“What Is It About Obama?” — a nicely reported, fairly-close-to- the-button L.A. TImes piece by Terry McDermott.

L.A. Times guy James Bates speaks to ThinkFilm’s Mark Urman about awards-season surge of Half-Nelson and Best Actor nominee Ryan Gosling: “There’s not a day that goes by when someone isn’t in a position to read about Half Nelson,” Urman says. “That wasn’t the case when it was in active theatrical release. Now, it’s part of the dialogue. On the January- February cusp, when this film is about to come out on DVD, if the gods are good, it will be an Oscar nominee in a major category. It would make an enormous difference on DVD.”

Director Karen Moncrieff acknowledges that titling her latest film The Dead Girl serves as a form of truth-in-advertising and that those uninterested in the occasionally disturbing subject matter might be better served elsewhere.
“I understand making an unrelenting film may make some people feel like ‘life’s difficult enough, I don’t want to see a movie that’s going to make me that uncomfortable for that amount of time,'” she told L.A. Times profiler Mark Olsen. “And I absolutely respect their right to go choose another movie.
“I feel like I’m making films for people who are like me, who like to go to movies and be shaken up, literally taken by the throat and shaken up for an hour and a half. And moved and forced to look at things that are ugly, forced to contemplate the darkest moments any of us can imagine.”
As I said on11.22.06, “The color palette in The Dead Girl is pale and splotchy, and the mood of it is down, down…all the way down. Moncrief, who wrote and directed, has invested herself and her cast in an orgy of dingy, hopeless, lower-depths misery. Her female characters (the guys are mostly creeps or louts) are either sad or traumatized or badly bruised, or a combination thereof. There’s no question that Moncrief regards them with the utmost compassion and respect, but she’s mainly interested in how it feels to be in their cages — caught, desperate, unable to escape.”

Casino Royale is the all-time King Shit among the James Bond movies with a worldwide gross of $304.4 million. The super-succcessful Daniel Craig vehicle (no thanks to deadhead producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli) took in $14.5 million at 6,300 European theatres over the holidays. Royale is “only the fourth 2006 pic to clear $300 million, joining Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, The Da Vinci Code and Ice Age: The Meltdown,” says Dave McNary‘s Variety story.

A thoroughly dull Matt Damon interview in the 12.26 L.A. Times, written by Josh Gajewski. Damon’s Good Shepherd character has no pulse, and neither does the piece. I was nodding off after the first five graphs. The role of Edward Wilson — a soft-spoken, stiff-shouldered secret agent — is “not flashy,” Damon tells Gajewski. “It won’t get any attention in terms of awards or anything like that, but for me personally, for just how complex a role it was and how interesting the subject matter is to me, this was definitely up there.”

The U.S. military announced today the violent deaths of six more American soldiers in Iraq, for a grand total (since the March 2003 invasion) of 2978 stiffs. This is exactly five bodies more than the number killed in the 9/11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Gray-haired, jowly-faced Robert De Niro will portray “Ben,” a character based on hotshot producer Art Linson, in What Just Happened?, a Warner Bros. release that will begin filming under director Barry Levinson in March.

The title and story are taken from Linson’s 2002 book, which is largely about the making of The Edge. The 1997 drama was a pretty good, moderately well- received film about a grizzly bear looking to hunt down and eat three guys — a multi-millionaire (Anthony Hopkins), a younger man who’s been sleeping with the rich guy’s wife (Alec Baldwin), and a not-very-smart black dude (Harold Perrineau) — who are lost and stranded in the Alaskan wilderness. Linson produced and David Mamet wrote the script.
Please, please, God…don’t let this movie turn into another jaunty lightweight fizzle, which, sorry to say, is pretty much what Levinson has been specializing in over the least few years, post-Liberty Heights. Look at the sheet…Man of the Year, Envy, Bandits, An Everlasting Piece. Please, please let this be another Wag the Dog or, better yet, a Hollywood-style Tin Men.
The Production Weekly blurb says De Niro will play a Linson-like producer who is going through two weeks of hell as he tries to get a picture made, hanging on to the tattered threads of his career as he tries to maintain his dignity while surviving the mounting humiliations of Hollywood.”
Sean Penn is expected to play himself, the Production Weekly report says.

“Based on matinees already, I’m hearing Dreamgirls could score $5 mil and possibly even $6 mil today (i.e., Monday, 12.25). Many theaters sold out 24 hours before the 12.25 screenings [began] and added a midnight extra to accomodate moviegoers. The target audience had been African- Americans, gays and upscale whites. But now the movie is playing bigger than expected with white audiences in general. Anecdotes are starting to come in of audiences cheering and clapping and crying, which had been happening nightly since 12.15.06 when Dreamgirls opened in only Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome, New York’s Zeigfield, and San Francisco’s Metreon.” — Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke, posting just before 5 pm eastern today.

Susie Woz‘s USA Today article on Dreamgirls costar Jennifer Hudson‘s singing of the anthemic “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” (published 12.22) is far, far more interesting when you read it alongside Armond White‘s disparagement of same in the New York Press (published a week or so ago).
Woz sample: “Just about every Broadway musical worth its bugle beads has that one signature tune. The one that brings down the house. The one that eventually drones in doctors’ offices. The one that you know the name of, or the words to, even if you don’t know what show it came from. Then there is And I Am Telling You (I’m Not Going) from Dreamgirls.
“Much as when musical whiz kid Michael Bennett staged the Act 1 closer on Broadway back in 1981, the movie version of the glitzy showbiz opera about a ’60s girl group has its seminal spellbinding moment. The volcanic Effie, dismissed by her soul sisters and Curtis, the man she adores, pleads and wails in protest before she ultimately faces the audience alone and dares them not to love her.
“Love her, they do. Even movie audiences regularly break into applause.”
White sample: “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going — realistically understood as “The Stalker’s Anthem’ — is the show-stopping number from Dreamgirls in which a woman begs and threatens a man to love her.
“Despite its ostentatious build-up, And I Am Telling You has not entered the Broadway canon: It’s a number white actresses don’t/won’t attempt because it’s culturally stigmatized. The song is so wildly humiliating that it can only be rationalized as a cartoonish black stereotype — the anguish of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin thoughtlessly jumbled and coarsened into a hebephrenic climax.”

I’ve long felt that the only thoroughly decent Christmas film is the 1951, British-produced, Alistair Sim-starring A Christmas Carol (or Scrooge). Because it feels genuinely Dickensian, for one thing. Everything else I can think of has a problem of one sort of another — forced, tonally one-note, one too many cute kids, oppressively sentimental, etc.

All the films directed by Bob Clark need to be permanently dust-binned, of course, and that necessarily includes A Christmas Story. The older I get the less comfortable I am about sitting down with It’s a Wonderful Life (the town-rallies-round, happy-ever-after finale is just too effusive), although the moment when James Stewart screams out that he wants to live again still gets me. Has there ever been a really superb Xmas film? Nothing’s coming to mind.