film critics and calibrated the standings based on a point system, and the #1 film is Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 with 590 points, compared to 533 for The Queen, 524 for The Departed, 402 for Pan’s Labyrinth and 392 for Letters From Iwo Jima.
That’s it — there’s no excuse any more for any Academy member who refuses to see United 93. None. at. all. If you, an Academy member, see United 93 and don’t care for it, fine. But if you flat-out refuse to see it, you’re bringing dishonor upon yourself and the Academy and the entire process. If the United 93 cowards had the smallest shred of character they’d resign, but of course they won’t do that. Say it loud and clear: these people are despicable.